Jerry Mitchell, Ghost Hunter

He has nothing to do with hunting primes. Jerry Mitchell doesn’t talk a lot, display an intractable smile and doesn’t brag about anything. Seated at his desk in the editing room of the Clarion Ledger, the major daily newspaper for Mississippi, located in Jackson, he says he is simply “an ordinary guy, an easy person to live with, and who listens to his interviewees for as long as it takes.” A rule established in his dogma for many years, and which led this journalist with a falsely debonair physique to become an unbeatable opponent of the former members of the racist and criminal organization called the Ku Klux Klan.

In less than twenty years, Jerry Mitchell rooted out a dozen forgotten files from the FBI, taken from legal documents filed and forgotten, and revealed a considerable number of mistakes in investigations in the 1960s headed by local authorities most often linked to the Ku Klux Klan. By himself, he recreated historical threads, gathered evidence, and retraced certain suspects from the era in order to get their testimony.

He was the one who brought down the “Grand Wizard Imperial”, Sam Bowers, responsible for the 1966 death of Vernon Dahmer, civil rights activist. It was he again who stifled the accusation against Edgar Ray Killen, found guilty at the age of 80 of having organized and ordered the murder of three antiracist activists in 1964.

“I never know what these people are going to say to me when they decide to meet me,” he says. “I only want them to talk to me. Very often, you only have to give enough rope to your interviewees for them to hang themselves.” Four Klansmen, as they are called, implicated in different assassinations for which they were never convicted, were trapped by Jerry Mitchell’s work. In total, 23 individuals, if you count all the affairs reexamined by other journalists or federal inquests, following his articles.

However, no one knew that this man from Texas, born of a Navy airplane pilot, would rub up against the demons of the past. “White, Southern, and a profoundly religious,” as he defines himself, Jerry Mitchell acknowledges not having been raised with ideas of racial equality. “I didn’t know anything about that,” he confesses. The déclic came in 1989. Working with the legal columns of the Clarion Ledger, a young Jerry was sent by his boss to the premiere of Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning, a fictional film dedicated to the murders of civil rights activists. He would leave deeply moved, horrified by the Ku Klux Klan’s violence. “This was the beginning of my education.”

Jerry Mitchell then decided to pursue the justice problems by becoming a little more interested in the white supremacist organization, “as a second job,” he states. Eight months after his cathartic movie experience, he landed “page one” of his paper. His scoop revealed how the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a government agency that worked to maintain racial segregation, had spied on a black activist several months before his death.

Three weeks later, a second article accused the same commission of having manipulated on the choice of jurors during the trial of Byron de la Beckwith, suspected of having beaten in Jackson, in 1963, Medgar Evers, a black activist and human rights defender. “The state of Mississippi secretly helped him to not be convicted. And no one knew,” he says. The day after the appearance of the inquest, Medgar Evers’ wife presented a request to reopen the file. In 1994, thirty years after the events, Byron de la Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison.

Through his investigations, the journalist began to crack these files. One day, he received a phone call from one of his sources, who proposed a meeting with him. Jerry Mitchell returned to the paper with 2400 confidential notes from the Sovereignty Commission in the trunk of his car. Explosive documents confirming the existence of obscure connections implemented by government authorities, police services, and the intelligence community in order to resist desegregation by all means necessary. Wiretapping, attempts to infiltrate civil rights organizations, references to murders by the Ku Klux Klan: “Some pages were frightening, others packed with beyond ridiculous details.”

Jerry Mitchell dedicated around fifteen articles to this subject. One of them reveals how his own daily life was a eulogy to segregation in his editorial pages and covered up certain affaires upon the request of authorities at the time. “I simply tried to air our dirty laundry”, he says with an apparent nonchalance that masque the work accomplished.

In 1999, he landed an interview with Bobby Frank Cherry, one of the two suspects still alive and implicated in the attempt perpetrated, on September 15 1963, against a Birmingham church, in which four young black girls perished. An affair closed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1965 after the conviction of Robert Chambliss, alias Dynamite Bob.

The interview would last six hours. The old man repeated several times that he shouldn’t be blamed for anything. He stated, as he already had done for police, that he found himself in front of his television in the middle of watching a wrestling match at the time of the attack. No doubt, his alibi would be turned against him.

Returning to the newspaper, Jerry Mitchell requested documentation to verify TV programs on the air at the time. A note placed on his desk the next day indicated that there was no wrestling that day. The publication of the article led to the reopening of the investigation. On May 22 2002, the Ku Klux Klan ex-member was sentenced to life in prison. He died in prison two years later. “I’m not looking to convince my interviewees. In away, I appeal to their vanity,” he says.

Jerry Mitchell pursues this road not with a religious purpose but with jubilation. He writes little. “Around a hundred cases still need to be researched, the hardest ones”, he says. His name is regularly cited for the Pulitzer. In 2000, at the conference for editors and journalist investigators, he was presented as the “Simon Wiesenthal of the south,” in reference to the tireless Nazi hunter.

The New York Times had even considered paying for his services. “They wouldn’t leave me alone,” he says. “At the end of several months, they had handed me on other subjects.” He smiles again. Discretely he slides in the fact that his daughter supports Barack Obama’s candidacy. And that he is already looking to strike again. He is mounting, along with two other journalists, a pool of investigations on this period. With the goal of enlarging the area of investigations outside of Mississippi.