NEW YORK - When the 2005 John Chancellor Award for excellence in journalism and a $25,000 check were handed to Jerry Mitchell here at Columbia University the other night, not unnoticed was that two of the award's nine winners have been Mississippi journalists.
Now based at the Columbia School of Journalism, the award was established in 1997 by wealthy businessman Ira Lipman of Memphis in memory of the late distinguished NBC news broadcaster. Lipman, as a student at Little Rock's Central High, had become Chancellor's "inside" source during his coverage of the school's violent 1957 integration.
Naturally, this columnist, as the initial Chancellor Award winner, was extremely pleased that the 46-year-old Mitchell became this year's (and the youngest) recipient in recognition of his remarkable investigative reporting for The Clarion-Ledger that brought long-delayed convictions of killers in four heinous 1960s civil rights murders.
Although it was deservedly Jerry's evening, I would be less than honest if I did not say I was quite honored to hear some overly generous remarks thrown my way by several speakers, including Jerry, who kindly referred to me as his mentor.
In a banquet hall filled with a herd of black-tied, gray-haired lions of journalism who hold an armful of the profession's highest honors, it was noteworthy that I could count colleagues with Mississippi connections all over the room.
How 'bout these, for instance?
David Halberstam, noted author and speaker, who as New York Times war correspondent won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War coverage, and who just out of college began his career on the West Point, Miss., Times-Leader; Jack Nelson, the former Biloxian who later won a Pulitzer for reporting and became the Los Angeles Times' Washington bureau chief; Hodding Carter, III, former editor of Greenville's Delta Democrat-Times and until recently director of the John S. Knight (newspapers) Foundation; and Hank Klibanoff, managing editor for news of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who honed his reporting skills as state Capitol Correspondent for The Sun-Herald in Biloxi.
Helpful for Jerry in getting the award was that Halberstam, Carter and Nelson were members of the Chancellor Award selection committee. Each personally knew how markedly Mitchell's investigative reporting contrasted with the Clarion-Ledger's shameful coverage of Mississippi's civil rights violence during the 1960s.
Perhaps the highest honor paid to Jerry the other night was that several family members of the civil rights murder victims he wrote about were present at the ceremony. Myrlie Evers Williams, the widow of slain civil rights pioneer Medgar Evers; Ellie Dahmer, widow of Hattiesburg's Vernon Dahmer, and Dr. Carolyn Goodman, mother of Andrew Goodman, one of the three young activists killed in Neshoba - all came to praise Jerry's dedication to bring racial justice.
Of course, no trip to New York for the Minors is going to be without some interesting sidelights.
Several weeks beforehand, we had our good Jackson friend, Polly Shanks, alert her daughter, Janet, who has taught at Columbia for a number of years, that we'd be coming her way. Janet and our son, Doug, both graduated from Murrah High in the early 1970s, and we see her from time to time when she comes down to visit her mother.
Janet teaches foreign students enrolled in graduate study at Columbia. We learned over breakfast with her in New York that among her students are the daughter of South Korea's president and the son of Japan's prime minister.
Janet became a treasure trove of information about the great old Hotel Lucerne (built in 1904) on 79th and Amsterdam, where we were to stay, and a list of great little restaurants close by. She also recommended visiting the Darwin exhibition now open at the Museum of Natural History, and the exhibition on Slavery in America at the New York Historical Society museum.
Knowing my interest in politics, Janet also put me on to another exhibit at the Historical Society: the remarkable display of political campaign buttons and presidential memorabilia in the Henry L. Luce (Time-Life) Foundation collection.
Where else could you see original campaign buttons going back to Abraham Lincoln, as well as the arm chair George Washington sat in for his inauguration?
By the way, George Washington also figures in the slavery exhibition. Though we don't commonly think about it, Washington owned black slaves. When the Revolutionary War had ended, old George tried unsuccessfully to get back a young woman slave who had gone over to the British side in New York. There it seems, she had accepted the Brits' offer to give slaves freedom and be shipped off to Canada.
The recently opened Darwin exhibition, which explores the life and discoveries of Charles Darwin into the theory and science of evolution, is of course especially timely right now amid the controversy in this country brought on by "intelligent design" advocates.
What most fascinated me as an old World War II destroyer sailor was that the 90-foot long wooden HMS Beagle, with Darwin aboard, circumnavigated the globe in the 1850s. We thought being gone two years from our home port was long. Those guys were gone five years. Jolly British pluck, you see.
