![]() ![]() The Klan’s firebombing in 1966 of the home of prominent Mississippi civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer, who died of his injuries. The bombing of a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama the same year, which killed four young girls. The 1963 assassination of Black leader Medgar Evers, who was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson home. ![]() That injustice put Mitchell on the trail of three others. Seven Klan members, including a deputy sheriff, were convicted and jailed under federal laws for violating the victims’ civil rights but the killers had never been prosecuted for murder, even though their identities were widely known. No one had been convicted of killing New Yorkers Andy Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, who had come to Mississippi to help to register Black voters, and a local African-American man, James Chaney. When the houselights went up, he discovered the man was a retired FBI agent who had investigated the murders. As the movie recreated the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers ambushed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, Mitchell’s silver-haired seatmate offered a running commentary on what was accurate and what had been fictionalized. Mitchell had been covering the courts for the Clarion-Ledger, in the state capital, Jackson, for three years in 1989 when he attended a screening of Mississippi Burning. It began, like many journalistic investigations, with a chance encounter. ![]()
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