Revealing Mississippi's dark secrets

[ccharles000]

Newspaper reporter Jerry Mitchell does not give up easily. He was working the courtroom beat in the southern city of Jackson, Mississippi when he first saw the film Mississippi Burning.

It changed his life.

The movie was loosely based on the murder of three civil rights workers in the summer of 1964.

The young men, one black and two white, had been trying to help African-Americans register to vote in the then segregated Southern state.

They died at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. For years, no one was prosecuted for the killings.

Since learning of their story, Jerry Mitchell has dug deep into so-called cold cases from Mississippi's violent past - when African Americans were threatened, shot or burned alive just for trying to vote.

In the last 15 years, his investigations have helped to put four Klan members behind bars. The most recent case was that of Edgar Ray Killen who was convicted of manslaughter in the Mississippi Burning case.

Jerry Mitchell says there was a conspiracy of silence around the cases.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/8330775.stm