Jerry Mitchell’s mission

The Arkansas Gazette had won two Pulitzer Prizes — one for public service and one for ed- itorial writing — for its news coverage and editorial stands during the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis. Owned by the Heiskell and Patterson family of Little Rock, the newspaper was losing revenue at home due to angry subscribers and advertisers. But it was being praised nationally as one of the best publications in the South.

Next door in Mississippi, it was a different story. As Kathy Lally once wrote in The Baltimore Sun: “The Hederman family ran what probably was the most racist newspaper in the nation. Some of its past reporting, when reviewed today, is nearly unbelievable. The Clarion-Ledger covered the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic 1963 march on Washington with a picture of the mall littered by trash and a headline that proclaimed, ‘Washington Is Clean Again With Negro Trash Removed.’”

Lew Powell, a former journalist in Mississippi, told Lally: “It was really a terrible paper, about as bad a paper as you can get. It was a mixture of incompetence and malevolence, especially on racial issues.”

Hodding Carter III, whose family received national attention for the quality newspaper it published just across the Mississippi River from Arkansas at Greenville, said: “The Hedermans were to segregation what Joseph Goebbels was to Hitler. They were cheerleaders and chief propagandists, dishonest and racist. They helped shape as well as reflect a philosophy which was, at its core, as undemocratic and immoral as any extant. … They weren’t hypocrites. They believed it. They believed blacks were the sons of Ham. The Hedermans were bone-deep racists whose religion 120 years ago decided that question.”

Lally wrote: “The Hedermans and Mississippi were intertwined, both revealing a relationship that is difficult for an outsider to understand. The Hedermans asserted their moral authority through their newspapers and their control of the First Baptist

Church, the most powerful congregation in Jackson. They were able to proclaim themselves devout Christians while holding many of their fellow men — those of color — in contempt. … The Hedermans were also stern prohibitionists who nevertheless approved of the state’s collecting a tax on alcohol during years when alcohol was illegal.”

Brothers Thomas and Robert Hederman came to Jackson from rural Scott County, Miss., in the early 1900s to work as printers. They bought the newspaper in 1920 and, according to Lally, “left the paper along with their Baptist, teetotaling legacy to their sons.” Rea Hederman, born in 1945, began turning the newspaper around in 1973.

“He hired aggressive young reporters from all over the country, 300 of them in eight years, and turned them loose on abuses the paper had ignored,” Lally wrote. “When he left Jackson in 1982, the paper was working on an education series that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service.”

Rea Hederman went on to buy the New York Review of Books in 1984 and later bought the British literary quarterly Granta. His father and uncles were unable to get along and sold the Clarion-Ledger and nine other Mississippi newspapers they owned to Gannett in 1982 for $110 million.

What Rea Hederman had started — transforming a newspaper’s reputation — was completed by a Texarkana native named Jerry Mitchell, who graduated from Harding University in Searcy and cut his teeth at Arkansas newspapers. Mitchell finished high school on the Texas side of the state line in 1977. He was later an intern at the Texarkana Gazette. Mitchell graduated from Harding in 1981 with a journalism degree, joined the Arkansas Democrat in 1982, and moved on the next year to the Sentinel-Record at Hot Springs. In 1986, he was hired at the Clarion-Ledger.

Mitchell was a court reporter at the Jackson newspaper in 1989 when the movie Mississippi Burning convinced him to investigate unsolved civil rights cases. His investigations helped put four members of the Ku Klux Klan and a serial killer behind bars. During his three-decade career at the Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell won more than 30 national awards and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In late 2018, as Gannett continued to cut newspaper budgets to the bone, Mitchell announced that he was leaving to start a nonprofit organization known as the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.

Earlier this year, Simon & Schuster released Mitchell’s book Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era. At a time when we’re reflecting on the state of race relations in the country, the book is well worth the time it takes to read.

In the words of noted Southern writer Rick Bragg: “It’s one thing to have a great story to tell. But it’s another thing to have it told by a great storyteller. Jerry Mitchell has written this book with power, talent and conscience.”

It was at Hot Springs that Mitchell began his work as an investigative reporter, looking at the money being lost by the Magic Springs theme park and the way the city was propping up the park with a bond issue. Now, the man who would play such a key role in turning around the reputation of Mississippi’s largest newspaper is helping train a new generation of investigative reporters.

Though the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting focuses on stories in Mississippi, it does some reporting in other Southern states. Mitchell’s mission to reveal the South’s violent past and bring about justice continues.

Senior Editor Rex Nelson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.