Jerry Mitchell

There have been a lot of hangings, a lot of them in Mississippi.

We're going to talk about it with legendary journalist Jerry Mitchell.

If you don't know Jerry Mitchell, he is one of the most legendary reporters out of Mississippi, and he is the reporter who cracked decades-old cases regarding the Klan.

So he is an expert on the Klan in Mississippi and on the racial history of Mississippi so-called justice.

Very excited to talk with him.

Tilt your screen down so we can get you all in screen.

There we go.

The great Jerry Mitchell.

Then a 30-year-old reporter at the Jackson Clarion-Ledger started pulling a thread that would unravel everything.

Jerry Mitchell was born in 1959, four years before Evers was killed.

He wasn't a civil rights historian by training.

He was a newspaper reporter who had developed sources inside the state government, and those sources pointed him toward a set of files that the State of Mississippi desperately wanted to stay sealed, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.

They were supposed to stay sealed for 50 years.

The State of Mississippi wanted its own citizens to forget that their government had spent two decades running a spy operation against the civil rights movement.

Jerry Mitchell had other plans.

Through sources he had cultivated inside state government, he gained access to information from those sealed files.