Clarion caller

Media | Jerry Mitchell's reporting has brought both justice and healing to a divided state. | Joe Maxwell

Jerry Mitchell sits at a back diner booth at Jackson, Mississippi's Mayflower Restaurant, where business deals are made at old Formica tables. One past exchange was pure evil. "You don't know how appropriate it is that we are sitting in this booth," says Mr. Mitchell, the 45-year-old's stubbly red-gray beard highlighting a grin. "This is the booth where [assassin] Byron De La Beckwith got the ticking time bomb that he took down to New Orleans in a failed plot to kill the head of the Anti-Defamation League."

Mr. Mitchell, a top investigative journalist, began writing articles in the late 1980s that helped convict Mr. Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of civil-rights leader Medgar Evers. As Mr. Beckwith left the Jackson, Miss., courtroom in 1994 to serve a life sentence, he derisively mumbled, "Jerry Mitchell." Rob Reiner's 1996 film about the Evers case, Ghosts of Mississippi, features a character based on Mr. Mitchell.