Date: Wed., Oct. 24, 2007
Time: 7:30 pm
Place: 202 Brooks Hall

*This event is open to the public.

Sponsored by the Ogden Newspapers Seminar Series

Learn how investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell's coverage of Civil Rights era cold cases helped put five Klansmen behind bars and led to 23 convictions.

About Jerry Mitchell

He has been called “a loose cannon” and “a white traitor.”
Whatever he’s been called, Jerry Mitchell, 48, has never given up in his quest to bring unpunished killers to justice, prompting one colleague to call him “the South’s Simon Wiesenthal.”

Since 1989, this Award-winning investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., has unearthed documents, cajoled suspects and witnesses and quietly pursued evidence in the nation’s notorious killings from the Civil Rights era.

Mitchell’s work has helped put five Klansmen behind bars: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers; Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966; Bobby Cherry, for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls; Edgar Ray Killen, for helping orchestrate the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman; and James Ford Seale for his role in the abductions and killings of two black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore.

For his work leading to Killen’s imprisonment, the Pulitzer Board in
2006 named Mitchell a Pulitzer Prize finalist, praising him “for his relentless and masterly stories on the successful prosecution of a man accused of orchestrating the killing of three civil rights workers in 1964.”

He has received more than 20 national awards, including the George Polk Award for Justice Reporting, the Vernon Jarrett Award for Investigative Reporting, and the Elijah Lovejoy Award, named after the nation’s first martyr to freedom of the press.

In 2005, Mitchell received another career award, becoming the youngest recipient ever of Columbia University’s John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism. And this year he received the John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award for Freedom of the Press for his persistence in exposing these injustices.

Mitchell’s work has inspired others. Since 1989, authorities in Mississippi and six other states have reexamined 29 killings from the civil rights era and made 30 arrests, leading to 23 convictions. The Justice Department is now reexamining more than 100 slayings from the era.