Jerry Mitchell
GRANTEE
The stories of Jerry Mitchell, who leads the investigative reporting team for Mississippi Today, have helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars as well as helping free two people from death row.
Mitchell is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and a winner of more than 30 other national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant. He is the author of Race Against Time, which is about his pursuit of some of the nation's most notorious murders, including the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the KKK’s 1964 killings of three civil rights workers.
The Mississippi Today investigative reporting team has exposed a two-decade reign of terror by officers called the "Goon Squad."
