The long wait for justice in Mississippi.

• Author: Chalmers, David
• Position: Law & Justice - Essay

IN THE MIDDLE of the 1960s, nothing seemed quite as bad for civil rights as Mississippi, and less likely to change. The stale had the largest share of black people and the fewest black voters. Its racial history had been written by the James K. Vardamans, Theodore Bilbos, and John Rankins, now replaced by the likes of Sen. "Big Jim" Eastland and Gov. Ross Barnett. It was the home of the Citizens Councils and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Parchman Prison, and the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The killers of Emmet Till, Medgar Evers, Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Vernon Dahmer, and others less known to history, still walked free. Bill Minor, who told what went on in Mississippi for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, called himself "a war correspondent behind the lines."

In a 1961 letter from the jail in Magnolia, Miss., where a group of young civil rights activists were imprisoned for "disturbing the peace," famed New York urban planner Robert Moses wrote that they were "a tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone that the builder rejected." Their "Mississippi Freedom Summer" in 1964, with students working with the local people, focused a national attention that helped passage of the new civil rights law. With their registration soaring to 70% of the eligible, black voters became a political factor.

In 1989, newsman Minor and a younger reporter, Jerry Mitchell, and two ex-FBI men watched the motion picture "Mississippi Burning," the Hollywood version of the 1960s and how the FBI solved the Neshoba County murders. The title had come from the FBI case-file's "MIBURN." Activists have criticized it as an FBI "buddy film," which showed black people only as passive sufferers, but it fascinated Mitchell and launched him on a career as Mississippi journalism's investigative historian of the 1960s.

The dramatized images of the Klan violence gripped him. "I am a Southerner and I knew zero about the civil rights movement back then.... I just didn't notice the things happening around me," he later commented.

In the 1960s, the Hederman family-owned Jackson Clarion-Ledger censored the news and acted as a cheerleader for white supremacy. The Columbia Journalism Review concluded that the Clarion-Ledger and its sister Jackson Daily News were "possibly the worst metropolitan newspapers in the United States." Now, a new Hederman family generation has turned around the Clarion-Ledger, which has become part of a national newspaper chain, while Mitchell came on board in 1986 as a court reporter.

As his friend Minor described it, Mitchell "peeled back years of neglect of the civil rights murders. He uncovered forgotten testimony, misplaced key pieces of evidence, unknown witnesses, and lost transcripts from failed attempts decades earlier to convict major suspects in the murders." Mitchell explains, "You never know. There might be a witness who would come forward and tell what they saw."

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He found material from the secret files of the Sovereignty Commission, which mistakenly had been placed in open court records. An unidentified friend brought him more files showing that the Commission had spied on the civil rights workers killed by the Klan in Neshoba County and had assisted Byron de la Beckwith's defense in his trial for murdering Evers, the state's NAACP leader. Mitchell obtained a copy of a sealed State Archives interview of Sam Bowers, the White Knights leader who had ordered the killing of the Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, and Dahmer. His stories began filling the front...