Some places in the United States have kept secrets for decades. The U.S. South, the former home of the oppressive Jim Crow laws and the heart of the civil rights movement, is one of them. In the past 20 years, some of the regions darkest truths have been slowly giving themselves up, largely through the work of intrepid investigative journalists.
Jerry Mitchell is one of them. Since 1989, the 50-year-old investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., has steadily worked to find documents, suspects, and witnesses in some of America’s most notorious civil rights era murders.
His work has helped to put four Ku Klux Klansmen behind bars, including Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, and Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966.
These days, Mitchell is working with other like-minded reporters on The Civil Rights Cold Case project.
“The idea of uniting forces is an attractive one,” says Mitchell. “We hope that by uniting forces we can achieve more together than individually.” But one of the biggest challenges for the project, which started in mid-2008 and soft-launched its Web site earlier this month, is funding.
The project is being partially backed by the Center for Investigative Reporting, Paperny Films, and WNET in New York. But the urgent need for more funding is about more than having a financial buffer.
Reporters working on the project maintain commitments to jobs and work on the Cold Case project in their spare time. This presents a problem as the crimes were committed as long as 50 years ago.
“Our ultimate goal is to get funding,” says Mitchell. “The window is kind of closing on these cases, because suspects are dying, witnesses are dying.”
Hank Klibanoff, the project’s managing editor, agrees that with fewer funding concerns the project could move forward more quickly.
“It’s challenging—we’re a small group,” says Klibanoff.
Klibanoff grew up during the civil rights movement, and spent 35 years as a newspaper reporter and editor in Mississippi, at The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is co-author of “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation,” which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history.
Even with funding restrictions, Klibanoff—a native son of Alabama—and many others working on the project with roots in the South, the project is extremely personal. But he says the ultimate purpose is not punishment or seeing criminals land in jail.
For Ben Greenberg, a blogger-turned-investigative-reporter, working on the Cold Case project represents a chance to carry on a family legacy on some level. His father, Paul A. Greenberg, was a special assistant to Martin Luther King Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the early 1960s.
“My motivation is kind of a blend of obsessive investigator who knows too much about unanswered questions to let them go, and a childhood of civil rights movement who sees gaping wounds that need to be healed,” says Greenberg.
He says that interviewing victims, perpetrators, and families of both is always an experience that impacts him.
“As soon as you start to talk to the family members of the victims, it’s a very affecting thing,” he says.
The team is currently investigating several cases of unsolved murders. Frank Morris, a family man and business owner, was sleeping in the back bedroom of his shoe repair shop in 1964 when he was woken up by the sound of breaking glass. He died days after from injuries sustained during the fire.
Stanley Nelson, one of the team’s main reporters, is investigating the Morris case along with two other violent murders.
“Through Stanley’s reporting he found out about a spin off of the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Dollar Group,” says project leader Klibanoff. “Very little has been reported about it—the Klan kept spinning off more and more violent groups.”
Clifton Walker was on his way home from work in 1964 when his truck was surrounded 300 yards from his home by armed men and shot to death.
Reactions from the communities the reporters visit have run the gamut from very supportive to threatening. But in many cases, both whites and blacks are looking for reconciliation, closure, even sometimes redemption. But that doesn’t mean everyone is willing to talk, even after decades have passed.
“There are both whites and blacks who think it should be left alone—then and now,” says reporter Ben Greenberg. “There are fears that kept people from coming forward in the ’50s and ’60s that keep people from coming forward.”
The Cold Case project has some kindred help from the FBI, although it’s not the agency’s main focus in 2010. There are still over 100 civil rights era cases that are unsolved.
But even if most of the cases never get prosecuted, the Civil Rights Cold Case Project will keep soldiering on, racing against time and battling lingering prejudices by revealing the truth.
“It’s important to tell these stories,” says Mitchell.
