This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp. Maybe years ago you saw the movie Mississippi Burning like me. It's the story of some infamously brazen killings by the Ku Klux Klan.
Episode Transcript
Lee C. Camp
Jerry Mitchell
First day of summer, Freedom Summer. Three civil rights workers, young men by the name of James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner.
Lee C. Camp
This is MacArthur Genius recipient Jerry Mitchell.
Jerry Mitchell
They were arrested, put in jail, and the deputy sheriff, who was a Klansman himself, released those three young men into the hands of waiting Klansman, who then in turn killed them and buried their bodies fifteen feet down in an earthen dam.
Lee C. Camp
Years ago, Jerry watched that film along with some FBI agents. He found himself enraged – the constructive kind – and his anger drove him on a search for justice.
Jerry Mitchell
I was able to get my hands on these spy records, just like a… just a smattering of them, just a little bit of one… that were from these sealed files that were part of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which was this state segregationist spy agency. It was operating in Mississippi, headed above the governor.
Lee C. Camp
And that led Jerry to begin investigating one of the most outrageous assassinations of the civil rights era.
Jerry Mitchell
Medgar Evers was the head of the NAACP in Mississippi. [He'd] been fighting for years for African Americans to be full citizens, and was assassinated – shot in the back – in his own driveway, June 12th, 1963.
Lee C. Camp
You are listening to Tokens; public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. I'm your host, Lee C. Camp, professor of theology and ethics in Nashville, Tennessee. In this episode, you get to sit in my living room with me, listening to the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Jerry Mitchell, talk about his anger, how his faith drove his quest for justice, and the way in which that journey would contribute to the conviction of twenty-four cold cases of civil rights era murders. This is all recounted in his new book, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era. Our interview in just a moment.
Delighted today to have Jerry Mitchell, who's an investigative journalist, formerly with the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. His new book, being received with rave reviews and widespread acclaim, is entitled, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era.
Welcome, Jerry.
Jerry Mitchell
It's good to be with you.
Lee C. Camp
So, if I understand correctly, I've heard you tell the stories through the years that the work that you've done in investigative journalism has ended up leading to something like twenty-four convictions in civil rights murder cases.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, there have been twenty-four overall, nationwide.
Lee C. Camp
And these were cases in which originally they either were not prosecuted or they were prosecuted and defendants were acquitted rather than…
Jerry Mitchell
Well not acquitted, but yeah, mistrials, or maybe not tried at all. Absolutely.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. How in the world did you begin getting into such work?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, I saw a movie, and it's called Mississippi Burning…
Lee C. Camp
Yeah, I remember that movie.
Jerry Mitchell
…which is about the Ku Klux Klan's killings of three civil rights workers. Young, young people, young men by the name of James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner. And that happened June 21st of 1964. First day of summer, Freedom Summer.
Lee C. Camp
And in that case, I think a lot of people came into Mississippi to help with voter registration.
Jerry Mitchell
That's exactly what they were doing. They were all involved in the civil rights movement. Andy Goodman was coming down as a part of those students. You know, a thousand students that trained in Ohio were kind of coming down to Mississippi, and when they got back, or even before they got back – the reason they came back early – was because the Klan had bombed one of the churches, like, set it on fire where Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney had spoken before. And so they… the Klan burned that church to the ground, and so the civil rights workers came to investigate that particular fire, and members of the church were beaten as well.
Lee C. Camp
And in that particular case, those three young men ended up being killed.
Jerry Mitchell
They were killed by the Klan. They were arrested, put in jail, and then released. The deputy sheriff, who was a Klansman himself, released those three young men into the hands of waiting Klansman, who then in turn killed them and buried their bodies fifteen feet down in an earthen dam.
Lee C. Camp
Goodness. So you saw this movie, Mississippi Burning.
Jerry Mitchell
Yep.
Lee C. Camp
And how did that end up getting you into this work?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, what happened was I saw it with a couple of FBI agents who investigated that case as well as the journalist who covered that case, and basically what I learned and what outraged me was the fact that no one had ever been – despite more than twenty Klansmen being involved in killing those three young men – nobody [had] ever been prosecuted for murder.
And that was what I couldn't wrap my head around, that nobody had ever been prosecuted for murder. And so that kind of began both my education and my journey. I knew nothing of any of this. This was not something I learned in school. No one ever told me these stories. I knew very little about the civil rights movement, period, and I certainly didn't know much about the violence connected to the movement, other than I remember when I was a young kid that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. I do remember that. That kind of came through into my little child's world, but the rest of it, it all escaped me.
Lee C. Camp
Huh. You know, I… it's remarkable… I remember, you know, I grew up in Talladega, Alabama, and one of the bombings of the buses occurred probably, I don't know, maybe a fifteen minute drive from my home.
Jerry Mitchell
Right.
Lee C. Camp
And I don't ever… that happened – I would have been a very young child when that happened.
Jerry Mitchell
61.
Lee C. Camp
Or yeah, that would have been before I was born. But I never remember having heard it talked about when I was a kid.
Jerry Mitchell
Exactly. No one talks.
Lee C. Camp
And fifteen minutes away from my house! And yeah, it was not until I was in seminary, actually in Texas, that I began watching a video series that one of our professors had us watch, and that was the first I'd ever heard about this story.
Jerry Mitchell
There was a whole series of black churches in Mississ… oh not Mississippi, in my hometown of Texarkana, Texas, that got bombed – burned to the ground at both the Texas side, and I think on Arkansas's side, too. And I never knew that until… they invite some alum back for this gathering in the early 2000s, and suddenly I hear someone talking about “oh yeah, my church got bombed.” I was like, “what?” And so I didn't know… even my own hometown, I didn't know about, you know, some of, you know, some of the horrible things that happen[ed]. To the town's credit, they were able to kind of come together and rally and begin to rebuild those churches. And they went through a tough time too, but I didn't know any of that growing up.
Lee C. Camp
So here you are in the late 80s. You see this movie, you kind of feel this sense of indignation.
Jerry Mitchell
Outrage, really. Anger.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. So then what happens from that point forward?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, not too long after that, I… about a month later, an unrelated yet related event happened, which was, I was able to get my hands on these spy records, just like a… just a smattering of them, just a little bit of one… that were from these sealed files. And that kind of led me to be interested in getting more. And eventually I got…
Lee C. Camp
So sealed files, you mean sealed state files?
Jerry Mitchell
They were these spy records that were part of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which was this state segregationist spy agency. It was operating in Mississippi, headed by the governor.
Lee C. Camp
And was it an official government congress?
Jerry Mitchell
It was. It was an official state agency headed by the governor, and then all the top state leaders were part of it. It's kind of the state equivalent of a white citizens council. And they had a propaganda arm, which they promoted segregation by sending people up north and bragging about segregation. And then they also had a spy arm, where they infiltrated civil rights groups and different things like. It's very fascinating, and so I was interested in getting those spy files and eventually legal sources began to leak them to me. And what I found out was, at the same time the state of Mississippi was prosecuting Byron De Le Beckwith, this other arm of the state, the Sovereignty Commission, was secretly assisting the defense, trying to get Beckwith acquitted, and nobody knew that.
Lee C. Camp
So let's back up just a second for those who don't remember Byron De La Beckwith.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, I'll explain who it is… Well, Medgar Evers, let me tell that first… Medgar Evers… was the field secretary from the Mississippi NAACP, kind of the head of the NAACP in Mississippi. You know, basically had been fighting for years for these… you know, for African Americans to be full citizens, and was assassinated – shot in the back – in his own driveway, June 12th, 1963. And he was shot by and killed by a man named Byron De La Beckwith, who was a member of the White Citizens Council and a Klansman as well.
Lee C. Camp
Actually the last time I saw you, that afternoon, we went to Medgar Evers's home there in Jackson, and it's a very moving sort of place to visit, and it's just a sort of sacred kind of holy place.
Jerry Mitchell
Exactly. Killed right in that spot, and you can still see what appears to be blood on the driveway. It's just, it's a very haunting place.
Lee C. Camp
It is haunting. Yeah. And I was always moved by… I've been there two, three times now, I guess, and I think one of the things that's just so… first, so much got my attention, was the ways in which the house plan had been changed. It didn't have a front door. It had a side door for security purposes.
Jerry Mitchell
It's the only house on that street that doesn't have a front door.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. And then the windows were up high.
Jerry Mitchell
Correct.
Lee C. Camp
So that it was harder to see people in the house.
Jerry Mitchell
Bingo.
Lee C. Camp
And I remember hearing stories about how their children didn't have a normal bed. They would sleep on a mattress on the floor in the back bedroom. So that, again, it was harder…
Jerry Mitchell
Well, if a bullet came through, then it wouldn't hurt kids if they were sleeping.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. And then that haunting story about him coming home. I think he came home late that night…
Jerry Mitchell
He did, it was after midnight.
Lee C. Camp
… and was unloading, I think, t-shirts out of the back of his car…
Jerry Mitchell
They said “Jim Crow must go.” And was shot in the back by centralized authority. By a .30-06, he got shot with.
Lee C. Camp
So Byron De La Beckwith shoots him…
Jerry Mitchell
… shoots him in the back, and then Medgar fell forward and was able to manage to get himself around to the side door, you know, the house, the garage door. And his wife and the kids heard the shot and then ran outside, saw the blood and screamed and… the daughter, Rena Evers, said, “Daddy, get up! Daddy, get up!” And he never did.
Lee C. Camp
Byron De La Beckwith…
Jerry Mitchell
… went on trial…
Lee C. Camp
… went on trial, but his…
Jerry Mitchell
64 twice, but hung juries both times. He walked free.
Lee C. Camp
And so, how possibly – for people who that just can't possibly make sense how that would happen when there's all sorts of evidence that he did it – how does something like that happen?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, a couple of things that happened. One is he had an all-white, all-male jury. And the reason he had an all-white jury is because African Americans weren't allowed to vote. Those jury roles pull from voting roles. Essentially, that's where those come from. And then on top of that, Mississippi wouldn't allow women to be on juries until 1968. So it was literally an all-white, all-male jury. On top of that, there were some police officers who basically lied – I think we can say this now, you know, in confidence – they lied and basically claimed they saw Beckwith in Greenwood, Mississippi, which was where he lived, at least an hour and a half away. I mean, you know, back in those days probably closer to two hours. They claimed they'd seen him, like, pumping gas at 1:05 AM, but they didn't connect the time to anything. There was a lot of problems in my mind with that testimony.
Lee C. Camp
So they… so with all of these things… he hung jury twice in 1964, and then he goes off and…
Jerry Mitchell
He just walks free. He goes home. In fact, they had a banner across one of the bridges and Delta bridges that said, “Welcome home D-La.” That was kind of his nickname.
Lee C. Camp
Wow.
Jerry Mitchell
Welcomed home as a hero.
Lee C. Camp
Wow. So when did you and Byron De La Beckwith meet up?
Jerry Mitchell
April of 1990. So I wrote my story on what I just mentioned… [it] ran October 1st of 1989 and then this… then went to go visit Mr. Beckwith. That was in April of 1990.
Lee C. Camp
And what was that like. Or first, before you just say what it was like, how did you possibly… I mean, I'm assuming you don't just go knock on the door.
Jerry Mitchell
No, I called him. I mean, he and I had been talking on the phone for a little bit. Took me a while to get his phone number. He had an unlisted phone number, but I actually had help from a… an incredibly well known – at least in reporting circles – reporter by the name of Johnny Popham from… he worked for The New York Times for a long time… before coming back to the Chattanooga paper. And so, he was retired, and I guess they hung out or they knew him or whatever. And he was the one who actually helped me get Byron De La Beckwith's home number.
Lee C. Camp
[Laughs]
Jerry Mitchell
So I called Beckwith, and we kind of start a series of conversations. It was… I had to pass the quiz in order to go interview him.
Lee C. Camp
What sort of quiz?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, “what are your parents' names? Where do you live? Where do you go to church? Where'd you go to college?” I mean, I guess I could… of course, I went to Harding university. You know, I could have, like, refused to answer. But I feel he'd like my answers. You know what I mean? [Laughs] And so I just kind of told the truth, you know…
Lee C. Camp
… in that your answers kind of gave you credibility as a white man. As a white southern Christian man.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, I'm a wasp, you know?… I checked off all the boxes, you know, so he kind of said, “come on.” And so I went to visit him.
Lee C. Camp
And what'd you find when you get there?
Jerry Mitchell
[Laughs] He was absolutely the most racist person I'd ever spent any serious time with. Just N-word this, N-word that, and very antisemitic. I mean, just anybody who wasn't white, I mean, he pretty much hated.
Lee C. Camp
When you went to see him, I mean, what were you hoping to accomplish? Just from the perspective of a journalist's perspective, what was kind of your agenda?
Jerry Mitchell
Wasn't really an agenda…
Lee C. Camp
What would be your best-case scenario there?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, I think some reporters would have come in with a… maybe an agenda and a kind of a “gotcha” interview, but my mentality was more: how'd this guy – ‘cause I already talked to him on the phone – how'd this guy get to be such a racist?
And that's what I was kind of curious about. How do you get to be such a racist? And I think I got at least some semblance of an answer. So it was interesting. ‘Cause he just joined everything, including eventually the Klan. Now he didn't admit he joined the Klan, but it was pretty obvious he did. He was praising the Klan in our conversation.
Lee C. Camp
So you have this conversation with him. You began to get a picture of kind of what he's up to.
Jerry Mitchell
So he talked about the White Citizens Council like it was a long lost love. I mean, he was just very praising of it.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. Then you leave?
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah. Well, one of the things about… a detail that's kind of interesting I'll throw in, that at some point his wife brought him this… it looked like orange soda, you know, for him to drink. And as I kind of looked more closely at the drink, it was, like, bubbling furiously, like some kind of mad scientist potion. I'm like, what in the world is this? And so I asked him, of course. At some point I was like, “what is that you're drinking?” And it was indeed orange soda, but it was combined with food grade hydrogen peroxide. And I was like, “really?”
Lee C. Camp
[Laughs] What's that about?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, he was a believer in something called chelation, which is C-H-E-L-A-T-I-O-N. It's this belief… it's been around a long time… but it's this belief, you know, the radical right kind of seized on it, but the belief was that you would ingest something and then it would grab all these poisons and pull them out of your body.
Lee C. Camp
Huh.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah. That was the… that was the creepy… that was like the really creepy part of it.
Lee C. Camp
But it's almost like, I mean, as you tell that story, it strikes me as almost like a perfect metaphor for sort of his Christian identity, sort of…
Jerry Mitchell
Very much Christian identity, he believed in…
Lee C. Camp
Describe that for people.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, I'll try. I'll do this real quickly and it's blunt. It's very racist. So just… I apologize in advance for how offensive this is, but he believed that Adam and Eve were white people. He believed that non-white people were created on the sixth day – and they call them mud-people, by the way – and have no souls. You know, they're like animals. They have no souls.
Lee C. Camp
They're more animals.
Jerry Mitchell
They're more animal-like, and therefore, at least the way I took it, therefore, you have the right to kill them. You know, it's not like killing a human. And then they… he believes that Jews are satanic. Like he believes that – and people who are Christian didn't even believe this too – that Eve had sex with Satan, the serpent, and then that's where Jews came from. I mean, that's really awful and racist and antisemitic. But yeah, it is what he believed.
Lee C. Camp
So you began to have all this kind of conversation with him. You told us a great story about kind of what happens on the way back out to the car.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah. He told me… it was getting dark. He lived in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, which is just outside of Chattanooga, and he insists on, like, walking me to the car and I'm like, you know, really, that's okay. I think I can find my way. And so, he walks me out to the car anyway, he gets me out to the car and says, “if you write positive things about white Caucasian Christians, God will bless you. If you write negative things about white Caucasian Christians, God will punish you. If God does not punish you directly, several individuals will do it for him,” and so his wife made me a sandwich. I think you can guess…
Lee C. Camp
[Laughs] So after you have this experience with him, in time, he's brought to trial; the case is reopened…
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, reopened…
Lee C. Camp
… because of your investigative work?
Jerry Mitchell
A lot of people involved. I'm very blessed. I really am. He… but yeah, he went on trial finally, in 1994, and was convicted on February 5th, 1994.
Lee C. Camp
Back in Jackson?
Jerry Mitchell
In Jackson and exact same courtroom he had been tried in almost 30 years to the day. And when the word “guilty” rang out, you could hear the waves of joy as they cascaded down the hall til it reached the foyer full of people. Black and white just erupted in cheers, and I just felt chills because the impossible had suddenly become possible.
Lee C. Camp
And Medgar Evers's wife was there, I think.
Jerry Mitchell
And she was there, and her daughter Rena and her son Daryl, and they all cheered. Yeah. It was something that was just… I just felt chills because you know, the impossible had suddenly become possible.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. You tell at least four major cases in your book?
Jerry Mitchell
I do, I do.
Lee C. Camp
I think you also tell a story about Vernon Dahmer.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah. Vernon Dahmer.
Lee C. Camp
Can you give us a sketch of his story?
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, Vernon Dahmer was a very fascinating guy. What an incredible family. I just love the Vernon Dahmer family. Love all these families. But he was a farmer, businessman, entrepreneur, but he was dedicated really to getting the right to vote to all Americans. And the Klan didn't like that and attacked him and his family in the middle of the night, January 10th, 1966 – set the house on fire, began firing guns into the house. Vernon Dahmer woke up, grabbed his shotgun, ran to the front of the house, began firing back at the Klansman so his family could escape safely out of a back window. Unfortunately, the flames of the fire seared his lungs and he died later that day. A few weeks later in the mail came his voter registration card. He had fought his whole life for the right of all Americans to be able to vote and had never been able to cast a ballot himself. And the guy who ordered the killing, Sam Bowers, was the head of the white Knights, the KKK, and had never been convicted in that case.
Lee C. Camp
Now, before we talk about Sam Bowers… for those who aren't aware with the way the mechanism of inhibiting black voter registration worked, I mean, I read – I don't know if this is true, maybe this is a urban legend, but – my understanding is that one of the guys who was over voter registration there…
Jerry Mitchell
The circuit clerk.
Lee C. Camp
… he would ask the question, “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” And if you couldn't answer that question, you couldn't register.
Jerry Mitchell
The history of that is – and I mention this briefly in my book – is basically after reconstruction when the union troops left in 1875, 1876, from the South, Mississippi, you know, the white… the people are… white Mississippians essentially began to reassert power, both by violence, hook or crook, whatever, and eventually began to take power again or to, in their words, reassert white supremacy.
And so in 1890 they adopted a new constitution. That basically put in place poll taxes and a constitutional quiz. And so these circuit clerks acted as gatekeepers. And then two years later, they adopted basically a state law that kicked everybody off the voting rolls. Black and white, so they had to reapply.
Jerry Mitchell
So once they had to reapply, the circuit clerks basically… everybody who was… the whites who came in, they just pass with flying colors and they were all, a lot of times they… “Oh yeah, Joe, I know you. Yeah, you go ahead and register.” And an African American came in, it would be like, “Oh no,” you know, “Oh no, you don't understand what that part of the constitution means.” Or, like you said, they might ask some absurd question like, which I know got asked in Mississippi, “How many bubbles in a bar of soap?” I mean, they basically would either ask impossible questions that they couldn't answer or things like that, and therefore barred African Americans from voting for many years.
Lee C. Camp
So that's, I mean, I think that's one of the things that so often, seems to me, people overlook, is that there's a huge difference between a law that's on the books and social policy that may inhibit the intent of the law in the books.
Jerry Mitchell
Bingo. It was the law. It was the law in Mississippi and many other southern states adopted that, including, I think… Tennessee, if I'm not mistaken, essentially had something similar to that. It was, it was, you know, adopted throughout the South, that idea of poll taxes, the combination of both poll taxes and some kind of test or quiz or something that would keep, I think some other States also had what they would call a grandfather clause. Like if your grandfather could… you couldn't vote unless your grandfather voted. And different things like that. So there was a whole series of laws like that.
Lee C. Camp
So when people come in, like in the summer, Freedom Summer, they're coming in and trying to help people get registered to vote. Vernon Dahmer is trying to help people get registered to vote.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, in his own community. And he actually had, in 1961, actually had some civil rights activists actually living with him, you know, and they were actually working on voter registration and going around and getting African Americans registered to vote.
Lee C. Camp
Now, if I…
Jerry Mitchell
They brought a lawsuit later, by the way. That was a whole other thing, which Vernon's name was a part of that.
Lee C. Camp
… if I remember correctly, Vernon is another one of those who had served in World War II.
Jerry Mitchell
He didn't serve in World War II, but he had… six of his seven sons served a total of 78 years in the armed forces. That's the other part that kind of gets left out of the history sometimes, is people think that the modern civil rights movement began with Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme court ruling May of 1954 which desegregated public schools. But actually it began with these African Americans who returned home, coming home from war and said, “Hey, we fought for our country. We deserve the same rights as citizens.”
Lee C. Camp
And in many ways, as I understand it, the U.S. army was further… it was more progressive than…
Jerry Mitchell
… they were segregated at that moment in time. But you're right, the desegregation of the armed forces began after the war. Truman basically made that… made it a policy. Now it took a period of time before they were fully desegregated. But that's what began to happen.
Lee C. Camp
So Vernon Dahmer is… dies after this horrific house bombing, fire bombing. What happens in his case?
Jerry Mitchell
So basically the case got reopened. I did a story after the Vernon Dahmer family met with me. I did a story that met with the district attorney.
He reopened the case. He acted somewhat interested or actually interested at the time, and then got kind of cold feet over time. And then another district attorney came in, and it was like starting over. It just looked like nothing was going to happen. And so I ended up going to grad school at Ohio State, and while I was at Ohio state, I get this telephone call from this guy that claimed he had information on the Vernon Dahmer case and wanted to meet with me. And so I flew back to Mississippi and met with him and it turned out he had worked for Sam Bowers. You know. And helped type up Klan propaganda and stuff like that. So it was interesting. And so he… anyway, I came back and met him, and he had overheard Sam Bowers give the orders to kill Vernon Dahmer so that, that… after that – that was in spring of 1997 then the authorities re… you know, he met with the authorities and authorities reopened the case.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. I think it's this case that you tell some… just some hilarious stories.
Jerry Mitchell
There are some very funny stories, and I hate to… it's such a tragic, horrible, you know, murder, but there are some funny stories. So Bowers got arrested in May of 1998 and he was… he was arrested with his right hand guy – this guy's name is DeavoursNix – and when the family brought DeavoursNix, it was like the most pitiful sight you've ever seen. They were like wheeling him in, in the wheelchair with the green oxygen tank he's breathing out of, and they wheeled him up in front of the judge and he's like, “I can't take more than a couple steps without needing oxygen, judge.” And so the judge is like, “Well, normally I don't do this, but I'm gonna lay out without bond.” So, a dozen days later – this is like a reporter's dream – we catch him on the golf course.
Lee C. Camp
[Laughs] You get a picture?
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah. We got pictures and he got arrested, and so we had like before-and-after pictures in the paper. You know, “Klansman says he's too sick for jail, but not for golf.”
Lee C. Camp
Wow.
Jerry Mitchell
So he got arrested and he ends up being convicted August 21st of 1998 and sentenced to life in prison, just like Beckwith.
Lee C. Camp
You are listening to Tokens and our interview with MacArthur Genius grant recipient, Jerry Mitchell, on his new book, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era. You can find out more about the book and Jerry on our website at www.tokensshow.com/podcast. In part two of our interview with Jerry, we discussed dealing with death threats, we talk about courage, and we consider the Hebrew prophets on justice. Part two in just a moment.
You are listening to Tokens and our interview with MacArthur Genius grant recipient, Jerry Mitchell, on his new book, Race Against Time.
[To Jerry] You've experienced plenty of kinds of death threats.
Jerry Mitchell
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had dozens of death threats. You have clients been repeatedly telling me he was going to slit my throat, and a guy said he had pictures of me and knew where I lived and just all sorts of things like that, you know, over the years. Even got confronted in a church parking lot, you know, “what are you doing digging up the past?” you know what I mean? That kind of thing. You know? That was more harassment than threat. It was just like, “why are you doing this?” I was like, you know, this is news. This is important.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. So how did… how does one go about? I mean, obviously these are people who are threatening you who have a history of violence. So these are not incredible threats. Credibility to them. How does… how does one go about processing that sort of a threat?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, you know, for me personally, I think the thing that's helped me the most has been faith and that is because if somebody kills me, I just get to go home sooner. And I think for me personally, that's helped me a lot. Another thing is I was pretty young at the time, young and obsessed and not willing to be intimidated. I don't know what else to say, and I just was headstrong and all those things and not really… you know, them trying to threaten me really made me more determined to do it than ever.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. You know, I'm always telling my students – I teach ethics classes – so I tell my students that, you know, I can teach the most brilliant ethics class and you can understand all this stuff, but if you don't have courage, in many ways it's not going to mean anything because you know, that's when the push comes to shove. You gotta be able to somehow act on what you think is right.
Jerry Mitchell
Right. And it's all about living fearlessly. And that's kind of the unexpected gift I got from that. And living fearlessly is not about living without fear. Living fearlessly is about living beyond fear. It's about living for something greater than ourselves. And I think if we understand that, are willing to live for that, it, you know – which all the people in the civil rights movement, that's what they were doing.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah. They were living for something greater than their selves because it's when we… it's when we're able to do that, I think that we can kind of take that next stop and be courageous, you know, cause that's what we want. We want to live courageously. We want to live courageous lives. Because, I don't know, a life of fear is not worth living.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable that you got to play your… have gotten to play your part in a movement that just has so many heroes of such immense courage. It's overwhelming.
Jerry Mitchell
I mean, we could, we could sit here all day and talk about the courage that just… ordinary people, as we might say, the extraordinary courage of ordinary people over and over again, Fannie Lou Hamer and, and so many others that just inspire me. Bob Moses. Wow. Just this many, many… Amzie Moore. I mean, you know, that aren't necessarily known to, you know, the average American. I think it's one of the problems too, is we don't teach our history and, you know, we kind of… this kind of gets written off as – and I don't mean anything offensive about it – this kind of gets all written off as African American history, or “this belongs in black history month.” But the truth is that it's our history. It's not just African American history, it's our history. And the other part of the equation that we sometimes leave out is, for lack of a better term, the white defiance, I mean, that what they were going up against, it wasn't just the Klan. It was the entire state, powers that be, everything.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. And as I've been thinking about this, I'm reminded of a quote that I often like to use in class as well about… from Aristotle where he once said something like, the virtuous, he said “man” ‘cause he would have been sexist in his day, but you know, the virtuous human being will be angry in the right way with the right intensity for the right length of time in response to the right thing. And when I first read that, I thought, oh well, thanks very much, that's very helpful. But the more I've reflected upon it, I think it's pretty brilliant. You know.
Jerry Mitchell
It's pretty right. Yeah. I think scripture kind of backs that up as well. You know, if you're talking about anger, that there's a… there's a season for it or length of time for it as well.
Lee C. Camp
And so, when you talked about seeing Mississippi Burning and that beginning this sort of being very angry, what does it look like over a long haul to let anger be proper, properly ordered, and become, I guess, fuel for just action? Versus it becoming seeds of bitterness that just eat you away inside.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, that's a great question. I think, I think the, the answer, or at least we get from Solomon, is “don't let the sun go down on your anger.” I mean, I think this, you know, if we're angry – make it more personal – if we're angry at somebody, the ideas go, you know, for us as Christians is to go take care of that. You don't let that fester because when it festers, that's when it kind of becomes bitterness. But I think for these kind of cases, in my opinion, what this is more like, to borrow a term, “righteous anger” or whatever you want to call it, “just anger.” And, I think it's okay to be angry in that way and, and to seek justice. I think that's what, you know, from a faith perspective, God loves justice. That's what, you know, Isaiah says, and… yeah. I think that… and God is just so, it's not like… I think that when I did a deep dive on the scriptures and stuff after Byron De La Beckwith was convicted, I really began to really think more about what justice was and what it means and what it looks like.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. I mean, it does seem to me bizarre, in the ways in which we have such social and political polarization, and amongst some, there's this sort of language as if you start talking about justice, that's somehow suspect as some sort of leftist progressive agenda.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah. That's not what the Bible says.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah, right? Yeah. Well, one old Testament scholar, you know, talks about how social justice is a conservative issue because it's all there over and over and over again in the Bible.
Jerry Mitchell
You don't have to read the Bible very much to come away with that. What is… what does God expect of us? To walk humbly, to do justice, and to love mercy. I mean, that's… and justice is more than just what happens in a courtroom. We shouldn't… A, with that, to describe that, we shouldn't have a different set of scales of justice for those who are powerful, who are rich or whatever, which unfortunately happens too many times in this country, just as a reporter who's covered it for years. I know it's true. But then the other part of that is justice is just about how we treat each other. How do we treat the least of these? Are we – I'm going to give a simple example – I know in Mississippi now, they did finally change it, but it's still not that much better. They would allow… the Mississippi legislature allowed the law to be changed. They used to have laws against, it's called Usury Laws. And instead Mississippi legislature, like a lot of other state legislatures, were willing to change the law, and even in some cases the constitution, to allow these payday lendings, places, or title loan places, or whatever, to charge the equivalent of like – this was the one in Mississippi – 573% interest.
Lee C. Camp
Oh my goodness.
Jerry Mitchell
For, like, a loan. Now. I just think that's just so far beyond the pale, but for a state legislature to change the law and allow essentially poor people to be – in my opinion – to be exploited to that extent because you are essentially exploiting them in that level. And we as society didn't used to allow that, but we've now opened the door to allow that. And I mean, what are you doing? I mean, we as a society should try to protect – and I'm not trying to go on a wild crusade, but let's say – the lottery. Oh yeah. The lottery is a great thing. Well, who does the lottery? Well, a lot of the people that do… you don't see rich people going in to buy a bunch of lottery tickets most of the time.
Lee C. Camp
My understanding is that studies on that basically show it's like a regressive tax on the poor.
Jerry Mitchell
Exactly, on the poor. But it's something we ought to be thinking about. And that's justice too, in my opinion.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. A lot of the scholars, biblical scholarship around justice, will talk about how clearly you have in scripture this sort of element in which justice is sort of retributive justice that you get in the criminal justice system, but as you say, one of the first things about that is that it must be equitably dealt out. Right? And then there's this other piece of justice where – and you can say even the more emphatic element of justice in the Hebrew prophets is on the sort of holistic concern for the community, especially concern for the poor, the marginalized, the foreigner, the widow, the orphan. Anybody who doesn't have a lever on power the way everybody else would, they especially are attended to by justice in this sort of proactive way.
Jerry Mitchell
And by God. Yeah. Over and over again, it says, God blessed us. And protects them.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. And it just seems to me it's so important, you know, for us to keep saying this is not a… this is not a conservative versus liberal thing. It's a sort of thing that's right there in the tradition.
Jerry Mitchell
I would agree wholeheartedly with that. I think it's within the, within the tradition. Yeah.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. So you have moved from, you were the Clarion-Ledger there in Jackson for what, 30 years or so?
Jerry Mitchell
Three decades.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. Yeah. But now you've moved over to a new, a nonprofit?
Jerry Mitchell
I started a nonprofit. I'm essentially continuing to do what I've always done, which is investigative reporting. Because I think that's… for whatever reason, God gave this gift to me. I don't know why, but anyway…
Lee C. Camp
And I would say, I should have said this in the introduction, but I think you're the only a MacArthur Genius grant recipient that I've ever met. So I'm sure that had to be a quite a fascinating sort of experience.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, that's a whole interesting story. I had someone ask me the other day about that phone call. It was so… it was funny. It was interesting. Yeah. Which was an interesting experience. And that was what, because of the MacArthur grant, I got that book deal, so I'm grateful.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. So in the nonprofit work that you're doing, what are y'all trying to accomplish with that?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, we want to… you know, we are interested in areas of justice and those kinds of things. I mean, I think that, how does it all play out? How do these things play out? I'm very interested in the criminal justice system, and we're looking at those things. For instance, one of the areas we're exploring right now is juveniles who've been sentenced to life without parole. And so that's something the U.S. Supreme court has come back and said, “Hey, wait a minute, this ought to be rare, not frequent,” and for whatever reason in Mississippi so far, most of the judges have either given the same sentence, or not re-sentenced. So we're taking a look at that. I've written – over the past year, I've written about prisons in Mississippi. It's just fascinating that, you know, the least of these, so to speak, or just, you know, it's almost like, “Hey, just go away. We don't want to know what's going on,” almost kind of situation. I'm always fascinated by being able to report on places and things and people that are… that aren't being reported on. These hidden worlds. And so I've been… I've reported on prisons before. So we just kind of took a deep dive into prisons along with the help of ProPublica. We got a grant from them for a year, and basically bottom line, we kind of showed the prisons were going to blow up in Mississippi and they did in December, and all these people, you know, were killed in basically a gang war.
Lee C. Camp
Oh goodness.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah. And we had basically showed how the prisons were, the gangs were running the place. ‘Cause they didn't have enough staff, 50% vacancy rate.
Lee C. Camp
50% vacancy rate in the staff of the prison.?
Jerry Mitchell
Exactly. In staffing the correctional officers only being paid $25,000 a year, which qualified them and their families for food stamps in Mississippi. So it's just all sorts of awful situations. And so we reported on that, and that's part of what we do. We wanted to warn the public and public officials, and they did nothing. And that's what happened.
Lee C. Camp
What do you do with the argument of somebody like Michelle Alexander and The New Jim Crow, where she's making the argument that the mechanisms of Jim Crow systematically have been relocated to the kind of criminal justice system.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, to mass incarceration and that kind of thing, which is an interesting argument. I mean, certainly you can… if you look at Mississippi, you went from slave plantations to a plantation. At Parchman prison, it was a plantation and essentially you had inmates that worked on what they called the “sunup to sundown gang” that worked… they actually raised on-average in the early years of Parchman, and then that of course increased over time… they actually brought in, I think it was the modern equivalent of about $5,000,000 over two years to the state treasury. So it was like a big boom to the state treasury for many years. Of course, they would not only do that for the plantation that Parchman had, the prison had, but they would kind of farm them out to other people's plantations, and they would be paid for that as well. So it became a really huge money-making rack. And of course, the people who were working were getting zip. They were getting nothing. And there were essentially, there's a whole book on it by David Oshinsky. It's called Worse Than Slavery. So essentially you kind of see the beginnings of that in the Parchman prison system.
Lee C. Camp
So in your work now, when you look at what's going on in 2021, 2020-2021, what sorts of echoes… are there echoes of the 1960s you're hearing now 40 years later, or you know, what are the sort of things that you're seeing and hearing that cause yellow flags, red flags in your psyche?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, there's been a real rise in white nationalism, white supremacy within the past probably five years, a little more. There's no question of that. I mean, you see this whole series, not just even in the United States, but around the world of, you know, terrorist attacks or white supremacist attacks or antisemitic attacks, you know, attacks on Hispanics, others, churches, synagogues, mosques, you know, you name it. And it's all – a lot of it, not all of it – but a lot of it sometimes is unfortunately in the name of God, quote unquote, you know. But the white supremacy is… you're seeing a real increase in nationalism and nativism. And there's been a real increase in what I would call identity politics and things. And we're, we're essentially… the disconcerting thing, especially in this country, is I sense we are fracturing as a nation. Along racial identity, other partisan political lines.
Lee C. Camp
From your take on this, what are some of the major elements that have been contributing to this fracturing, what you're seeing as fracturing?
Jerry Mitchell
You know, that's a great question. I don't know that I know all the reasons why other than an embracing of Nativism, Identityism, you know, whatever you want to call it, of people that are embracing, you know, kind of that white nationalism and different things like that are the equivalents across the board.
Lee C. Camp
In what ways do you feel that the media itself is contributing to our polarization?
Jerry Mitchell
Wow, that's a great question. Well, one of the ways I guess you could say, or what's happening is kind of a… we've devolved back to over a hundred years ago, which is when we used to have like… back when newspapers were basically the media. You'd have – back then – you would have, like, the Republican whatever newspaper, or you'd have… they were party organs or the such and such Democrat.
Lee C. Camp
I don't know that I ever knew that.
Jerry Mitchell
Yeah, it's true.
Lee C. Camp
So this is early 20th century?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, you go back and look at the names of newspapers. I mean, it's called Arkansas Democrat in Arkansas. And so that was a democratic publication. Yeah, of course it was… that was southern Democrat, you know, not like necessarily we would think of Democrat today. But you know, Mississippi has a paper called the Woodville Republican, while it was a Republican party organ. And that's kind of… A.P., Associated Press, kind of was a service that was seeking to kind of try to satisfy everybody, like they were going to try and be a news service that was used by everybody, not just one particular party. So each party kind of had their own party line, so to speak, on things. And that was the way it was before the turn of the 20th century, that that was in place and then kind of came along. And before, you know, after that was this idea of more universal idea of what they called objectivity and things like that.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. So I mean…
Jerry Mitchell
That's how we've got that today. I guess that's the other – to finish that thought – the other part of that is today, you, you see that today.
Lee C. Camp
You see what today?
Jerry Mitchell
You see these kind of echo chambers in certain, you know, like certain TV channels or blogs or whatever. I mean, you kind of, it's innumerable, , the various outlets for, in other words, like, if you know, I'm a Republican or I'm a Democrat or whatever I am, and I've got a particular point of view that I'm looking to, this particular source is going to basically be an echo chamber reinforcing that view as opposed to a source outside that that might, you know, give me multiple points of view or whatever they are.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. What sorts of practices would you suggest to a person in the suburbs, person living downtown, whatever, whoever they are? What are best practices in reading or best practices in being informed from your perspective?
Jerry Mitchell
The main thing is credible news sources as opposed to Joe Bloe's blog.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah.
Jerry Mitchell
And to be able to be discerning. I mean…
Lee C. Camp
But what do you say to those who just say, well, what goes as credible is fake news? Or what is credible is biased?
Jerry Mitchell
Well, I don't know if I can completely answer your question, but I'll just get to the heart of it, which is this, in my opinion. Truth matters. And we've got to… and yes, we may not be able to completely get to truth, but we need to move toward truth. And if truth is no longer important, if you get to have your truth and I get to have my truth and somebody else gets to have their own truth, we don't have truth anymore. That's not truth. Truth is bedrock. It's… or facts. If you want to think of in terms of facts, maybe that's a better term to use. There's no such thing as multiple sets. Everyone doesn't get their own facts. There are facts and whatever those facts are, are the facts. Now, people may draw different conclusions from those facts and they're certainly entitled to do that. But the facts are the facts. And there aren't other facts, you know what I mean? You know, the facts are the facts, and you go from there.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. What gives you some hopefulness about being a journalist at this time? In American culture.
Jerry Mitchell
It's great. I think it's a great time to be a journalist. I mean, we're… I don't know that our profession has ever been more needed than at this time, at this moment in time. And I'm excited about the nonprofit, Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. We're trying our best to raise up a new generation of investigative reporters because it's important. How does the public know what's going on? Like with prisons. It's not like the… it's not like the public official were telling them this. We are reporting on this based on developing, you know, a lot of sources both inside and outside and from within prisons and families and others, this information, and being able to show the public what's really happening behind bars. This is important. It's taxpayer money being spent and how is our tax margin being spent? We need to know these things. We need to know the facts. As we're kind of talking about, and when the public doesn't know the facts and the public's kept in the dark, then we're operating in darkness.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. I remember just as you're talking, I was flashing back to remembering a story as I recollect years since I read this story. So I may be missing the facts, but as I recollect, I remember there was a journalist who would go… American journalist who went to see Gandhi. And I remember Gandhi talking about how important the journalist was. And that in many ways Gandhi couldn't do what Gandhi wanted to accomplish or what he did accomplish apart from the journalist because the story needed to be told. And it does seem to be that, apart from that sort of rootedness in telling stories vis-a-vis the powers of the world, we don't have much hope in kind of… certainly apart from any sort of violent retaliation. You know, in many ways journalism is the most nonviolent kind of response to try to break down abuses of power, it seems to me.
Jerry Mitchell
It is. It is. And I think you hit on another point there that's important to me, and that is story. That you know, how do we tell others? Story. I mean, I think there's something innately powerful about story and telling a story because you can teach story to little kids. I mean, you can, and I think, again, to harken back to faith and to scripture, the vast majority of it is story. Ifind that interesting. I find it interesting that we learn by story and story is so powerful, and I learned that at some point… I was at grad school. I learned how to… really began to learn how to do narrative nonfiction. I had not done any of that before, and this is 96, 97.
Lee C. Camp
That would have been really cutting edge, I would think in the late 90s.
Jerry Mitchell
I guess. But I mean, I read it and loved it and I'm like, “Oh man, I want to do this.” But I remember I did this piece called Preacher and a Klansman, which is about John Perkins, who's an African American preacher, and who got involved in the civil rights movement, and Tommy Terrance, who was a Klansman in Mississippi who was involved in a bunch of the violence. And the end of the story is they become friends. And so I remember I got this letter from this guy from the Mississippi Delta. He was like a 58 year old doctor, and he said, “I never really understood what African Americans had gone through until I read your story.” And I'd written about it for years and it made me realize the power of story. And I hope that with the book, with Race Against Time, that it becomes that for people, that it's a means by which people can learn. It's not a boring history book. Hopefully it's an interesting story that people can read and take away. And I've heard that back from people as well, that they go, “Oh man, I never knew all this happened.” You know? And that's what you want to do with story. You want to kind of hopefully share a story people don't know. And they begin to learn from it.
Lee C. Camp
Yeah. And it reminds me, too, of the power of that story that you just began to tell in your own sort of investigative work where you get to that point in that courtroom where you realize that the impossible has become possible precisely out of storytelling.
Jerry Mitchell
Exactly. Isn't that fascinating? You tell a story and then that in turn becomes another story.
Lee C. Camp
Right.
Jerry Mitchell
Or a continuation of the story. It is. It does remind us, and I think sometimes it's real easy to get away from that to think… it lets you know, sometimes if you just assemble a whole list of facts, it's not necessarily going to have the power it will that if it's embedded within us.
Lee C. Camp
Well, we've been here talking to Jerry Mitchell, investigative journalist from Jackson, Mississippi on a Nashville cool winter day. Jerry Mitchell, recipient of a Mark MacArthur Genius grant, and most recently the author of Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era available everywhere good books are sold. Thank you Jerry. Very much, man. Great to be with you. Thank you.
You are listening to Tokens, public theology, human flourishing, the good life. We have a bonus for you from one of our live shows. Our good friend Odessa Settles sings a soul shivering version of the classic spiritual “There is a Bomb in Gilead.” Head to tokensshow.com/podcast, click on this episode, and there you'll see the video and everything else Tokens related. Please do us a favor: leave us one of those glowing five star reviews on Apple podcasts and subscribe in whatever app you are listening in. Thanks to all the stellar team that make this podcast possible. Our executive producer, Christie Bragg of Bragg management, our co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios, associate producer Leslie Thompson of Rogue Creative Marketing and Media, Associate Producer Ashley Bayne, engineer Carri Harmon, and production assistance by Cara Fox. Grateful for our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett. Now we'll go out on a bit of our friend Odessa Settles, which you can watch the full performance at tokensshow.com/podcast. Peace be unto thee.
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