Lessons in social responsibility

Staff photo by Jim Evans
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Lovejoy award winner and reporter Jerry Mitchell talks about his recent stories of Civil Rights-era murderers to students Monday in Skowhegan. He said of those men, ``They're just killers that have gotten old.'' Some third- through sixth-graders from Cornville and Canaan joined students at the Margaret Chase Smith School in Skowhegan.

SKOWHEGAN -- A Mississippi journalist, whose news reporting has helped put members of the Ku Klux Klan in prison, told fifth- and sixth-graders here Tuesday to use their gifts to help society.

"There is a debt of service (due) from every man, some little way we're supposed to do something with it, a way we can pay something back," said Jerry W. Mitchell, who Sunday night received Colby College's 2006 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, given annually to a courageous journalist who defends the freedom of the press.

Mitchell's articles have led to the imprisonment of the Klan's Imperial Wizard, the Klansman who bombed a Birmingham church and killed four little girls and blinded a fifth and the man who help orchestrate the 1964 killings of three Freedom Riders.

Mitchell, a reporter with the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., shared with the children tales of how Klansmen threatened his life, telling them how important it is to fight wrongdoers.

"The Ku Klux Klan is a group of hateful people," he said. "They slink in the night, kill people, burn crosses and scare people."

Mitchell said it was more important to do the right thing than worry about fear.

"I've always not cared what other people thought about me," Mitchell said. "I was really upset that these people had gotten away with murder. ... It's not wrong to be mad, just wrong to do bad. It's OK to be angry (at injustice.)"

Mitchell told the students that some things are funny, sometimes it's all right to laugh. He elicited that laughter when he told the students about how one Klansman said he knew where Mitchell and his family live and threatened to harm them.

"But he was from South Carolina, so at least I knew he had a good ways to drive," he joked.

"It's not a matter of race, it is trying to help all people," Mitchell said. "You try to help the least of these."

Rich people don't need help as much, he told the students. Poor people, he said, don't have access to lawyers and court records and other material to help defend themselves.

Mitchell talked of a life in the south -- "when I was your age"-- that most Maine children have only read about in books -- about separate bathrooms for whites and blacks, separate drinking fountains, segregated schools.

Civil-rights activists helped changed all that, Mitchell said, and it became important to him to write in support of people who risked their lives to do what was right.

Mitchell said even children can stand up for what they believe in: "A lot of civil-rights leaders were students just like you, a little older, but just like you."

Teacher Larry Ross, who teaches an enrichment class at the school, said he wrote to Mitchell when he learned he was coming to Colby, mostly to tell him how much he admired his work.

"I invited him to come talk to my kids," Ross said. "I was surprised when he said yes. He could have just as easily said he had a plane to catch and that would have been understandable."

To introduce Mitchell to his students, Ross said: "Chance favors the prepared mind. (Mitchell) took a chance, believed in what he saw, and he has changed history."

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