Investigative reporter to visit Hill
Mitchell, a former Lovejoy Award winner, will return to the Hill next week.
The 2006 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award winner Jerry Mitchell will return to the Hill next week as a Lovejoy visiting journalist.
On Monday, April 25 Mitchell will deliver a talk titled, “Tales of Justice and Reconciliation in Mississippi: A reporter's journey into the Klan and unpunished killings from the civil rights era.” The talk will take place at 7 p.m. in the Ostrove Auditorium.
Mitchell is an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. As the title of his talk suggest, Mitchell is most famous for his investigations into several civil rights era killings by the Ku Klux Klan that led police to re-open the murder cases and arrest several Klan members.
According to the Lovejoy Award website, “Mitchell’s work has led to the trials and convictions of four Ku Klux Klansmen: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 killing of Evers; Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for ordering the firebombing that killed the NAACP’s Vernon Dahmer in 1966; Bobby Cherry for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley; and Edgar Ray Killen for helping orchestrate the 1964 killings of Freedom Riders Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.”
Among the many awards Mitchell has won since he began his investigation into the Ku Klux Klan in 1989, he was recently awarded a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2009.
Mitchell is the final in a series of four Lovejoy visiting journalists this year. The other journalists included Alfredo Corchado of The Dallas Morning News, Maureen Orth of Vanity Fair and Scott Shane of The New York Times’ Washington Bureau. The Lovejoy Visiting Journalists program is sponsored by the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement and is made possible by a grant by the Knight foundation.
Michael Brophy '12
