Ralph McGill, legendary editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, would become known as “the conscience of the South” for his unflinching and dangerously (for him) unpopular editorial crusade against racial segregation. (Fans of our Looking Back feature have recently read that almost exactly 50 years ago McGill was repeatedly refused, on the most transparent of pretexts, access to public venues in Columbus, where the local League of Women Voters had invited him to speak.)
Now a new award named in his honor has been created, appropriately, at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, and presented, even more appropriately, on the basis of journalistic courage.
The inaugural recipient of the McGill Medal is Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., and his résumé is truly extraordinary.
Mitchell, 50, has spent most of the last 20 years researching records and documents, interviewing often reluctant and not infrequently hostile witnesses to history, and pursuing truth in civil rights-era crimes that lay dormant for decades. He has been repeatedly threatened with violence and death — even now, the FBI is investigating a recent series of threats against him — yet his dogged investigative reporting has brought to justice some of the worst race criminals of the latter half of the 20th century.
“Mitchell has done more than any journalist to open cold civil rights cases that beg for resolution, reconciliation, and justice,” said E. Culpepper Clark, dean of the Grady College.
A short checklist of cases and criminals brought to trial partly or wholly as a result of Jerry Mitchell’s reporting reads like a police blotter of the most infamous racial murders of the civil rights era. Byron de la Beckwith, murderer of Jackson NAACP leader Medgar Evers in 1963, was brought to trial, convicted and imprisoned largely on the basis of Mitchell’s work. So was Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, convicted for ordering the firebombing that killed NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966. So was Edgar Ray Killen, who helped orchestrate the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the crime that inspired the film “Mississippi Burning.”
And then there is perhaps the most infamous of all the lowlifes Mitchell has helped to put behind bars — Bobby Cherry, convicted in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls.
There is no statute of limitations on murder, nor should there ever be an expiration date on atrocities like those Jerry Mitchell has dug deep into ugly history to uncover. In that regard, his mission is not so unlike that of Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who spent much of his life after World War II tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice.
Mitchell was admirably humble about receiving the award: “Ralph McGill showed us what courage truly is … To receive a medal named after him is the ultimate honor.” The work of the McGill Medal’s first recipient does more than ample honor to its namesake, as well.
— Dusty Nix, for the editorial board
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