Writers; 108; Civil Rights Investigative Reporters

Be a citizen, be a citizen... I don't have to say accused assassin any more, I can say convicted assassin, who laughed and said he's dead, isn't he? That's one nigger that's not going to come back, but what he failed to realize that Medgar was still alive, in spirit, and through each and every one of us who wanted to see justice done, writers is made possible in part by a grant from the William Battle and

Sarah Mel Repture Crooks Foundation. Hello I'm Gene Edwards, welcome to Writers, almost two generations ago in Jackson, Mississippi, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated. His killer was brought to trial, but twice jury's couldn't reach a verdict, and so the killer went free. A Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed, four little girls died, their killers were free for 38 years. And in Freedom Summer in Philadelphia, Mississippi, three civil rights workers went missing. Their bodies were found six weeks later, buried in an earthen dam, and again, the mastermind

went free. Carl Fleming learned about racism as a cub reporter in the 50s in small town, North Carolina. By the early 60s he was based in Atlanta, he was Newsweek's chief civil rights correspondent, he was on the scene of every hot spot in the South. Diane McBorder brings a different perspective, a Birmingham native, she was the same age as those little girls who were killed when the church was bombed. She investigated her book, Want a Pulitzer Prize, and Jerry Mitchell. His interest in civil rights came much later, probably 25 years after some of those crimes, but his investigative reporting in Jackson's Clary and Ledger has been instrumental in reopening many of the cases and obtaining convictions. Our program is about the truth, about those investigative reporters who had the courage to look for the truth. And to ask, as did the prosecutor Bobby DeLotter, is it ever too late to do the right thing? I am glad to have you all here, welcome to this table.

It seems to me that you are a very unlikely group to have grown up to do the things that you have done. Does that make sense to you? The guy from Texark, Texas, rose up to be an investigative reporter that was not your life's ambition when you started out. Girl from the country club in Birmingham, you didn't intend to spend 20 years of your life writing this book, didn't you? I didn't. And you and an orphanage to grow up to? How was it supposed to be plowing or doing something illegal? Which you probably also did. Well of course. I'm interested in how it came to be. How did you come from that orphanage to become one of the great, heart-nosed reporters of our time? Who might have disagreed with such an honestly intelligent person? You were there in the middle of all of it. I, this orphanage was a very tough place, all white of course, a lot of bullying. And I was a victim of a lot of that bullying.

So right away I developed a very keen sense of hatred of bully and hatred of the misuse of power so that when I came out of there as a young man and eventually got a job on a small town newspaper in eastern North Carolina, saw racism for the first time. I found it abhorrent because I immediately identified with the underdogs. And so my heart was with the black people right from the get-go. And it was just a sense, also in this orphanage, among the other things I learned was a sense of fair play. And it just wasn't fair. And I had a sense of morality also coming out of this place. So on all the levels that I knew about, I found the racism just intolerable. Did you sense the racism there in Birmingham when you were growing up? You remember that country club up there and not-

Well, I had this kind of dual vision of the whole scene because my father came from this very respected family, but he was very down really mobile and he in some ways acted sort of like a, quote, redneck. And so he used the inward which polite kids were not allowed to use. And so I saw his, his bigotry was an embarrassment, more of an embarrassment- social embarrassment to me before it was a moral embarrassment. And then I also wanted to understand, you know, I grew up, we grew up thinking that the chart bombing which killed these four girls who were close to my age at the time had been done by people who weren't really from Birmingham or they were just a bunch of red necks. And I always wondered how they could have gotten away with it for so long if that was the case. Texas and you ended up in Jackson, Mississippi. Was this your first reporting job? No, no, no.

I interned at my hometown paper in Texas, Canada, worked in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the paper there for about three years and also the Arkansas Democrat. But the idea of doing an investigative reporting job never occurred to you. Well first I wanted to be a lawyer when I was a kid. And then when I got older, I kind of rejected that idea. I wanted to be a writer, I like the idea of writing and particularly writing satire. I don't know, I was always drawn to writing satire and that kind of stuff. And then I found I didn't pay anything. But so journalism appealed me because this is a way to get paid to write, you know. And I was drawn very early to investigative reporting, so I did a lot of investigative reporting in Hot Springs before I came to Jackson. Is that story true that you were watching Mississippi burning with Bill Mayer? I was watching it, screening of the suppressed screening of Mississippi burning and I say this and it makes me sound so stupid, but I guess it's okay. It was almost as if the civil rights movement took place on another planet or some alternate

universe. I mean that was how much effect it had. I was fairly young at the time. I was like five years old when the civil rights workers were killed. So this was all eye opening to me. I was like, that's really happened, I can't believe this happened, you know. And not that I didn't know that those kinds of things took place and that these events took place, but I didn't really, it didn't really sink it in my soul, so to speak. And that was the beginning of my education, all about the civil rights movement. I was just horrified that these guys had gotten away from other people. I knew all three of the gentlemen that were killed. The victims were Mickey Schorner and Ru Goodman and James Cheney. All freedom's summer volunteers. Cheney's the one who asked Roscoe Jones to become the fourth civil rights worker to go to Philadelphia with them on that fateful Sunday. He did not want to go by himself with Mickey and Andy. He did not want to be in the car with him because he had been forewarned before that if he would call back up here again, that's some things might happen to him. And he was really afraid.

And I told him at that time, I told him, okay, I'll go, tell Mickey, I'll go. And he was also scheduled to speak at a Sunday school class. Mickey said, no, Roscoe, we can't go. We need you at the church because we need the youth. So that's why I didn't go. I was afraid that particular night because I went home and I told my grandmother that I found out that Mickey then was missing and I told her, it's a mom to do it, they did it. Schorner, Goodman and Cheney went missing on June the 21st of 1964. The three had been driving on a rural Nishoba County Road headed to a church to investigate a fire. Their bodies were found 44 days later, buried in an earthen dam. They'd been beaten and shot. It took three years for 19 conspirators to come to trial, seven were found guilty of violating the civil rights of Goodman Schorner and Cheney and sentenced to three to ten years. Nine others were acquitted. And the jury couldn't reach a verdict on the remaining three, including a gray killer. One of the jurors said he couldn't vote to convict a preacher and Killin was a Baptist

minister. Killin was tried a second time in 2005 and 41 years to the day after the murders, he was found guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to three consecutive 20 year turnouts. Mr. Killin, you're submitted to the cast of the sheriff of the Shoba County. I think that the most significant part about the case is that for once and for all people who want to know, people who want to know can't actually find out some facts. I think we are on our way to resolving some important issues, but it's a little deeper than just Mr. Killin himself. Mr. Killin was a foot soldier, that was an honor for him. The sovereign commission is something I think we need to look at a little bit more. Government officials, people who was appointed, we never look at that. We don't realize that the sovereign commission is fired upon the civil rights movement.

How did you learn about the sovereign commission and where did you find that file? I guess it was, I first found out about it in February of 1989. Another reporter told me, there are the sovereign commission files that are supposedly accidentally filed in the open file, which there was a lawsuit trying to open up the records of the sovereign commission, the state segregation spy agency. So there was a long, long, long battle that the suit was filed away back in 1977 to try to open them up. So sure enough, I went over and there was like a report, the sovereign commission report that accidentally was sealed one, it accidentally got filed in the open file. So it showed that this person working for the sovereign commission infiltrated the co-follow office, which was basically the umbrella organization for all the civil rights organizations in 64, in Jackson, infiltrated that and basically stole documents and photographs of incoming

freedom summer volunteers and of course gave those to the commission and then returned all that to the files. So that was kind of my first glimpse of the sovereign commission stuff, I was kind of like, wow, you know, that's pretty wild stuff. So then of course my next question was, what else did they do? So I began to kind of develop sources that first began to tell me what was in the files and eventually started actually leaking me to actual documents. Talk to me about sources, you talked about your source that turned you on to those files. How do you develop, how do you find sources? How do you develop those sources? Who talks to you about where the bodies were buried or who turned over the information about who actually buried the bodies? How do you develop those sources? I think you first have to develop trust. And how can you do that if you're a white reporter from the outside?

Well I think in all our cases we were souther, so we had that going for us and certainly at that time with my crew cut hair cut and a deep southern grove and drank a lot of jack nails and smoked a lot of cigars and I could talk that trash, talk to the best of them. I was one of these people. Those were my people. I grew up just as poor as anybody. I mean I came right out of red neck roots and so I was one of them and so I think people in my case, in probably all our cases, they recognized kindred spirits but then I think you have to develop a relationship where people trust you even if they don't, if they know in advance they're not necessarily going to approve of what you do. They at least know that you will be fair. You were there. I was there.

My friend Claude Sitten in the New York Times and I was the first reporter to arrive. In fact we had been up to Oxford, Ohio, the previous week where all these kids were out there training to come down for what was referred to as Mississippi Freedom Summer. And they drove down as you know in that station wagon and had a system set up that they were supposed to call in and they didn't call in and we were immediately notified and we got in a car and drove straight to Philadelphia. Tell me what happened when you walked into the sheriff's office. Well the guilt was written all over them, Sheriff Price particularly standing there with that damp face and that furtive look and rainy there with the plug of chewing tobacco in his jaw. They wouldn't look at us and even no matter how they looked we knew the kids were dead and we knew it all probably based on our experiences in the Civil Rights Movement that that the sheriff and his deputy were involved.

And we the second time we went back next morning when we came out into the lobby we were confronted by this white mob who the leader of which confronted us in a very angry way and began to tirade at us. If it weren't for you, Dan, you loving, nigger loving, communist reporters coming down here staring up all this trouble, we wouldn't be having any problems and we were getting along just fine and you guys come down here with these agitators blah, blah, blah. At the end of which he said, and if you don't get out of town, you're going to be killed. And Claude had a, the managing editor of the New York Times was a guy named Turner-Catledge and he had a relative there who ran a hardware store. So we went over to this hardware store and Claude said to this guy, on Claude sitting in the New York Times is Mr. Fleming with Newsweek. And Turner said if we ever got down here and got into trouble, we might come to see you.

And we're just reporters down here trying to do our jobs. These three kids are missing and this crowd has said they're going to kill us if we don't get out of town. This guy is looking on quite coldly and when he finished he said, well, Mr. Sidden, if you guys were down in the street and these guys were kicking the crap out of, he said, I wouldn't participate in that. He said, on the other hand, I wouldn't lift one damn finger to help you guys. It weren't for you, you love it, nigger love it, you guys coming down here. Stir enough all this trouble. My guy says you better get the hell out of this town like these guys said, are you going to get killed? So we walked out on the street and I said, Claude, it's a good thing you've got some influence in this town or we'd be in big trouble here. That's the first time you went to Philadelphia, you, man? I was there covering the Mississippi burning story. So Philadelphia was, it was odd in my experience because generally, especially Yankee reporters will come south and they'll be shocked at how nice everything is because they're expecting

to see all this dry, being acted out in the streets and usually everything is just so nice and the tea is so sweet and everybody's so helpful, you know. And I found that Philadelphia was different from any town that had ever been in Mississippi, the hospital. No, the suspicion of hostility, and I had come down a week before the pack of reporters came because I knew that that was going to be my only shot at getting the story. And I also found out these long lost relatives because I also knew that nobody would talk to me. And as I had that kind of family connection, so I did that and it was still, it was still really rough. I felt really just scared while I was here, and didn't even, didn't stay in town after the first night. I think any place one went as a white reporter through the south in that days was dangerous and we all knew that and took measures to protect ourselves.

I agree with Diane that Philadelphia had a sinister quality about it, unlike any place I'd ever been in the south before. It was just something a menacing, air prevalent there, sinister, a kind of fear I had not felt any place. I don't sense that. You just never knew that somebody was going to come and just drag you out in the middle of the night and you would never be heard from again. You don't sense that in hell. No, no. I don't know at all. I mean, I think the way I kind of envisioned Philadelphia historically is it was always off the beaten path, you know. And so like a lot of rural places, it didn't have a lot of outside influences. And so I think, but I think Philadelphia has changed since then. I think we're very much rebellion against outsiders. I still think there's some remnants of that within the community, but haven't said that. I think the communities come a tremendous, long way since then, I mean, as evidenced

by the verdict. And I think in a way that Philadelphia may have been dealing with this more than, say, Birmingham has because you couldn't help but know the people involved because it was so small. So you couldn't really say, well, those were just rednecks that got out of hand the way people in Birmingham would do. It does seem to be perhaps more genuine, personal cell searching there than I say among the average citizen in Birmingham. I heard a loud noise, it sound like the whole building shook. And I remember something hit me in the head and I remember hearing children scream and I just remember it getting black. And I just remember just running. I called out at it when the bomb went off because I was blind and both at. And I called about 3-10, but when I called out of here, I didn't get an answer from it. We start uncovering the breed and looking for bodies, like I said, you know, and anybody

who started saying, you know, I found one body over here and somebody else said, well, I not going to go over here and someone said, I'm not the body over here with no head on it. But at the time, I didn't know that was my sister. At the time, I viewed her body. I couldn't tell by her face whether or not it was her. And the only way that I could tell was by the shoes she had on. And that's when I learned the adi and my friend Cynthia and Denise and Carol were killed. The four victims were Cynthia Wesley, Carol Robertson, and Adi May Collins, all 14, and Denise McNair, who was 11. More than 20 others were injured in the bombing of Birmingham's largest black church. In spite of international outrage, it was nearly 14 years before state authorities charged

a clan leader, Robert Shambles, with murder, he was convicted and died in prison. In 2001, 38 years after the bombing, Thomas Blanton, Jr. was convicted of murder and given a life sentence. And the next year, Bobby Frank Cherry was also found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Over the years, been very painful, but I see it in a different view now since there's a closure to what has happened. I'm able to talk about it much better than in the past. And there's some drastic change that happened or something. It's going to always be some pressure there. It took almost four decades before these men were brought to justice. People said justice tonight is not justice delayed, but those babies, they didn't live their lives.

These men lived their lives to the fullest. And where was the justice system for the girls? The justice system failed them early. The justice was finally done, but they are old men. They live all of their lives, and I'm angry for that. But the thing, the common complaint that we hear all the time, that we hear all the time is, why are you messing around in these things? Oh, yeah. Why do we have to believe? It's always, why open old wounds and I always go, where are your scars? How do you have the authority to say, let's don't open any wounds because you have not really suffered any of the injury. Let the people who suffered the injury decide whether we should open it up or not. Did you have that sense in Birmingham that people didn't want you to do that story? Oh, yeah.

Birmingham is, yeah, but I think once it actually came out, once the book came out, there was a certain amount of relief that it's, oh, so we can finally see how it all worked. I think with my generation, because we grew up under segregation, so we experienced it, so we knew what it was like, but we weren't responsible for it. There was a certain willingness to accept that this was how it happened. I would say that it was an older generation who said, well, I lived through it, and I never saw any of that going on. They thought just because they weren't experiencing, just because they weren't doing bodily damage to African-Americans, then segregation was okay. You know? Did your sources in Birmingham, how did you develop your sources? And did they think you were fair when the book finally came out? Well, a lot of people I found didn't really think they had done anything wrong. And so they weren't afraid of, they didn't, they weren't ashamed to talk to me. Well, Diane has put her finger on something I think is key to this story.

Yeah. And that is that Jerry knows that if you're doing investigative reporting, you didn't need to have developed sources, but in this case, all these guys thought they were doing the right thing and let it not be forgotten that it's the reverend killing. And that these people, many of them, absolutely thought they were doing God's work. And Bobby Cherry was the same. Absolutely. Absolutely. Did you have a, tell me about your got you a moment with Mr. Cherry. Which Cherry? Well, you know of that, well, I went to, you know, he, he, his wife had emailed me and buying me down to come talk to him and, and this is impressive. Email to him. I love that. That's great. That's a horrible thought. Church of Armor is on email. Exactly. Exactly. So, so I'm like, and she was insisting he was innocent and I should come talk to him. I'm like, sure. And so he lived in Texas, so drove down to Texas and took him as wife out for barbecue because, well, I guess that's what you take Klansman out for him, not really sure.

But so we talked for about five or six hours and, and he said, well, I didn't have anything to do with that church bombing. I left that sign shop and the sign shops literally like two and a half blocks from where the church blew up. I left that sign shop at a quarter to ten because I had to get home and watch wrestling. And even pulled out a sworn affidavit from this woman. Yes, I remember that night. Well, we're all sitting around watching wrestling. So I got back to the newspaper and talked to our librarian, Susan, and she said, you know, just check with the Birmingham news and, you know, in terms of what the TV schedules were, what was it? It was on TV that night. And the next morning I had an electronic message from Susan, all in capital letters. There was wrestling. In fact, I had wrestling on for years. I had no one ever put that together before. Well, this was kind of a, this, it was a concocted alibis. And the alibis were evolving over the years.

Right. So, you can talk to this in 80 when the FBI decided to reinvest to gate the case. He didn't concoct this alibi in 63, he concocted it in 80, apparently. Well, he had an alibi quote unquote back in 63, but it kind of got better, you know what I mean? He kind of, all immorally. He kind of, all that's not to forget that nobody wanted to investigate this stuff. Most of these cops who in league with these clansmen, and I don't know, I've several places in the South, I actually heard FBI agents go up to the local sheriff and apologize for being there. I'm sorry to be here, Bobby Kennedy sent me down here. Well, I think the church bombing case, the FBI did investigate it pretty thoroughly, but they were, they had a little problem with their own informant inside the clan. And they were, I think they were a little bit nervous that he was involved, so that, you know, I think if that investigation was, had been corrupted in any way, it was because of that.

At 16th Street, church itself, the congregation really never spoke of the bombing afterwards. So there's the sense of internalizing some shame that should have been absorbed by the perpetrators in the city that had fallen to the victims and I, it just, again, I felt so angry feeling how the city had not kind of owned up to its role in this and had not really done something affirmative for the victims, the victims' families. And I still feel that the city is, you know, there's a big campaign now to restore the church, but I think that there ought to be some kind of more, perhaps, a living monument or foundation or something. The statues in the park just don't know. I don't think so, because it was a long process that produced this quadruple murder and it was, there was a lot of, you know, the prominent citizens were implicated in this, the arch

perpetrator of that church bombing, Robert Chandler's had been protected by City Hall for years. At the time that it happened, he wasn't, but they said in motion this chain of events. They're always sociopathic people at the bottom of the spectrum who will do terrible things. The clan guys who did these murders, for example, and the clan guys who did the bombings and stuff that we wrote about all over the South, horrible things done to black people. I used to literally go back to my motel room and then throw up, I was just so ashamed. But there are always people at the bottom who will do terrible things, but they don't do them without the licensing, the approval and the cheering of the people at the top. And that happened not only in Mississippi, but all over the South, the Citizens Council, the business leaders, the religious leaders.

And the media were all complicit in licensing these people to do these things. And they would not have happened without that. But I think there has been, as Diane points out, a kind of expiation, and I think the civil rights act were passed and the voting rights act were passed in 65 and 66. Most of the South breathed a big sigh of relief. It kind of let them off the hook because most southerners are decent people. Do you all believe, though, that if it hadn't been for those four little girls in Birmingham and if it hadn't been for those three civil rights workers in in Philadelphia and if it hadn't been for a mega-ever's, that they'll may never have passed? No question about it. And it gives up power willingly, that I know of in history, and those events forced, first of all, they forced the media to pay attention because as Jerry knows from the media, Diane too, most of the media reluctantly came to the civil rights movement. And they didn't come until their hands were forced, King's marches in Birmingham, the

church bombing. And the fact is, one of the coal facts about the Philadelphia thing is it had two of those kids not been from the north and not been Jewish. There were not been nearly as much media attention because black people were being killed and thrown into the rivers all the time down here, and nobody paid much attention. Also, Kennedy's civil rights bill was in trouble. I mean, he introduced it right after the Birmingham demonstrations, the Firehouse and Police Dog demonstrations in 63, and it was kind of in trouble throughout the summer at Ross Barnett and George Wallace had gone up to testify against it in the summer calling it the civil wrongs bill. And probably, if it hadn't been for the Church of Birmingham and Kennedy's assassination, it would have made out of past, and Johnson was able to ram it through. I was going to say, during the Second Church Bombing trial in Birmingham, which was in 2002, I got a little bit misty there just to see, because it was kind of tamped down compared

to the first one. Then you find out that it was just a lot more matter of fact, and in the first trial, they had been kind of selling it a little, the prosecution had to sell at the case, and it was pulling the emotional strings and everything. And this time it was just very matter of fact, and September 11 had occurred in the meantime, and I really thought it had something to do with that, because it was like the sense of our society as just taking care of business, this is what we do. We don't have to make you feel really terrible about these girls, which is in the first case, there was a lot of sort of emotional stuff about that, and it was so moving to me to think that we're just getting it done, just do the hard work, get it done. I had that sense during the killing trial. That's pretty much less emotional than everyone expected it to be.

It was, it was, and it's kind of, I think a matter of style, depending on where the prosecutor is in the case, I know that Bobby the Lawyers' closing was certainly very emotional, but I think that they definitely, the way they approached that, was as a straight-up murder case, and not as a quote-unquote civil rights case. In fact, kind of interestingly, they purposely did not refer to Meg Rivers as a civil rights leader during the entire trial. They referred to him by what he did. He tried to register people to vote, edited it out, out of fear, and understandably so, this was the first one of these series of trials, of course, backstreet done something I'll buy on the floor, but at least since 89, and so there was a fear that if we use that word that people may think this is ferocon or something, you know, and they conjure up modern images of who Meg Rivers might have been like. Metgar and I were both born, reared in the state of Mississippi, and we knew that anyone

who would, who would dare challenge the system is putting his life on the line, and he was so dedicated to accomplishing certain things, until you could move him from it. You just could die, two or three days, perhaps before he was killed. And I was sitting on the sofa and he had stretched out and he had his head on my lap, and both of us without any warning began to share tears, because at that point we knew each other so well we communicated without talking, and he said, you know what's coming, and I said, I guess I do. It came in the early morning hours of June the 12th, 1963, Byron Delebeck with Leyen Wade in the bushes across the street, and shot Medgar Evers in the back as he returned

home late from working. In 1964, Beckwith was tried twice, both times in front of all white juries, both times the jury's deadlocked. Twenty-five years later, the case was retried. Beckwith was given a life sentence for the murder of Medgar Evers, he died in prison. All I want to do is say, yeah, Medgar, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I truly felt that all of the negative feelings that I had had over the years just escaped at that one moment when I heard the word guilty, I would like to think that people would see this as progress for this state of cleansing the records that have just haunted us as a state to say that we are on our way, that the state that Medgar envisioned, the

nation that Medgar envisioned, it's on its way. And you think about the dramatic changes that have taken place in a very short span of history, we're talking 40 years, which is a blip in history, in the unbelievable changes that have taken place in this state as a result of what happened in the 60s, it's an entire different world. The main one being, black people do not have to walk around in fear anymore, and you say that to young people, they don't quite get it, but it's true that most black people walked around all the time with an underlying sense of fear, but if I do say the wrong thing, I could be out of here. Eger A. Kiles conviction the other day was the eighth conviction in the city since 1994. That's really amazing.

And you've been involved in all eight of them? It's just been amazing, that was the 22nd conviction nationally that's been since 1994. So it's been really amazing, it's really been kind of a social phenomenon that really started here in Mississippi with the average case. So when Bobby DeLotter gave that closing argument at the Beckwith trial in ASC, is it ever too late to do the right thing, that's spread absolutely across. It became kind of the model case gene, and many others appointed that case and say, well, this is kind of where we took our cue from, and people began people all over thinking about, what about this case? Early Evers, you know, the way she described it one time in the media was it is an old one, but it's an old one that's infected. And so what you have to do is go in and clean out that one in order for it to finally heal. And so that's my sense of what's taking place here in Mississippi. How do you gain the trust of someone like Murley Evers? Well, I think that it develops over time, I think that, you know, it doesn't, it's

not an overnight thing. I think that you start and you begin to talk with someone, and as you talk them over time, it begins to develop. You know, you become closer and closer in the sense of being able to trust one another in those kinds of things. Do you remember when she called you and said that finally that she had found the documents through the transcripts? Oh, the transcripts? When did you remember when you finally gained her trust? It was very interesting. We had not had that many conversations, I remember, I'd referred to her as Mrs. Evers, and at some point she goes, call me Murley. So that was fairly early on, it was not that long into the relationship that she insisted that I'd call her by her first name. And which to me was significant in the sense of when she testified in the trial against Beckwith, of course they wouldn't refer to her as Mrs. Evers, you know, and those

cursy titles were, of course, for those who were African-Americans, was, you know, they would refer to them by their first names, it was kind of a derisive thing. So for me, for her to say that to me, I thought it was pretty significant because I understood the history of that. But how do you go about convincing the newspaper like the Clarion Ledger, that it's important to invest, they've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in your work over the years. And there was no promise of reward from the beginning, convincing to do it. All right. One day at a time. And by the way, this was the same Clarion Ledger that never would have printed your stories. How you getting it? Well, as the opposite. I mean, they were part of the problem. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You know, they were getting sovereignty commission reports directly and printing a lot of that stuff.

The commission files of the ones that showed that the commission had secretly assisted Beckwith's defense. I redeemed Beckwith's defense, who has tried for killing Omega Revers. So Bob Woodward said one time that great stories are done at Defiance of Management. And I think that there's a certain truth to that because what it means is, at least I view it from a reporter perspective, which is you have to be willing to push the envelope. I mean, it's your job as a reporter to go out there and expose the truth. And you can't let anything get in the way of that. And so when you sat down for the first time to talk to Byron DeLay, Beckwith is up there in on the mountaintop in Tennessee, I mean, he welcomed you. Oh, absolutely. Welcome me like a long lost cousin. I mean, I had to, I think you have to understand in order to talk with Beckwith at that point, there was kind of a whole long litany of questions that you had to answer correctly before you got in.

You had to be wide, of course. You had to be a son or you want to know where I went to church, where I lived. Where I grew up, you know, all these questions. Of course, with my white conservative Christian upbringing, I thought, I'm going to pass flying colors, you know. And so I just happy to answer you. And so he welcomed me in and we talked for about five or six hours. But absolutely the most racist person I ever sat down with, but he was happy to do it because what you find with these old clansmen killing and others is they're anxious to tell their story. I mean, it's just the most amazing thing. You would think, well, you know, these guys are idiots. What are they talking for? But that's not the way they see it. They see it. Well, I just want to tell my story. I don't know about YouTube, but to me, it's amazing that you were there for all those, you were there the night of the riots. You were in Jackson, the day that Medgar Evers was assassinated, you were there. One of the, there are two white heroes in my book, and they're both Republican.

Because you know, we always get accused of being members of the liberal media. And one was John Doerr, who was a lawyer with the Justice Department, and the day of the funeral for Evers, there was the memorial march downtown, and King and all the other big civil rights leaders, they marched down to a certain point, and cops had stopped him before they went on to a Capitol Avenue, and he kind of broke up, and then a sort of a John Doerr and I were having lunch at a small place, and we heard this uproar, and we got up and went down, and there were a bunch of black kids, young people, were throwing rocks at these Mississippi cops, and it was this intense confrontation, I mean, the area was just electric. And John Doerr walked out between these two forces, white shirt, held up his hands, and said, I'm John Doerr from the United States Department of Justice, and you know, if you

know anything about me, you know who I am and what I've done, but this is not the way. If you don't stop, they're going to be some grieving mothers tonight, so it was an unbelievable kind of Gary Cooper moment, and I'm standing there taking notes, and I went back and looked at my notes in my notebook, they were about that high. These are Gary Mitchell's reporting tips, I like that. That's good, I better take notes. And what I mean by that is, you may have a variety of sources, you may have people that you think are just absolutely nuts, but sometimes those people can be valuable, they may have documents, you know, they have access to or have in their position, that's how it works. We do have to be willing to appeal the emergency response in order to get people to cooperate

with you, too. I mean, you know, some people you feel almost like you maybe need a bath afterwards, but your role as a journalist is really to take in the material, you're not sitting there kind of prejudging it, so to speak, you're just kind of trying to gather the material. Be willing to harass. Not necessarily in a mic wallet, right? And I mean polite harassment by that, the example I give for that is I would hit you to get a quote from this lawyer one time, and so I just, I kept calling, I just called like every hour, you know, because I had to get this quote from this guy, and finally, the secretary really became my ally, you know, by that afternoon, I was totally nice, I was totally cordial, by the afternoon, the secretary is like, what, he hasn't called you, let me get him on the phone right now. And that's what you want as a reporter. The final tip. Be willing to dial the wrong number, and it happened to you, it's true.

I was, Beckwith had two Greenwood cops give him an alibi, basically, said he was in Greenwood that night, which of course they were lying, but nonetheless they did. And so I talked to the one guy, but he did, I didn't know where the other guy was. He said, very unusual last name, was Cresswell with 1S. And so I had a Greenwood phone book, and I looked it up, and they're all like four or five Cresswells, and I'm thinking to myself, they've got to be related, right? So I put on my, my best Southern accent, I could possibly put on purposely dialed the wrong number, and went, it, it's Hollis there, and go, oh no, you want my cousin, he lives over in Maven. Let me give you his number. So it's, it works. And I don't know, maybe I don't know if it works outside the South or not, but it certainly works in the South.

I want to, I want to give you all the moment to ask each other a question. I mean, this is a rare opportunity, and I know that there are some, some unanswered questions that each one of you have, who would like, would you like to begin? What if you always wanted to ask him? Well, just, you, you talked a little bit about, about Philadelphia, I mean, tell, tell a little bit more about kind of that sequence of events with, in terms of finding the station wagon and that whole sequence of events of the early days of the investigation and search for the bodies, and then going in those swamps and all that. The first thing that the cops told us was, and then, which was repeated by the governor a couple of days later, was that this was all part of a communist plot. Our kids were probably hanging out. They were already in Cuba by this time, and then, of course, the car was discovered and making it quite evident they were not in Cuba, they were dead someplace, and that

was the first big tale tale thing. And then, of course, for me personally, it was the fact that it was not safe to be in Philadelphia. And after this confrontation that I described, this mob, and going over to the hardware store, we went back to our rooms, and I looked out the window, and it was a car park there. All four doors open, there were four guys sitting in it, and there were two shotguns visible, and they were passing around a jar of moonshine whiskey, and I went out to check them out, and they invited me to have a drink with them, and I did, you know, almost gagged on that stuff. But, you know, I tried to explain, you know, that we were just southern boys down there doing a job, and one of them said, well, you know, maybe like to take a ride around the country, but that's one of the farms around here, which turned out to be later, of course, not a thing we would want to do, because the fact that the bodies were buried in this farm

dam, but I went back in and said to Clawed, sitting, we better get out of here now, and we got in our car and drove to Meridian when these guys pursued us to the county, the county line. But we didn't spend any more nights in that town until the visor, yeah, and then the big national media came, and then everybody came. Now, Carl, I wondered, you know, was there a consciousness among reporters then about, because you know, when you get caught up in the war stories, there seems to be this kind of acceptance of the status quo, you know, that this is the way it was, and did the reporters ever step back and say, wait a minute, this is the United States of America, how could this be going on? Did y'all have discussions like that? Well, certainly, my friend Clawed, sitting and I did, he came from a very poor family, Southern grew up in Georgia, came out of Methodist family, just like I did, and certainly

there was a sense that this is not right. People have asked me, well, weren't you afraid all the time, and I often say that people I was so angry, and so ashamed, I mean ashamed, I was one of these, these were my people doing this stuff, so it was a sense of shame at the inhumanity, and I was appalled, it's a shock. How could you be an objective reporter and be angry? It's easy, and on this particular story, even if you wanted to, you didn't have to slant anything, you just had to print what they said and lay out in a very calm way, what had happened. It was no need to try to slant it, just the most casual look at the facts, it was horrifying, so it was easy, and plus I've been taught, as I guess, and no everybody as reporters had, no matter what your personal feelings, you need to be objective, and you take a pride

in that, that no matter how bad it looks, you can give the person a fair shake, you can treat them fairly, and that way you get to go home feeling okay about yourself at night, you feel clean inside, and I think that's very important, that you feel clean inside, you feel like you've done an honest job. Because what does objective mean, because you know one person, this is objective to another person, it's not objective, I think some better words are like what Carl's mentioned fair, even handed, words you're not misrepresenting what someone says or anything like that, you're representing their point of view, no matter it may be totally reputnant to you, but you're representing their point of view, what they have to say, I know I did that with Beckwith, I would call them on story and say okay, I'm doing this story, what is it you know, you want to say about this, and of course you might give me some terribly racist quote, but that was, but he did, exactly. And I leave the reporter with the last question, what's your question?

My question to both of you is, are you happy and content with the reporting lives that you've led? I mean, if you ever had any, maybe I should have been a lawyer, or maybe I should have been a rich person, I am so happy with this profession, I think it's so amazing to be able to ask anybody anything you want, just because of your badge, you know. And to me to work about, to write a book about the segregated style, and you know, a lot of it was about white people, but a lot of it was about the Civil Rights Movement. And for me to be able to talk to African Americans about race was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had. And I don't know whether that would have been possible if I hadn't been a journalist,

because that whole dialogue on race problem here, you know, has never, it's hard, it's hard then. It doesn't happen for everyone. No, and it so much opens up. And I had a, I remember a number of African Americans came into me after the book came out and said, how did you know so much about us? And I would say, like, what? And I would say, well, like the language and stuff, and sometimes they would give me an example like high yell or something, and I'd say, everybody knows that. But, and I thought, because you told me, or I listened, or I observed, and it was just great. I thought, God, this is the best job in the world. Is it? I do. I think it's, I tell people that I think I've got the best job in the world. I really do. It's the fact that, you know, the management has been so gracious to me and allow me to

kind of pursue these things over the years and to have that kind of freedom. You know, occasionally I've had people not from the surface of Mississippi, but from maybe other places as well, but they'll say, like, well, Jerry, you know, I'm surprised you haven't left and gone to work for, you know, some bigger paper somewhere, like, why would I want to? I mean, you know, I've got a great, great, great job. You know, if I were going to go work for, you know, some of the people like the New York Times or Washington Post, yeah, they'd let me write about Mississippi for a little bit, but not every day. Exactly. And always tell people the materials here. I mean, Mississippi is such a treasure for reporters, historians. I think it's just so rich, South in general, so rich material, such incredible history, such incredible modern-day stories, struggles every day, men and women, I'm continually inspired by, you know, talking to people about what they've gone through every day.

And so I can't imagine a better job. I kind of stumbled into it, but I can't imagine. And you end up shaping the national story in a way that you might not, if you wrote a bigger paper. And I think all reporters that I care about really don't care about the fame and money. In fact, I know most of the really good ones have a kind of a contempt for that. I know for me, I worked in the almost complete anonymity of Newsweek, didn't get into the bylines hardly ever, but what I wanted in God and you to have it in space is respect to my peers. We're a band of brothers and sisters who, who feel like we have been engaged in something that was almost a calling and a noble calling, and boy, do I feel blessed to have had the life I had just about the luckiest guy in the world. This has been very special. I want to thank you all.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Some of the roughs south is Carl Fleming's memoir. He began covering the civil rights movement in the fifties. Diane McWaters' first book was Carrey Me Home. She chronicles the civil rights era again in a dream of freedom, a book for teens and preteens. And Jerry Mitchell recently won the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism. He's writing a book about his experiences investigating civil rights murders. For more information about our authors or about any of the other authors previously featured on writers, including Yodora Welty, please visit our website at www.mpbonline.org. Lesson plans are also available. As he reported on the civil rights struggle, Carl Fleming says that he longed for Yodora Welty's humane voice. Here the acclaimed author reads about one of her African-American characters in her story, A Worn Path.

It was December, a bright, frozen day in the early morning. Bar out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag coming along the path through the pine woods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small, and she walked slowly in the dark pine shatters, moving a little from side to side in her steps with a balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum and a grand by the clock. Writers has been made possible in part by a grand from the William Battle and Sarah Mel Repshire Crooks Foundation. For a copy of this program, call 601-432-6294 or send a checker money order for 2495 to Mississippi Public Broadcasting, 3825 Ridgewood Road, Jackson, Mississippi, 39211. Please indicate the name and date of the program.