He convinced authorities to reopen many cold murder cases from the civil rights era, his investigations providing the basis for prosecutions, prompting one colleague to call him "the South's Simon Wiesenthal".
[4] In 1989, Mitchell was working as a court reporter when the film Mississippi Burning inspired him to look into old civil rights cases that many thought had long since turned cold.
[6] In 1996, he was portrayed by Jerry Levine in the Rob Reiner film, Ghosts of Mississippi, about the murder of Medgar Evers and the belated effort to bring killer Byron De La Beckwith to justice.
Mitchell's reporting has helped to put at least four Klansmen behind bars: Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966, Bobby Cherry for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls and in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, for helping orchestrate the June 21, 1964, killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
He has often written about the work of Bradford and his students, who helped Mitchell in the Mississippi Burning Case and, more recently, in clearing the name of Clyde Kennard.
One of Mitchell's most historic discoveries was the long-secret identity of Mr. X, the secret informant who helped the FBI discover the location of the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman.
When Barry Bradford provided key information gleaned from his interview with retired FBI agent Don Cesare,[7][8] Mitchell was able to conclude that Highway Patrolman Maynard King was "Mr.
[1] The Southeastern chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates decided in April 2006 to give Mitchell its first-ever award for Journalist of the Year.
[1] In 2000, Mitchell received the Silver Em Award from the University of Mississippi,[1] where he was called "a true hero of contemporary American journalism."
In November 2005, Mitchell became the youngest recipient ever of Columbia University's John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism for his 17 years of pursuing justice.
The title referred to the decades-delayed, yet thanks to Mitchell's revelatory investigations, many ultimately successful prosecutions of elderly murderers of civil rights martyrs that had been carried out by the likes of Deavours Nix, Byron Beckwith, Robert Chambliss, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., and Bobby Frank Cherry.