Black Heritage Month Keynote Lecture: Chasing After the Real Ghosts of Mississippi

As the nation continues to engage in difficult conversations about modern era race relations, law enforcement, and violence, the theme of this year's Black Heritage Month programming series is Black Bodies, Black Lives. A special guest, Jerry Mitchell, will deliver the keynote lecture, inviting Lafayette community members and the general public to reflect together on a troubled past, contemplate our tenuous present, and plan for a more just future.

Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter with the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger whose courageous efforts have ensured that unpunished murders from the Civil Rights era are finally prosecuted. In 1989, Mitchell began his immersion in decades-old stories of thwarted justice and undertook a meticulous review of the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Ku Klux Klan member Byron de la Beckwith had been tried twice for this crime in 1964, and each trial ended in hung juries. By analyzing hundreds of documents and interviewing scores of witnesses, Mitchell laid the groundwork for a new trial. The case was reopened and culminated in the conviction and life sentence of Beckwith in 1994.

Mitchell has since uncovered largely unknown details about many other long-dormant murder cases. His reporting has played a key role in the convictions of Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966, of Bobby Cherry for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls, and of Edgar Ray Killen for helping to orchestrate the 1964 deaths of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. His investment of time and painstakingly detailed research has also produced a broad range of reports on such subjects as racial reconciliation in the South and judicial bribes and chicanery in Mississippi, as well as a series on his own family’s battle against a rare genetic ailment. In an era when long-term investigative reporting is more the exception than the rule, Mitchell’s life and work serve as an example of how a journalist willing to take risks and unsettle waters can make a difference in the pursuit of justice.

Mitchell's work has inspired countless others. Since 1989, authorities in Mississippi and six other states have reexamined 29 killings from the civil rights era and made 27 arrests, leading to 22 convictions. In 1996, he was portrayed by Jerry Levine in the Rob Reiner film, Ghosts of Mississippi, about the Evers case. He was also featured in The Learning Channel documentary Civil Rights Martyrs that aired in February 2000 and was a consultant for the Discovery Channel documentary Killed by the Klan which aired in 1999.

Jerry Mitchell received a B.A. (1982) from Harding University and an M.A. (1997) from Ohio State University. He joined the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger in 1986 as a bureau reporter, before turning to investigative reporting in 1989. In 2009, he received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.