The Christian Chronicle Podcast
The Christian Chronicle Podcast explores the news and stories shaping Church of Christ congregations and members around the world.
The Christian Chronicle Podcast
Episode 135: How journalism can be a truth-seeking ministry that serves God's justice (Jerry Mitchell)
MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient, Pulitzer Prize finalist and world famous investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell talks about how a relentless pursuit of the truth honors God and promotes God's desire for justice. In this episode, Mitchell talks about how he helped crack cold cases that brought to justice the murderers of five 1960s-era Civil Rights workers in Mississippi. He also makes a plea for Christians in society to renew and restore their collective and personal efforts to find and hold up truth, even when it hurts.
Link to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting at Mississippi Today
Link to Jerry Mitchell's recent investigative work
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Family and friends, neighbors and, most of all, strangers. Welcome to the Christian Chronicle Podcast. We're bringing you the stories shaping Church of Christ congregations and members around the world. I'm BT Earley. May what you are about to hear. Bless you and honor God.
BT Irwin:Here in the United States, we often say that freedom is not free, and what we mean is that the freedom we enjoy as citizens of this country is freedom that came at the cost of the men and women who died on battlefields to support and defend the US Constitution. So the image that comes to mind for many of us is that of sailors and soldiers in battle, but for a few of us and it really needs to be all of us other images may come to mind. As many as 100 American citizens were murdered for their peaceful advocacy and efforts to support and defend the US Constitution during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Those Americans laid down their lives so that Black Americans could enjoy the full freedoms and rights to which they are entitled under the Constitution and its amendments, and yet were denied by local customs and laws, particularly in the former Confederate states. We're releasing this episode the week of the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. This federal legislation aimed to overcome local and state laws that prevented Black Americans from exercising their right to vote, as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment of the US Constitution. The freedom that Black Americans accessed through the Voting Rights Act was not free. It came at the cost of the lives of those who died advocating for it. How did they die? Many of them were murdered in cold blood by those who opposed equality for people of color. In many cases, the murderers got away with it. How did they die? Many of them were murdered in cold blood by those who opposed equality for people of color. In many cases, the murderers got away with it as governments and law enforcement worked together to make sure that convictions and punishments never came in full. Our guest today did the dangerous, exhausting and painstaking work it took to bring many of those murderers to eventual justice decades after they committed their crimes and seemed to get away with it.
BT Irwin:Jerry Mitchell is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the MacArthur Genius Grant. As a reporter for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, mississippi, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mitchell began investigating the murders of civil rights workers in the 1960s. His investigative reporting eventually led to cold cases being reopened and four Ku Klux Klansmen being convicted and sentenced for their roles in the murders of Medgar Evers in 1963, michael Schwerner, james Chaney and Andrew Goodman in 1964, and Vernon Dahmer in 1966. In 2020, he released his first book, race Against Time, which details the story of how he investigated the civil rights murders. It is one of the best books I've ever read and I cannot recommend it enough. In 2023, he founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Journalism, which now has the largest newsroom in the state of Mississippi. He's a Church of Christ kid, a Harding University alumnus, and now he's one of the newest members of our board of trustees at the Christian Chronicle.
BT Irwin:Jerry, welcome to the show. Great to be with you, bt. Thanks. I want to ask you what I call a trade question. My wife and I read the book Race Against Time together when it came out in 2020, and then recently we picked it up again and started reading it. When we go on road trips, she'll drive and I'll read, and so I was reading to her from the book and she stopped me and said how does he get these people to talk to him? Because a lot of the people you interview are guilty and they know they're guilty, they know what they did, and yet they, they talk to this stranger, this reporter. How, how does that happen?
Jerry Mitchell:I. I think you know there were several factors in, you know, my favor. One was I'm pretty unassuming. I mean I'm not, uh, I'm always saying the opposite of Mike Wallace for those that remember the old 60 minute show. And so I don't, I don't come in there gun guns blazing. I just kind of come in there and say, hey, you know, and I had the Southern accent and you know, and, and the upbringing that made it such, in fact, with Byron D D LeBeck asked me all sorts of questions. I was like what are your parents' names? Where did you grow up? Where do you go to church? Yeah, I could have refused to answer, but I knew he'd love my answer, so why not just answer? He was like come on, I'll talk to you. I was one of the only handful of reporters who actually got to talk to him before he, before he went out and got arrested yeah, I one of the things that my wife and I talked about when we were discussing how do these, why do these people talk?
BT Irwin:to Jerry I said, well, the internet wasn't a thing.
Jerry Mitchell:Like, yeah, and that's exactly right. Yeah, the vast majority of this recording was free internet, thank God, because otherwise I'd, you know, had my face plastered everywhere. You know all that kind of stuff, so I benefited from the lack of social media.
BT Irwin:Yeah, I reminded her I think it was early nineties maybe. Yeah, I, I. I reminded her I think it was early nineties maybe. Yeah, like to Byron Dela Beckwith, that was a early nine, 1990, 1990, 35 years ago this year.
Jerry Mitchell:So I said to my wife I said I'm pretty sure he wasn't reading the Clarion ledger up in signal mountain Tennessee, right, no, although I interviewed him before and he liked what I wrote, these were just like little, these were just little snippets, yeah, kind of small bios, not even that long, like what have these people done since? And so it was him, it was Merle Evers, it was, you know, the prosecutor, you know those kind of things the original prosecutor in the case and different things like that. And so it just kind of had these short bios and I just quoted him accurately and he loved it was real racist, but he loved what I had. Yeah, because I quoted him accurately, I didn't misquote him or anything.
BT Irwin:And so I think that probably helped me as well. Let's just stick with Beckwith for a second here, because the chapter where you go to his house.
Jerry Mitchell:That's kind of creepy, isn't it?
BT Irwin:Here's what I want to say about the book to anybody who hasn't read it yet Race Against Time. It is a page turner and there are some really tense moments in the book, like I read the whole thing the first time, I think in less than a week because I couldn't put it down and like the chapter where you go to Beckwith's house, which is on Signal Mountain, tennessee. So anybody who's ever been around Chattanooga you know you drive up into the mountains and so you get this sense of you going to this secluded place and he is a he's a scary, scary man, like the way he talks, and so one of the things that one of the things I thought about as I as I read that chapter in particular and you even kind of touched on this is is just the kind of bile that he was spewing while you were sitting there and you were drinking some weird drink concoction.
Jerry Mitchell:He was.
BT Irwin:He was and his wife gave you this. It was almost kind of like what could be in here, could it be poison? But my wife always tells me I can't lie. She said I can't play a joke on her because my face gives it away. Your face gives it away, right, and so you're sitting here. I imagine looking this guy in the eye while he's saying these things and I'm like I have no poker face and so how do you?
BT Irwin:a lot of people might read that chapter and just be kind of repulsed by what he says. People might read that chapter and just be kind of repulsed by what he says and ask how can jerry sit there with a straight face and look at this man while he's saying these things and not give himself away?
Jerry Mitchell:yeah, it's a great question. I'm not sure how I didn't get myself away, but he was definitely of the. I think as reporters we kind of developed this knack of more of a poker face, you know, just asking questions. We stay focused on the questions and what we're asking and what they have to say, and I was recording the whole interview.
BT Irwin:Yeah, so, yeah. So the book again, highly recommend everybody to read it. It's it's a very good read, very good read and it's all true. That's the crazy thing. There were many times when I was reading the book where I'm like this is not a like. I think John Grisham recommended your book. He is on his. I love John Grisham books and you would think, reading the book, that you're reading a John Grisham book because it's just so, it's like a great story. But it's just crazy that it's all true and you lived it, man. So I want to, I want to get down into the reporting that you did, that you write about in in race against time and everything that you've done since. Really, I feel like you've had to overcome a lot of inertia, and what I mean by that is the cases you covered in Race Against Time were around 30 years old.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, they were.
BT Irwin:Yeah, had moved way on. It almost seemed like a different era by the time that the late 80s, early 90s rolled around. I think there may be another kind of inertia, though, that you're reporting us to overcome, and that's what I would call evil on the people that we want to admire and respect and trust the most. So the murderers in Race Against Time you pointed out in your book. I mean these were like church deacons, sunday school teachers, cops, upstanding citizens, you know, smiling and waving at the kids down on the town square. And even now, with the case of the so-called goon squad in Rankin County, mississippi, you've been investigating that for a while. People these days, christians in particular, really hold up law enforcement as almost holy or sacred. So insofar as people criticize or resist your investigating, how much do you think it's not so much that because you're going after individual bad actors, but they feel like you're going after their most sacred institutions themselves, you know, church, civil government, law enforcement, things like that.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, well, I mean these, you know so-called church goers no offense, they were Klansmen, you know. Yeah, but I mean, like beckwith was christian identity, which I don't know that your listeners have heard of, but it's, it's basically a white supremacist religion. I remember so distinctly asking beckwith about it. You know it's like because I knew nothing about it. I, I mean that was the other thing going in to talk to Beckwith is. I mean he just told me about this whole world I knew nothing about. So I was learning from him about white supremacy and what was going on at that point in time. But yeah, I mean pretty reprehensible. I mean like they believe things like Adam and Eve were white people and you know anyone who doesn't have white skin, that these were made by God on the sixth day with the animals and therefore don't have souls, and just, you know things that none of us would, as christians, would support. I mean it's just ludicrous. You know teaching and belief. So I have to say that, even though, even though you had some that were the quote-unquote taught sunday school, which the heather clan sandbowers did, some of these other guys, they were out there in terms of their religious beliefs. But yeah, in terms of law enforcement. Yeah, it's a great question and I think you know we have to be careful, and it's whether we're talking about investigative reporting or not.
Jerry Mitchell:Talking about investigative reporting, I think there's we're unfortunately in a period of time right now where it's kind of a come on us versus them situation and where it's like you're, here's my team for lack of better terms and I'm talking about politically or not politically, and so anybody on my team I'm going to back and say they're wonderful, and anybody who's on the opposite side, well, they're just of the devil or whatever people say about it, and so I have to be very careful about that. And so I have to be very careful about that, because in my mind and that's why I think what I do and why investigative reporting and journalism is so important, because it's about trying to find the truth, and I think that's a Christian cause as well we should be about the truth, not about whether our side wins or doesn't win, and I don't mean that in Christian terms, I just mean politically, socially, whatever box you want to put that in. We've still got to be about the truth, because it's not. We've got to have truth in order to have justice, and if you don't have truth, you can't get justice, and that's what I see a lot of right now.
Jerry Mitchell:There's just a lot of muddying of the water, lots of lies told not just by politicians but by plenty of others, and it just really muddies the water and makes it difficult for people to sort out. I'll give a simple example these, so these so-called news shows right now, and I I just think they all ought to be labeled opinion, because all they are is there's some talking head, whether you're talking about msnbc or fox or cnn, I pick your channel, I don't care what channel and it's they're purporting to share the news, but what it really is is them pontificating about the news. It's their opinion, and I just think the show should all be labeled opinion because they're not news and and I think that leads to a lot of confusion for people, and and people think that's true. You know well, it's their opinion about something may not be true at all, and so that's why I think what we do is so important. We're trying to get it true and it's not about who's on what team or politically I'm about as apolitical a person as you can get it to, because I just think that I think that confuses things Again. It gets into this team thing.
Jerry Mitchell:And the other thing I'd say as a Christian is Jesus didn't sink away much into politics. In fact, he had opportunities over and over again. They kept trying to, almost try to bait him into making political statements and he kept refusing to. You know, you know, render under season, go to Caesars and under God, what's God? So he just would resist it. And I think we've got to be careful of getting sucked into those dramas about what politicians said today. This politician said today or this one didn't, or whatever. It's just. I just think it's endless and I'm not sure it benefits God's kingdom.
BT Irwin:Just thinking about when you started out in this world and right up to the time, do you feel like people? I don't want to say people have given up on the truth.
Jerry Mitchell:People have given up on figuring.
BT Irwin:Well, I think it's real difficult for the average person to figure out what truth is yes, so in other words, people aren't less interested in the truth, it's just that will no longer feel like they can find the truth. I think that's accurate giving up.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, and I think you and I'm not blaming social media for this, but people today get most of their find the truth. I think that's accurate and they're giving up. Yeah, and I think you know and I'm not blaming social media for this but people today get most of their news from social media. It comes through their Facebook feed or whatever. Whatever feed they have, that's how they get it. Maybe they get a newsletter, maybe they get something else like that, and that's what, how they get their news, which is unfortunate, and I'm glad to see people like Christian Chronicle kind of stick to hey, we're going to report on what's happening.
Jerry Mitchell:I think that's a good thing. I mean, I think sometimes, yeah, you know, I always want to kill the messenger. I mean that's age old, the messenger is always the first one to go. But yeah, but I think it's important. We need to know these things Because here's the downside If you don't know, you can't make wise decisions. If you don't know what the truth is, how can you you know, how can you act wisely, how can you do what's right? You've got to know, you've got to know what the truth is, or at least, again, as close as we can get to the truth.
BT Irwin:Yeah, going back to that question about inertia, and when you, when you did the investigative reporting which, by the way, that was all on your own initiative at first it was almost like a hobby for you, because your your day job was court reporting.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, yeah, I was, I was doing court reporting and I was kind of sticking this.
BT Irwin:In addition, you were the person who actually did something and started following the leads and you did it on your own time and eventually it worked its way into your full-time work. But no one else was doing that investigation. No one else was looking into the unsolved murders or the crimes against civil rights workers in the 1960s. You did it and there was resistance to that. You wrote about that quite a bit in the book and then it led to convictions. People that should have been put away for murder eventually were put away for murder like decades later. Did you notice a change in the attitude of the general public? You know, like I said, they moved on and probably were like, yeah, that happened a long time ago, we're moving on with our lives. Then the cases were reopened and then people were convicted. You know a good example. Did you notice that people in Mississippi, for example, were like Jerry, thanks for revealing the truth. This changes our perspective on everything.
Jerry Mitchell:When I started doing the Beckwith case, I had a lot of people that were not happy with me. I had someone stop me in the church parking lot. Yeah, I remember that.
Jerry Mitchell:Who was mad about what I was writing about. So I was getting about. So I mean, I, I, I, you know, so I was getting into church too, so but yeah, it's, it's. But it changed over time and what you began to see was people began to realize, wait a minute, you know, like, let's say, from a conservative standpoint of viewing this, whether people were looking at it from a liberal or conservative standpoint, they began to, you know, people who are more conservative began to realize it was a good thing, you know, and they were like, yeah, because this is, and that's the thing about these cases People don't realize that is, these cases got prosecuted by Republicans and Democrats. This was not a partisan issue at all or a political one. It was the right thing to do. And I know God loves justice and that's the thing that's come trying through to me and really led me to do a deeper dive into scripture, of studying what does God think about justice? What are his thoughts on that?
BT Irwin:We'll get to that a little more in a second. So I've lived in Mississippi. My dad and grandparents lived in Mississippi and by some estimates you likely know all about this Mississippi is either the most Christian or second most Christian state in the US.
BT Irwin:I believe that yeah, of the population that claims Christianity Real close with Alabama something like eight out of ten people. I think I can't imagine that Mississippi was less Christian a few generations ago, that Mississippi was less Christian a few generations ago and yet Mississippi had the highest recorded number of lynchings and violent accidents of people of color during the Jim Crow era. And then in the 1960s you go into great detail about the murder and the violence against people who were working very hard to realize their right to vote under the US Constitution. So what have you learned about the disconnect or dissonance that must exist within people who claim to be Christian and yet perpetrate or excuse violence against fellow human beings made in God's image? You had to have encountered a lot of that in your reporting.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very fascinating. I know sam bowers justified the murs in this interview that he did. Sam bowers was the head of the white knights of the q quest clan in mississippi, which was the clan organization most violent clan organization united states for at least 10 killings. So in this interview he talked about that. I was like you know, yeah, he was justifying killing. He said, yeah, if someone's going to destroy your way of life, you know you have a right to kill them. And so that kind of became justification, I think in terms of like the Christian identity type stuff. They believe that you know, you know if you kill, if you, if you kill someone that's not white, like Beckwith at one point said to someone, it was like killing killing a dang dog and a dang dog.
Jerry Mitchell:You know I mean because he viewed it as you know, those who were black were subhuman in some form and therefore it was justified. And look, this still goes on today. This disconnect unfortunately still continues. What I mean by that is this there's a great book I read years ago. It's called Faces of the Enemy and it points out something I think is very scriptural, which is before we kill people with our weapons, we kill them with our minds. Wow, and I think that's very true. I think we would especially understand, as Christians Jesus talks about that.
BT Irwin:Yes.
Jerry Mitchell:You know you hate. You know you say, oh, you know that, you know it's been said, don't murder anyone. But you know, I tell you, don't even hate your brother. And he goes. And then you think, well, jesus, what are you saying? And then he goes on and says love your enemies. It's like what are you talking about? Jesus is like I love my enemies. And so I still, to this day, believe that what Jesus taught is radical and we have not fully embraced it. And we have not fully embraced it Like we want to take the edges off of what Jesus teaches.
BT Irwin:Yeah.
Jerry Mitchell:You know, and I think that's what you get back to, this undiluted Jesus, and I think if we will embrace that and drink that, it will change us.
BT Irwin:You in another interview, I think, with our friendly camp. You talked about growing up in Texarkana, right.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, texarkana.
BT Irwin:Texas Right and there was a bus bombing or I think maybe there was Church bombings. Okay, church bombings.
Jerry Mitchell:Right, I didn't even know it.
BT Irwin:I grew up there and I didn't know it Exactly. You didn't know about it. My dad was living in Mississippi in the early 60s at the time this was going on, and my parents they eventually moved to Nashville. So both of my parents were in Nashville and I've asked them many times about what was going on during the civil rights movement. What was going on during the civil rights movement Right, and they both told me we knew nothing.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, we weren't aware at all that, and and I mean there were things going down all around newspapers newspapers, which was the main source of news at the time, local news at the time were complicit in this, and what I mean by that is they would not report on this stuff and what I'm talking about.
BT Irwin:Well, I was going to say you talked about people like Sam Bowers and Byron D LeBeckwith and they had this interpretation of Scripture that was obviously racist. But then you have folks like my parents and their parents, folks in the churches that were not, were not part of these crimes, but they were aware that things were going on. Yeah, I think they're aware generally. Yeah, they stayed on the sidelines. That's kind of what I was getting at with with question is that.
Jerry Mitchell:Oh yeah, I think we in the church, to be honest, share some lameness. I mean the sense of you know, we didn't. I mean churches were segregated for many, many, many years and we have to accept the fact that we did that. You know, we and our fore, the fact that we did that. You know we and our forefathers were responsible for that. I mean and and we should, we should not. I mean that's not good. I mean the fact that we closed the door to people that were of different color.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, I mean that's and and and. So what we need to do about that obviously is is do our best to change those kinds of attitudes.
BT Irwin:Our brothers and sisters, we're all one blood, you're a, you're a church guy and I'm a church guy and so we've we've been in a lot of churches and so you know, you start, you start reporting like you were in the early 90s, and you even mentioned being approached in the church parking lot, the church parking lot, with my daughter in my arms.
Jerry Mitchell:Am I right?
BT Irwin:Okay. So I'm imagining all the church folks I've been around my whole life and I have to imagine that at some point someone approached you and said someone approached you and said you know God cleanses of our sins through the blood of Jesus Christ and you know forgiveness is total, it's free to us because of Jesus's pain and suffering for us. So if someone confesses and repents, maybe in the privacy of their own thoughts, god forgives and makes a fresh start.
Jerry Mitchell:And so I can imagine someone.
BT Irwin:Yeah, I've had people talk about that. You know, Jerry isn't that kind of unchristian. You know you're digging up dirt on the past when God is forgiven and we should all move on, and so I imagine you've had to live in that. Oh, I have plenty of people tell me to move on, that's for sure it's in the past leaving yeah what have you found in that tension? Being a christian, one hand, who believes in the forgiveness of god and yet also working for justice? How do you, how do you navigate that space?
Jerry Mitchell:well, these guys never repented. I mean they were. I mean I had conversations with them. It's not like they were sorry for what they did. I mean they never expressed any remorse or or other than I billy roy pitts and tommy terrence and there were two guys that two client guys I did interview that expressed remorse and repentance. You know for that, I think that you know and I'm you know, I, I think obviously if you've done something wrong, someone, you need to go to that particular person. I mean that's obviously.
Jerry Mitchell:that's pretty basic. You should go to that person. But yeah, it's, you know. But I had people say things like why don't you like they'd see the guys going off to trial, playing guys going off to trial or off to prison? And they would say to me, jerry, why don't you leave these old men alone? And I would tell them these were young killers, they just happened to get old.
BT Irwin:Wow, wow. I'm thinking in particular. We had Nancy French on the show. I might've been last year and, excuse me, she was. She was the victim of Terrible sexual abuse at the hands of a someone who worked in her church. This is what she writes about in her book and you know, one of the troubling things about that story that she tells is how the perpetrator and people who knew about it have kind of said to her well, you know, we're moving on. God forgives, we're moving on, gibbs, we're moving on. And yet there's this strong move in the church circles in which she was a part of to forgive and move on from that, and even people that didn't perpetrate the abuse but knew about it and covered it the problem is covering it up.
Jerry Mitchell:That's the problem. It looks like we don't want to talk about this. We want to cover this up. We want to keep it secret. Yeah, and that's in my opinion. I'm just. You know, and I can't speak to that particular situation. I don't know the details of that situation, but I'm just talking about in general.
Jerry Mitchell:We're supposed to confess our sins right One to another. It's the opposite. We're not about covering up sin. That's what the devil wants us to do. He wants us to cover up sin. It's the old what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. I mean, isn't that the whole idea? That's the whole idea. We're just going to not talk about our sins, conceal our sins. God gives us a way out. We confess our sins and when you confess your sins, as someone who's done that, it's freeing. It's freeing. God is trying to free us from the shackles of sin and we have the exact wrong mindset about this. Oh, this is. You know, this might be bad. This might reflect badly on the church. The church is supposed to take care of sin. We're not supposed to wink at it or cover it up. We should be the first ones out there going hey look, this has happened. Here's what we're doing about it and not covered up. I know it sounds contrary to the way we think, but it's not what the Bible says.
BT Irwin:That's a good segue into talking about the Christian Chronicle and the kind of work we do here. So you recently joined our board here at the Christian Chronicle, so thank you for that. We talk about this sometimes about well, we just recently had a really popular comedian stand-up comedian on the show and we talked about is he a Christian stand-up comedian or is he just a stand-up comedian who happens to be a Christian, or a Christian who is a stand-up comedian? And so, in that tone of question, should there be such a thing as Christian investigative journalism and, if so, how would it differ from just regular investigative journalism?
Jerry Mitchell:Well, I don't separate this Like I view what I do and people may think this is odd, but I view what I do as ministry. I don't view what I do as separate from being a Christian or somehow different than being a Christian. My faith informs what I do, how I act, how I behave. What I do, how I act, how I behave and what I, what we do, I think is, is godly in the sense of we're trying to get the truth and God loves truth, god loves justice, and and the more I kind of, you know, have learned about that, the more I realized, like when I started off, I didn't think that way, you know, I kind of thought of oh, my job's over here, you know church here and you know have these compartments of life, so to speak, but that's not what God intended.
BT Irwin:I studied the history of the Christian Chronicle when I came to work here and I came across how its founders in 1943 wanted to be a source of good news what God and God's people are doing around the world.
BT Irwin:And then Eric Trigestad and Bobby Ross Jr joined the team a couple of decades ago and they brought their experience and training as what we might call quote unquote real world news reporting, and we've won all kinds of journalism awards for news reporting. And that includes covering some of what folks might call bad news. So, for example, after I started here, we covered a story about a Church of Christ preacher who carried on years of sexual assault against girls in the congregations he served. And I know some people in our audience recoil at that kind of coverage because they want us to cover good news, the good things that are happening, and avoid stories like that. So, as a Christian who happens to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a world famous news journalist, how far should a Christian news organization like the Christian Chronicle get into what we might call hard news or bad news? How might we do it that in a way that stays true to our roots?
Jerry Mitchell:See, I see no distinction. I mean, here we go. Here's a very simple parallel. Does the Bible have any bad news in it?
Jerry Mitchell:Good, I mean, as people quote-unquote say it that way yeah yeah, in fact I'd say, in terms of the gospel, you have to kind of know what the bad news is until you understand except the good news news. And so I think we the nomenclature of this has, I think, unfortunately affected our views and it's not really it's bad. We call it bad but it's not really bad, it's it's it's reality, it's the reality. It's the reality. There is going to be a judgment day one day and we'll stand before God and heaven or hell awaits. I mean, that's the reality. Now you can ignore that and you can go on with your life and do whatever you choose to do, but that's the reality. And so, in my mind, the truth is the truth. And one of the big problems is you're talking about the.
Jerry Mitchell:What the Christian trials covered covered, like, for example, the example you gave here's been one of the big problems. It's not unique to Churches of Christ. Is that these churches? And certainly has been the huge scandal about the Catholic Church along these lines? Is they, these sexual abuse situations were taking place? Catholic church along these lines? Is they these sexual abuse situations were taking place? And then they would cover it up and then bump the person some other place and they would do it again.
BT Irwin:Yeah.
Jerry Mitchell:Do you think that's what God desires? Hmm, of course not.
BT Irwin:God desires for sin to be exposed.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, and it's not pleasant. He calls, and jesus would say, those those whom I love, I rebuke and discipline, and calls on us to do the same thing. And so I just think that we have misunderstood Scripture and are thinking that, oh, this is so horrific we can't tell anybody. It's what the Catholic Church did for years, and Protestant Church has been guilty of the exact same thing, and I know of a case right here in Jackson. Same thing happened. I saw a youth minister. He was off someplace, I think in Texas, and then got sent here to Mississippi, and that church didn't let the church here in Mississippi know. Hmm, wow, sexually abusing boys.
BT Irwin:Oh man.
Jerry Mitchell:And worked at a school, wow. And when you do that kind of stuff, you perpetuate it Again. Our job is not to cover up sin, our job is to expose it, and so that's the way I think about it. I don't think about quote, unquote, bad news. I just think about what's the truth in this situation, and we need the truth because we can't, again, we can't act in the way that we need to act. We don't know. Yeah.
BT Irwin:I know I've seen our news team agonize over oh yeah, it's a story, yeah the church of christ is a small world. Everybody knows everybody. I was at the crusade for christ here in detroit this week and everywhere I went people are like tell bobby ross. I said hi. And yeah, of course I've seen bobby ross six times a day about how well known he is among people, and so these are our friends, these are brothers absolutely right, it's hard to report on some of these things absolutely so I just like to take it down to nuts and bolts, because I've I've seen these discussions play out among our news people here at the Christian Chronicle.
BT Irwin:If a tip, we get a tip and you know what this is like. You get a tip. You hear about a situation that may be happening and it could be sexual assault in a church. There have been quite a few of those. It could be embezzling money.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, that happens, that happens.
BT Irwin:So if you're working at the at Mississippi today and you get a tip like that as a reporter, you you follow that tip right.
Jerry Mitchell:Oh yeah, you follow it and you want to see if it's true or not. You don't assume anybody who tells you anything is telling you the truth, right.
BT Irwin:I think here I think a lot of people in our audience I can't say for sure, but I think a lot of people in our audience would say well, instead of following that tip, what you need to do is turn that information over to the church for church discipline and let them handle that internally without the chronicles.
Jerry Mitchell:Hopefully they've done that. I mean, hopefully it's already gotten to that. I would presume most of those tips you get along those lines are to the point that they were already being dealt with in some capacity by the church, or maybe ignored. I don't know, it depends on the situation.
BT Irwin:And that's kind of the question.
Jerry Mitchell:It's a tough situation, it's a case-by-case situation, and so yeah, it's tough, it's a tough situation, it's a case-by-case situation, and so yeah, it's tough, it's a tough situation. But on the other, you know, usually I assume by the time you guys get involved it's already to a point of it's come to a head at a particular congregation or something like that, and so then it's more you're covering the fallout of it than you know, than you know the early investigation.
BT Irwin:I can think of a specific tip that we received in the last, I think, a year where church discipline I don't think happened.
Jerry Mitchell:Yes, i'm't think happened. That's what I'm talking about Right.
BT Irwin:And so, as an apprentice and student of Jesus Christ and a church guy on one hand, but as a professional investigative reporter who believes in finding the truth and bringing people to justice, christian chronicle is there a kind of metric that you would go through in your in your mind about how to follow up on this tip or what to do with this, knowing that you're with the christian chronicle and not say mississippi?
Jerry Mitchell:yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, obviously you have a different mindset. As a christian chronicle, you're covering, but, but you're being as churches of christ, you're covering and you're trying to be truthful about it and to be honest, you know Christian Chronicle tells the truth in love. So I think that's the thing you really want to do is tell the truth in love, and people need to know. Again, look at the Bible. I mean, for example, does the Bible just say King David was a great guy? Is that all it says? King David was a great guy? No, we have the faults of David all laid out, completely, completely laid out.
Jerry Mitchell:So, again, I think sometimes there's this disconnect between what we read in the Bible, what we think should be done here and it needs to be done in love. And you know you wouldn't want to. You know it's not to lambast anyone or two, but here's the deal. I can bet you money. There are some, there are other congregations who are dealing with the same situation and who knows but that that might be instructive to them and how they should handle the situation, disruptive to them and how they should handle the situation. So I, I, I this idea that we don't write about something because it might quote unquote hurt somebody's feelings or hurt someone's reputation, or, you know, if they've committed some grievous sin, they've already done that to themselves, because our reputation is in god's eyes is what really matters.
BT Irwin:If we're worried about people, our reputation in terms of with people then we've got the wrong mindset I want to give you a chance here at the end to tell us what you're working on now. We've spent a lot of time talking about Race Against Time and where that led you, but you've been once again doing some hardcore investigative reporting on a story in Mississippi that's made the national news quite a lot, and I don't know if you have any other projects that you want to talk about here but share with our audience what you're continuing to do as an investigative journalist these days.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, the Goon Squad is, I guess, the best shorthand to describe what we've been doing. We started investigating sheriffs in summer of 2022. We didn't set out to investigate sheriffs. We were working on another case when we heard these allegations of a sheriff allegedly taking women out of the jail and having sex with them, and so we began working on that story and then we found out the neighboring sheriff was doing the same thing. He and his deputies was doing the same thing, he and his deputies. So we wrote about that and we've been working with the New York Times since the fall of 2022. They started a program, I guess you could say, kind of focusing on local investigations fellowship, as they call it and so we've been working with them since fall of 2022 and investigating sheriffs and probably the most famous story we have a whole team of reporters now and in fact, as I speak now, we have six right this second Now we won't be able to keep that because we've got two of them are summer fellows and then a third that's a fellow.
Jerry Mitchell:But we've been investigating this quote-unquote goon squad, which was essentially a group of law enforcement officers mainly deputies that would go around and just beat people. It would go into people who were suspected of using drugs or selling drugs. They would just break into the homes without warrants. It sounds like something from the 50s. They'd break into homes without warrants. They would beat people. In the case that, they all basically went to prison for they planted drugs. They shot this guy in the mouth. What it was is two young black men. They went into the home, they poured food over them. They tried to humiliate folks, really humiliate them, the idea being, well, you're never going to do this again after we do this.
Jerry Mitchell:But they put a gun in the guy's mouth that they were wanting him to give him information about drugs. He kept saying I don't know who you know, and they didn't have any drugs. It wasn't like drugs they found there. It was. There were no drugs. And you know, please, you know, tell me about it.
Jerry Mitchell:And so he sticks a gun to the guy's mouth and he had emptied the chamber and so he pulled a trigger and, of course, click. You know it didn't fire. And then he did it again, but this time the chamber didn't empty. So when he pulled the trigger, it it literally makes me, of course explodes and barely misses the guy's spine. It shatters his jaw, lacerates his tongue, and then they're like and then they try to basically cover up their crime, what they've done, instead of admitting to it, and so these guys have all gone up to prison now, the guys that were involved in that particular incident.
Jerry Mitchell:But we showed in our reporting is this kind of stuff has been going on for more than 20 years and so we're continuing to investigate. We just did a story about the same sheriff whose son-in-law dodged a DUI conviction and it's you know he showed the sheriff shows up at the scene to take him home, and you know all this kind of stuff that's going on and you know, for lack of better terms, some of it's just good old boyism you know, they just want to.
Jerry Mitchell:You know, as we sometimes call them south, but yeah, but, but. But it's important because you can't mistreat people. I mean, it's just not, you know, as Jesus tells us. You know, we're supposed to even love our enemies. So I think, unfortunately, the mentality arises, you know, and I'm not the vast majority of people in law enforcement are great people, they do a thankless job, they put their lives on the line every single day, but unfortunately, a mentality arises among some that we're the good guys, they're the bad guys. So therefore, we have a right to mistreat these folks.
Jerry Mitchell:And that's not right and we don't believe that as Christians, and so that's kind of what's been going on for a long time and we're trying to dig down below that. And we're trying to dig down below that and we've been doing a number of stories. The same sheriff was using inmates at his mama's chicken house to work there and clean it out and do other stuff there and different things like that. So we just continued our reporting along those lines. So, yeah, is it tough reporting? Yeah, it's tough reporting, but we always want to be fair about it. We always give them an opportunity the sheriff and anybody else that we write about an opportunity to respond, to talk to us. We'd love to talk to them, sit down and talk. We've asked the sheriff repeatedly for sit-down interviews. He's never done that.
BT Irwin:How has your work changed you as an apprentice and student of Jesus Christ, over these many long years that you've been investigating the people that you investigate?
Jerry Mitchell:Interestingly, it strengthened my faith. Do I have more faith in people? Probably not. Hmm, do I have more faith in people? Probably not Less faith in people, because I know too much. But having said that, yeah, it's, it's, it's a challenge, it's a challenge, but I think the faith, from a faith perspective, it's, it's, it's, it's strengthened my faith, and I hope this doesn't come off egotistically, because I mean none, zero ego in this.
Jerry Mitchell:I look back at my own career and four Klansmen going off to prison and a serial killer went off to prison in in terms of this reporting, and I think to myself I'm not that talented I. This is not something I did, this is something god did, because god loves justice. It's just that simple. It's really that simple that. So it's strengthened my faith. It is not so I'm. I'm just very grateful and humble to be. You know, you know to have seen, you know been able to witness justice against impossible odds, impossible odds. I could go through case. You read the book. I would go through case after case after case where the odds were a zillion to one and yet justice came. How did?
BT Irwin:that happen.
Jerry Mitchell:Yeah, how did that happen? Well, there's something called God he loves justice.
BT Irwin:Well, race Against Time is the book. We've referenced it several times. What you just said about impossible odds, it's true. If you like a good mystery, folks read the book, because it's amazing how things come together in every one of these cases. Jerry Mitchell is the founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He's won the MacArthur Fellowship, also called the MacArthur Genius Grant, and he is the newest member of the Christian Chronicles Board. Jerry, thank you for making time to talk to us today about your work.
Jerry Mitchell:Thanks, I appreciate it very much, peter, very good, it's been fun.
BT Irwin:We hope that something you heard in this episode encouraged, enlightened or enriched you in some way. If it did, thanks be to God and please pay it forward. Subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend. Recommend and review it wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Your subscription recommendation and review it wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Your subscription recommendation and review help us reach more people. Please send your comments, ideas and suggestions to podcast at christianchronicleorg.
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