![]() ![]() That question launched Mitchell into yearslong investigations of not only the so-called Mississippi Burning murders, but a slew of other cold cases from the civil rights era. “How,” he asked himself, “was that possible?” ![]() The killers “had shot to death these three young men,” Mitchell learned, “and the state of Mississippi had done nothing about it.” Mitchell, who grew up in Texas, didn’t know much about the murders, and, as the theater lights came on, found himself “wondering why my history teachers had failed to mention these events in class.” Then a retired FBI agent, seated beside him, alerted him to another failure: that no one had ever been prosecuted for the murders. Mitchell was in his third year as a low-level courtroom reporter, at Jackson, Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger, when he happened into a screening of the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, a fictionalized portrayal of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers. Less known, however, is one of the main reasons those killers faced justice at all: Jerry Mitchell. The reason for the decades-long lag is familiar to any observer of Southern history: The victims were black, the killers were white, and while the times may have been a-changin’, that change-in the deepest Deep South-came slowly. The killers, however, didn’t face justice until the 1990s and later. The murders occurred in the 1960s, the victims ranging from an eleven-year-old Alabama girl finishing her Sunday school lesson to Mississippi’s most valiant voting-rights activist. ![]()
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