2005 Chancellor Award Winner - Jerry Mitchell

Jerry Mitchell

He's been called "a loose cannon," a "pain in the ass" and a "white traitor." For more than 15 years, Jerry Mitchell has unearthed documents, cajoled suspects and witnesses, and quietly pursued the evidence in unsolved murders of civil rights activists. Mitchell's investigative reporting and sustained coverage for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, has brought to justice four Ku Klux Klan members, beginning with the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers and, most recently, Edgar Ray Killen who was found guilty in June for orchestrating the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in 1964.

Mitchell was a court reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in 1989 when the film Mississippi Burning inspired him to look into old civil rights cases that many thought had long since turned cold. His dogged reporting, which cut across the grain of his paper and many of its readers, investigated leads that had been ignored or overlooked. For example, Mitchell's diligent attention to detail snared Bobby Frank Cherry, a suspect in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four young girls. Cherry's alibi was that he was watching wrestling on television at the time of the crime. Mitchell looked up an old television log and discovered there was no wrestling program broadcast at that time. While the continued willingness of these aging Klan members to talk with Mitchell is a paradox, he speculates, "I think they talk to me because I am like them, a white Southerner, raised a Christian."

David Halberstam, a member of the Selection Committee, said this about Jerry Mitchell: "Mitchell pursued these stories after most people believed they belonged to history, and not to journalism. But they did belong to journalism, because the truth had never been told and justice had never been done. As each of the guilty convictions was finally handed down, it has been news of the highest order, and Jerry was there still covering the story."

More...
Jerry Mitchell interview on NPR’s Fresh Air
View Video of Award Ceremony