Jackson Free Press

Award-winning journalist Jerry Mitchell is not among a dozen Clarion-Ledger employees facing an early retirement buyout choice. Speaking at this morning's Friday Forum at Koinonia Coffee House, Mitchell addressed the future of the Gannett-owned daily newspaper.

"It's disconcerting. I've got to be honest," he told the crowd. He said reports were already out that Gannett had offered early retirement buyouts to employees who were older than 56 and who had worked for the company for more than 20 years. Mitchell said he had the years in--he started at the newspaper in 1986--but he's not quite 53, yet. About a dozen staffers at The Clarion-Ledger got the buyout offer.

"It's a tough choice," Mitchell said. "If the vast majority take buyouts, it's going to be difficult." According to Mitchell, when he started at The Clarion-Ledger, the newsroom had 27 news reporters, not counting the feature and business desks.

Mitchell came to discuss his investigative reporting on civil-rights cold cases. The crowd gave him a warm reception, laughing at his jokes and applauding his presentation.

"If someone tells me I can't have something, I want it worse," he said. As a court reporter in the late 1980s, Mitchell learned about sealed Sovereignty Commission files. The now-defunct state spy agency amassed about 132,000 records starting in the 1940s. He wanted to see what was hidden.

Mitchell wrote about how the Sovereignty Commission helped defense lawyers for murderer Byron De La Beckwith during his 1964 trial for assassinating Medgar Evers the previous year. That led to a series of events: Police found forgotten evidence including a thumbprint; Evers' widow trusted Mitchell with her copies of the 1964 court transcripts (the official ones were lost), and the murder weapon showed up in a relative's closet. A new trial in 1994 ended with a murder conviction for De La Beckwith.

"It sounds like I'm making this up, but it all really happened in Jackson," Mitchell said. He told stories about interviewing De La Beckwith and what the convicted murderer had said.

"See that boy there?" De La Beckwith told a friend during the trial, indicating Mitchell. "When he dies, he's going to Africa."

"I always wanted to go to Africa," Mitchell said.

For more than 20 years, Mitchell uncovered many more civil rights-era murders. He wrote about the cold case in which the Ku Klux Klan firebombed voting activist Vernon Dahmer's home on a winter night in 1966. Dahmer saved his family, but died of burns soon after. Almost 40 years later a source told Mitchell some of the names of people involved in the attack: Sam Bowers, Devers Nicks and Billy Ray Pitts. He easily found Pitts after looking up his phone number on the Internet.

Mitchell said part of the reason he's been able to get sources--some of them former Klansmen and their families--to talk is because he is a white southerner who grew up in Texarkana, Texas and speaks their language. "We like the same food," he joked. He's taken sources out for barbecue and for catfish.

The interaction with murderers and their families has been odd at times. "It's not always what you think. It's more complicated," he said.

"I'm not like Mike Wallace," he said. "I don't go in with guns blazing." He finds many people have stories they want to tell someone, and if he is patient and listens long enough, he collects countless tips, quotes and even confessions.

Early on with these cold cases, he had an editor who really didn't want him spending time on these investigations. His wife hasn't always been thrilled about the threats to his life, he admitted. "I have a life insurance policy, so it works out," he said, laughing--but the crowd was somber.

A McArthur Fellow, Mitchell is working on a book for publisher Simon and Schuster, "Race Against Time." He expects to finish it next year.

An audience member asked Mitchell what impact his work had on race relations. He said his stories weren't enough to solve all of Mississippi's problems. While he started out with an interest in history, what drove him to investigate cold cases wasn't a mission of racial reconciliation, he said. What spurred him to dig deeper was the shock that so many people had murdered and nothing was done about it. Reporting on it was basic instinct that Mitchell said is part of his religious faith.

"It's just the right thing to do," he said.