The case against Byron de la Beckwith had been closed for decades when sources in Mississippi began leaking secret files to Jerry Mitchell.
The files from the state’s Sovereignty Commission showed that high-ranking members of the Mississippi government assisted Beckwith’s defense against charges that he assassinated NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in June 1963. And their strategy had worked, Mitchell said: The two previous murder trials against Beckwith, a former Ku Klux Klan member, ended in mistrials with all-white juries.
And then Mitchell, a journalist with the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, published a report about it on Oct. 1, 1989. Shortly after, prosecutors in Mississippi secured indictments against Beckwith using new evidence, and he was convicted in 1994. Beckwith later died in prison in 2001 at the age of 80.
“When the word ‘guilty’ rang out, you could hear these waves of joy as they cascaded down the hall,” said Mitchell, who spoke Wednesday to the Chattanooga Bar Association as part of its annual Law Day. “And I just felt chills because the impossible had suddenly become possible.”
Mitchell’s work, which has helped bring other prosecutions against former Klan members who previously escaped incarceration, was fitting for the bar association’s theme: “Free speech, free press, free society.” He has since started a new nonprofit, the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, and has a book coming out in 2020 about his pursuit of civil rights cold cases, “Race Against Time.”