It is a modest, but elegant, old home in Philadelphia, Miss. The living room is filled with mementos and memories of years past. Not the least of those memories is one particular night in 1964. Turner Catledge, a native son who had become executive editor of The New YorkTimes, returned for a face-off with a number of long-time friends who believed the Times was being unfair to their hometown, including a story written by the reporter who years later would also become executive editor of the Times, Joe Lelyveld.
The conversation centered around the Times‘ coverage of the brutal slayings of three young civil rights workers — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — who were found in an earthen dam not too far from the downtown streets of Philadelphia.
Dick Molpus, the former Mississippi Secretary of State and unsuccessful candidate for governor, remembers it as if it were yesterday. This, after all, is the home he grew up in, and it was his father who had helped set up this meeting. Dick was 14 at the time.
“Mr. Catledge sat in that chair you are sitting in,” Molpus said as he turned to me. “My job was serving drinks.” Catledge, who started his career on the Philadelphia newspaper, listened to the complaints, but he didn’t back down, Molpus recalled.
But this recent journey through my home state with two journalist friends, Ben Eason and John Sugg of the Creative Loafing newspaper group, wasn’t about the past. It was to look ahead, but you can’t talk about the future in Mississippi without looking back.
As we sat in the Molpus home, Gov. Haley Barbour was signing freshly passed legislation that would name a portion of the highway leading into Philadelphia for Chaney and Goodman and Schwerner. And the bill also would designate that another stretch of road be named for Emmett Till, the 15-year-old African American from Chicago who was murdered in 1955 by a white mob. And the state’s newspapers were reporting on the upcoming trial of Edgar Ray Killen, the last person to be charged in the Philadelphia killings. (Since then, the 80-year-old Killen has been found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison.)
Several days later, the same legislature passed a bill making it OK to display the Ten Commandments and other religious symbols in public places.
But speaking of newspapers, some incredible changes have taken place. For years, there were a handful of courageous Mississippi journalists, champions for the voiceless, such as Hodding Carter Jr. in Greenville, Hazel Brannon Smith in Lexington, Ira B. Harkey Jr. in Pascagoula, J. Oliver Emmerich in McComb and P.D. East in Petal, who, to varying degrees, reported on and editorialized favorably about the civil rights movement as it grew in the state and across the South.
And then there were papers such as The Clarion-Ledger, the state’s largest, then owned by the Hederman family, and its sister paper, the Daily News, which were locked into the status quo, supporting the likes of Gov. Ross Barnett and his nasty resistance to civil rights and desegregation of schools and public places, and failing to look behind the white sheets of the Klan.
But today’s Clarion-Ledger, now owned by Gannett, isn’t the paper it was for most of the last century. It won the Pulitzer Gold Medal in 1983 for an excellent series on education in the state. And one of its veteran reporters, Jerry Mitchell, has made a huge difference with his dogged investigation of the sins of the past.
It was Mitchell’s stories that led to the reopening of the Philadelphia killings. It was Mitchell’s reporting that led to the reopening of the Medgar Evers murder case and to the eventual conviction of Byron de la Beckwith. And it was Mitchell’s reporting that helped lead to the guilty verdicts for two other Klansmen: one who ordered the firebombing that killed NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer Sr. in Hattiesburg in 1966 and another for the 1963 bombing of the Birmingham church that killed four little girls.
Standing at his desk in the modern newsroom, Mitchell, a slight man with a heavy Mississippi accent, told about the time he visited Beckwith to interview him and about how Beckwith bid him goodbye with what was obviously a threat if he didn’t write a good story about him.
“His wife made me a sandwich to take with me,” Mitchell said with a smile. “You know what I did with that sandwich.”
Many of Mitchell’s stories are the result of solid, old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism, chasing document after document in search of valuable information. He has examined and re-examined the once-secret files of the State Sovereignty Commission, which are said to contain about 87,000 names and the details of the Klan murders of the era.
Mitchell’s desk is piled high with books, attesting to his love for reading and for research. One of the books was written by his good friend Bill Minor, who has been covering Mississippi politics and civil rights battles since 1947 when he arrived as a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Minor, 83, writes a weekly column for the Clarion-Ledger and is still as fiery as ever in the face of some physical setbacks.
He has seen it all and covered it for more than a half century in Mississippi, from the Freedom Marchers to the White Citizens’ Council to the backrooms of the State Capitol.
“It was tough being a reporter here in the 1950s and 60s. If the segregationists could hem you in, they knew that getting stories out on civil rights people would be hard. There were walls separating us from information — official walls — and they were hard to break through,” Minor said as he sat in a rocking chair in his comfortable living room. “The Citizens Council claimed it was preventing the Klan from coming back. They did that by modernizing segregation, using economic boycotts, pressure on people to keep silent. They had 80,000 at one point. In 1964 and 65, we had 62 black churches burned. We had no idea how violent it would become.”
Minor was there when Gov. Ross Barnett stood in the door and turned James Meredith away at the University of Mississippi, after which, history reminds us, all hell broke loose.
“I remember Ole Miss was playing Kentucky,” Minor said. “The stadium was a sea of Confederate flags. The stands exploded when Barnett said ‘I love Mississippi. I love our customs.’ The thought hit me, ‘This is what Hitler would do.'”
Minor was there to cover the story when Mississippi finally legalized the sale of alcohol, even though it had been sold for years illegally in bars, especially on the Gulf Coast. And he was there to chronicle the legal introduction of gambling casinos.
“Mississippi is the buckle of the Bible belt,” he said. “So how did we get casinos? In 1991, a senator from Natchez had a bill that he thought would let riverboat casinos dock. These dumb ——– in the Senate passed it. They didn’t realize the bill had been fixed so that riverboats don’t have to budge. Now any county touching the Mississippi River or the Gulf can have a casino.”
It was time for Minor to keep a haircut appointment. But he left with a parting shot at the Klan, which one time broke the windows of a small weekly he was publishing in Jackson in an unsuccessful effort to intimidate him.
“Show you how dumb the Mississippi night riders are. Once they set up a burning cross that fell over and it set a building on fire.”
As the trip ended, I looked into the rearview mirror to when I was a youngster starting my daily newspaper career in the mid l950s. It was at a new paper in Jackson — the State Times — which didn’t survive. At that moment in history the state’s largest newspaper was a proud protector of the mean and ugly past and present. Now it has a terrific investigative reporter in Jerry Mitchell, who is opening the confessional for readers to hear of many of those sins of the past, and men are finally being punished for their crimes of hate.
And as the story continues to unfold, my prayer is that Mr. Carter and Ms. Smith and Mr. Emmerich and Mr. Harkey and Mr. East and Mr. Catledge and a few others who were among my journalistic heroes, will find even more peace in their resting place.
They left a legacy for all of us in journalism that stretches far beyond the borders of Mississippi; a legacy built on a foundation of courage and a love of their communities and a dedication to the essential values of our craft — a legacy truly worth embracing.
