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.
