Zenger Award Acceptance Speech - Jerry Mitchell - Sept. 22, 2007

John Peter Zenger has been a hero of mine since I first read about him in a journalism history class -- someone who dared to print the truth. To receive an award now in honor of him and his wife, Anna Catherine, is something I never imagined.

Nor did I ever imagine that I would one day win the same award as Walter Cronkite, Bill Moyers, Gene Roberts, Bob Greene and so many others who inspired me to become part of what I consider the world's most noble profession.

The past 18 years have been an amazing journey, but I've learned that God has ways of keeping us humble. My son Sam is with us today. When he was young, a friend of his came over and asked me what I did for a living. I told him I wrote for the newspaper. I then saw Sam pull his friend over and say to him, "He doesn't write. He types."

So despite any awards I've won, I'm really nothing more than a glorified typist.

Not long ago, I visited the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, which stands as a reminder of 40 martyrs whose lives were stolen by hate. Young girls Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson had ribbons in their hair and their Sunday best on when a bomb planted next to their church ripped them apart one late summer morning in 1963. Three years later, Vernon Dahmer was sleeping with his family when firebombs from Klansmen crashed through the windows. Flames from the fire seared his lungs, and he died later that day. A few weeks later, his voter registration card arrived in the mail. He had spent his whole life fighting for the right to vote but was never able to cast a ballot. In the steamy summer of '64, domestic terrorists slinked through the night and kidnapped three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andy Goodman and Mickey Schwerner. Klansmen shot these three young men before digging a deep pit out of the Mississippi red clay and burying their bodies, hoping they'd never be found. That same summer, while searching for their bodies, authorities found two other bodies, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, who were hitchhiking when Klansmen picked them up and beat them and beat them and beat them before tying them up and throwing them, still alive, into the Mississippi River, where they drowned.

In each of these cases, their killers walked free, even though everyone knew they were guilty.

Recently I stopped by Chaney's grave in Meridian, Mississippi, and the words there struck me: "There are those who are alive, yet will never live; those who are dead, yet will live forever. Great deeds inspire and encourage the living."

In 1989, I became interested in the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state segregationist spy agency headed by the governor himself. I ended up getting a source who leaked the secret records to me which showed that at the same time the state was prosecuting Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the commission was secretly assisting Beckwith's defense, trying to get him acquitted.

A quarter century had passed since Evers had been assassinated, but his widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, had never stopped loving him and did all she could to keep his story alive. After my story appeared, she asked authorities to reopen her husband's case.

At the time, the odds were literally more than a million to one against the case being reprosecuted. All of the evidence was missing. There was no transcript, no murder weapon, nothing.

But Myrlie Evers believed, and she prayed.

Then some amazing things happened. Not long after that, authorities found an old box at the police department that contained crime scene photos and a fingerprint of Beckwith, lifted from the murder weapon. Then Myrlie Evers found her copy of the old court transcript. Two months later, the prosecutor found the murder weapon in his father-in-law's closet. In sort, everything that needed to happen for Beckwith to be prosecuted did happen. Fourteen months after I wrote my first stories, Beckwith was indicted for murder. Three years and two months later, the one-time Klansmen went to prison.

And so began my journey into the unpunished killings of the civil rights era, and what's happened since has been amazing.

In 1998, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers went to prison for life for ordering the killing of Vernon Dahmer. In 1999, James Caston, Charles Caston, Hal Crimm and Joe Oliver Watson all went to prison for killing a one-armed sharecropper named Rainey Pool. In 2001 and 2002, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry went to prison for life for planting the bomb in a Birmingham church that killed the four little girls. In 2003, Ernest Avants went to prison for life for killing Ben Chester White. And in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen went to prison for 60 years for helping orchestrate the killings of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. Earlier this year, James Ford Searle went to prison for life for his role in the beatings and killings of 19-year-olds Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore.

These Klansmen were not the only ones who went behind bars. Since 1989, authorities in Mississippi and six other states have reinvestigated cases that have led to 23 convictions.

Now the Justice Department is looking at more than 100 killings from the civil rights era in hopes of seeing what cases can possibly be prosecuted.

In my journey, I have been inspired by the strength, courage and nobility of those whose names don't appear in college history textbooks -- people who toiled in the civil rights movement like C.C. Bryant, who had his church and barbershop blown up, and Clyde Kennard, who was sentenced to prison for seven years on trumped up charges of stealing chicken feed because he dared to try and enroll at an all-white university.

Other than the work of Hodding Carter, Hazel Brannon Smith, Ira Harkey, Oliver Emmerich and Bill Minor, there was little room for real journalism during the civil rights era in Mississippi, especially at The Clarion-Ledger, which Minor called "the most morally bankrupt newspaper in the United States."

The paper campaigned to preserve segregation, no matter the costs, and referred to civil rights activists as "communists" and "chimpanzees," prompting some in the African-American community to call the publication, "The Klan-Ledger." A day after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, the headline in The Clarion-Ledger read, "Trash Taken Out in Washington."

When violence, aided by such rabble rousing, took place in Mississippi, the paper sought to put the blame somewhere else. When Beckwith was arrested for killing the NAACP leader, the headline read, "Californian Arrested in Evers Murder," overlooking the fact that Beckwith had lived in Mississippi almost his whole life.

Rea Hederman, Gannett and others helped see to many positive changes to the newspaper by the time I arrived in 1986. Unfortunately, however, one of the newspaper's top people opposed my reporting about these brutal and unpunished crimes that brought shame to the state's name. I kept expecting to come in one morning to find my computer gone, my cubicle disassembled and me heading back to my hometown, begging for my old job at the Texarkana Gazette typing obits.

Some people, including friends of mine, wanted me to stop. One recent letter to the editor said I should be "tarred, É feathered and run out" of Mississippi. It's always nice to know you have someone who'll help you pack.

The term has fallen out of favor, but I think of myself as a muckraker. In the early 20th century, muckrakers helped bring voting rights to women, exposed unsanitary conditions in slaughterhouses and helped end child labor. So if anyone ever tells me I'm a muckraker, I simply say, "Why thank you."

My entire family, especially my wife, Karen, has been supportive of me. But when she was eight months' pregnant in April 1990, she questioned my sanity when I told her I was leaving to interview Byron De La Beckwith, the Klansman who shot Medgar Evers in the back and watched him crawl across the carport to die in front of his wife and three young children.

Beckwith had never put two and two together to realize that I was the one whose stories had gotten the case reopened. That's why my wife was questioning my sanity. She felt Beckwith knew already and was setting me up for the kill.

I spent six hours with this evil man in his home in Signal Mountain, Tenn., which is a beautiful place when the sun's going down, unless you happen to be watching it with Byron De La Beckwith. He insisted on walking me to the car and told me, "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."

His wife had made me a sandwich. I think you can guess what I did with the sandwich.

Another time, Beckwith saw me across the courtroom and said to someone, "You see that boy over there? When he dies, he's going to Africa." I turned to my friend and said, "I've always wanted to go."

Once when I called Beckwith for comment, he said "I'm going to live to be 120. I don't know how much longer you've got. I would have for you to have a wreck or be molested. Do you know somebody who would do that to you?"

"Do you?" I asked.

Beckwith's wife, Thelma, was just as racist as he was, telling me how African Americans had been burned out of their homes to keep Lookout Mountain all white. Not many months after Beckwith was arrested, I went on vacation, and when I got back to my office, I had a message on my voice mail from Thelma. She had tried to call me person to person, and I could hear her conversation with the operator on voice mail. The operator says to her, "He's not here, ma'am. Would you like to leave a message?"

"Why, yes, I would," she said. "You just tell him to go to hell."

Beckwith was convicted on Feb. 5, 1994. Two days later, I got a call from the sheriff telling me that when they took Beckwith away, he kept saying two words.

"Two words?" I asked.

"Yes, two words," the sheriff said.

"What two words?"

"Jerry Mitchell."

For a moment, I basked in what I considered the supreme compliment -- until the sheriff continued: "Now when you drive home, Jerry, you may want to go a different way É"

"Uh, thanks, sheriff."

While pursuing the case against Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, a white supremacist told me, "Did you think we were going to let you go unscathed? I know where you live. You're an idiot. You're a traitor. I know your wife's name and your children's names."

After I told Karen about this, she had me call the FBI immediately. They investigated, and it turned out the guy who called me was from South Carolina. So I figured, "At least he's got a ways to drive."

While pursuing the latest case on James Seale, a white man called me a Yankee "Jew bastard" and "nigger loving son of a bitch" who needed to have his throat slit.

He and others hoped threats like this would get me to stop, but the truth was I wasn't going to stop. The best advice I can offer journalists is the same advice Winston Churchill once gave: "Never give in. Never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in."

Justice has come in some cases not because of my work, but because the cause is great and because there are many others greater than me who have taken up that cause.

Too often we as Americans think of change as something accomplished only by rugged individualists. The truth is change comes when many unite in a common cause to change a people and a place. Such was the case when thousands of students and others came to the South in the 1960s to get involved in the civil rights movement.

I don't need to tell you that these are dark days for journalism -- days when celebrity trivia passes for major news, days when reporters are being locked up like common criminals for refusing to reveal their sources, days when people refuse to believe what they read in their own newspapers but will believe any babble they hear on talk radio or cable shows that masquerade as news.

Despite all this bad news, there is good news.

The good news is good journalism doesn't wait on public opinion in order to make a difference. John Peter Zenger didn't wait for libel laws to be changed before he printed the truth. Ida M. Tarbell didn't wait for monopoly laws to be changed before exposing fraud by John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company. Edward R. Murrow didn't wait for the Senate to police its own before challenging the claims of Joseph McCarthy.

As journalists, we must never let the public's fascination with celebrity overwhelm our dedication to what's important. We must never test the public's pulse to determine what stories we should print. And we must never give in to those trying to thwart our attempts to expose the truth.

My hope is all of us can help to restore journalism to its rightful place as a fierce watchdog against oppressive government, a bright and clear beacon for truth and, most importantly, an unyielding, energized, relentless advocate for justice for all Americans.

My prayer is, no matter where we find ourselves, we can all take solace, strength and courage from John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger and from the martyrs of the nation's civil rights movement and like James Chaney's tombstone inscription says, that our deeds will live forever. That our deeds will live forever.

Thank you very much. God bless you.