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What New Civil Rights Thrillers Can Tell Us About the News Media

by richard03174

Hate Crimes Part of a Pattern of Long Standing

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Michael B. Jordan as lawyer Bryan Stevenson, left, and Jamie Foxx as inmate Walter McMillan in “Just Mercy.” (Credit: Warner Bros.)

Hate Crimes Part of a Pattern of Long Standing

Two new civil rights thrillers — one in print, the other on the screen — can tell us much about the press, and you don’t have to look far to find the lessons.

“Just Mercy“ (watch the trailer), the story of activist black lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s efforts to free an innocent black man serving time for the 1986 murder of a white woman in Alabama, opened around the country over the weekend after an Oscar-qualifying limited release on Christmas. It was nominated for an Academy Award Monday for best adapted screenplay.

Near the end, Stevenson’s white female assistant (played by Brie Larson) at the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization he founded, tells him that she was taught that lawyers should not become too personally invested in their clients, but Stevenson’s example (he’s played by Michael B. Jordan) has shown her otherwise.

Veteran Mississippi investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell (pictured; photo by James Patterson) bears out her conclusion in “Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era,” his new book to be officially published Feb. 4.

A white journalist who worked for more than three decades at the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., and was a 2009 MacArthur “genius grant” Fellow and a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mitchell demonstrates with his own dogged example how much a commitment to uncovering the truth can produce results, even if disappointment is sometimes part of the package. He left the Clarion-Ledger last year to found the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting.

Too few of us are familiar with the extent of the pervasive racist corruption that took place in Alabama, Mississippi and points east, west and north that cost black people their lives. Stevenson points out what fertile territory this is for the press. This is not just a matter of the past, he said at a gala showing of the film Saturday at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He offered his view of the big picture.

“We’ve gone from 200,000 people in our prisons in 1972 to 2.2 million people in our prisons today,” Stevenson said. “There are 6 million people on probation or parole. There are 70 million Americans with [criminal records], which means that when they try to get jobs, when they try to get loans, they’re often disfavored by that arrest history.”

At the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Bryan Stevenson said Saturday that the underlying issue is the narrative of people of color as criminals. (Credit: Don Baker Photography)

His questioner, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., remarked, “70 million!” and asked Stevenson to repeat the figures. “I want everybody to hear them.”

Stevenson replied, “The Bureau of Justice in 2002 projected that 1 in 3 black male babies born in this country is expected to go to prison, and the outrage is that nobody talked about it. There were no special commissions, there were no task forces. We didn’t get together to deal with this crisis, and that has led us to this place. You know, I go into these communities and I sit down with 11- and 12-year-old kids, and they frequently tell me that they don’t expect to be free by the time they’re 21 because all they see is their friends and their neighbors, their brothers, their cousins being caught up by this system.” That’s in large part because of the War on Drugs, mass incarceration and three-strikes laws.

“So we cannot disconnect what we are living through with mass incarceration. And today, from this commitment to using criminality as a mechanism for continuing to have control.”

To Stevenson, the underlying issue is the narrative of people of color as criminals that has persisted throughout American history.  

“We need to talk about the fact that we’re a post-genocide society. I think what happened to Native people, when Europeans came to this continent, was a genocide. We killed millions of Native people, through famine and war and disease.

“But we didn’t acknowledge it as genocide. We created a narrative instead, when we said ‘those Native people, they’re savages. And we used that rhetoric to become indifferent to their suffering. . . .”

In “Racing Against Time,” Mitchell writes in his epilogue, “Truth rules. This has been a guiding principle of mine throughout my career. Truth rules, while hate thrives on obfuscation, murkiness, and fear. I’ve been told time and again to let the past be. But I have long found that a true account of a painful past does more good than murky optimism. In our current fight against a new wave of white supremacists, a clear memory is important.”

The news media haven’t always been part of the solution. Witness the apologies that Southern newspapers have had to make for their roles in fanning Jim Crow and resistance to integration.

Mitchell’s former newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger, published his work uncovering the murderous activities of the Ku Klux Klan and others involved in the cold cases he’s investigated, but under prior ownership the newspaper was part of the problem. True, Bennie Ivory, a black journalist who retired in 2013 as the Clarion-Ledger’s executive editor (scroll down) is credited with supporting the work of Mitchell and others in uncovering the conspiracy to kill civil rights icon Medgar Evers. Evers’ Jackson, Miss., home is now an historic landmark (pictured).

But on June 12,1963, “on the day of Evers’ death, the Jackson Daily News wrote that the bullet that killed him landed next to a watermelon on the kitchen counter — a cutting racist reference amid tragedy,” Mitchell writes.

He went on, “Bill Minor told me the Hedermans, a teetotaling Baptist family that owned the two newspapers, had a powerful say in state government and also backed the [white] Citizens’ Councils.

“The papers, he said, were among the worst in the nation. The editor of the Jackson Daily News, Jimmy Ward, referred to black civil rights workers as ‘chimpanzees’ in his columns, and on the same day that many newspapers featured the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on August 28, 1963, The Clarion-Ledger printed the headline, ‘Washington Is Clean Again with Negro Trash Removed.'”

Nor did the black press have completely clean hands. “To ensure help from the African-American press,” Mitchell writes, the segregation-promoting Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission “put a few black editors on the payroll, including Percy Greene, who operated the Jackson Advocate. At the commission’s request, he printed a Sovereignty Commission story verbatim, linking Martin Luther King Jr. to communists.”

The local press in Monroe, Ala., published inflammatory lies about Walter McMillan, the innocent black man portrayed by Jamie Foxx in “Just Mercy,” Stevenson writes in the 2014 book on which the movie was based, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.”

However, the book and movie credit CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” 1992 story on the case, reported by Ed Bradley and his producer colleagues, as a turning point.

But even that was a risk. “My general attitude was that press coverage rarely helped our clients. . . .,” Stevenson wrote. “I knew of too many cases where a favorable profile in the media had provoked an expedited execution date or retaliatory mistreatment that made things much worse.”

The University of North Carolina last year found a net loss of almost 1,800 local newspapers since 2004.

In 2018, the FBI showed the highest levels of violent hate crimes since 2001, in a report that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights says underestimates the problem.

Mitchell concludes in his book’s epilogue, “We must remember the past waves of white supremacy and the myths they spread. We must remember the many innocent African-Americans and activists the Klan killed.

“We must remember what civil rights activists like Medgar Evers fought for — American values as simple as equality and the right to vote. And we must remember what they fought through — the intimidation and violence, the death threats eventually made real. We must remember, to point our compass toward justice.

“We must remember, and then act.””

(More to come)

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