![]() The paper's campaign to reopen the Evers murder case began on October 1, 1989, with disclosures from secret state government files that state spies had investigated prospective jurors in Beckwith's second trial and turned the information over to his defense lawyers. Today, the paper has one of the few black managing editors in the country, and at least three times the national average of black professionals in its newsroom. In what some think is a fitting irony, the Clarion-Ledger was purchased in 1982 by Gannett, a chain with an aggressive policy of hiring and promoting blacks, and of covering minority communities. Back then the paper was owned by the powerful Hederman family, which had no qualms about slanting the news in its substantial newspaper holdings across Mississippi to reflect its opposition to integration. The headline became the most quoted in the paper's 154-year history, symbolizing an alliance with segregationists that had earned it the nickname "The Klan-Ledger" from civil rights advocates in Mississippi during the 1950s and '60s.Ī quarter century after two separate murder trials of Beckwith ended in hung juries, it was a far different Clarion-Ledger that led the charge beginning two years ago to reopen the Evers case, one of the most notorious murders in the racially explosive '60s. On June 23, 1963, two days after avowed white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith was first arrested in the ambush murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the hometown Clarion-Ledger led its story with a curious headline: "Californian is Charged with Murder of Evers."Ĭurious because the headline obscured the fact that Beckwith, a California-born fertilizer salesman with a record of racist activities, had deep roots in the South and lived most of his life in Greenwood, Mississippi, 90 miles north of Jackson. Marcel Dufresne is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut. ![]() To the dismay of some, the Clarion-Ledger is mining the bitter past: the Medgar Evers murder, state spies and its own unsavory record. Exposing the Secrets of Mississippi Racism
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