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This story originally appeared in the Jackson Free Press. It was added to the Mississippi Free Press website in 2025.
Note that any opinions expressed in legacy Jackson Free Press stories do not reflect a position of the Mississippi Free Press or necessarily of its staff and board members.

Welcome to the JFP’s new Justice Blog. This blog is dedicated to the quest for justice in old Mississippi civil rights cases. It is also a place we can collect our own work toward that goal to date — the work of a group of native Mississippians who are investigating and publicizing both well-known and little-known civil rights cases of the past. This effort began in earnest when the JFP led an online petition drive, called “Real Mississippians Aren’t Racist,” calling for the prosecution of the murderers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and then picked up steam when the JFP team reported and blogged about the Killen trial in a personal and immediate way that no other media outlet did. Our efforts really paid off when we joined with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and published an in-depth story that kicked off a national media frenzy about the long-forgotten Henry Dee-Charles Moore killings, and revealed that one of the primary suspects is still alive, contrary to reporting by The Clarion-Ledger and The Los Angeles Times.

The purpose of these efforts, and this blog, are at least threefold: (1) to call for over long-overdue justice, (2) to give Mississippians a place to find like-minded people and, thus, strength of conviction and (3) to tell and show the world that native Mississippians — not just “outsiders” and transplants — want to face our past and see justice done, both for the families of the victims, as well as those of who live with the shame of a state that has done too little to quiet its demons of the past. And we have a fourth purpose: to educate and involve young Mississippians in our quest to tell our own stories, and thus learn valuable lessons to help us build a very bright future for all Mississippians in a state we all love dearly.

We will be posting news about “cold cases” on this blog, as well as linking to our investigations in the Jackson Free Press as we continue to reveal more about these cases, as well as other cold cases that deserve justice, too.

We welcome your feedback, and your suggestions or tips about these very vital cases. You can also e-mail information privately to [e-mail missing] .

Previous Comments

Y’all hear that Kennard was pardoned….at long last?


Blogged on it. This made my day! Cheers, TH


I’m bothered by a certain amount of self righteousness I experience when I look back in time. If the situations were the same, I’m afraid our elected officials, our newspapers, our TV stations, our leaders, our preachers and the rest of us would probably do the same thing.The same demons are still around. John Lennon is credited with this quote ,”The same bastards still run everything, they just have different names.” Who said,”The rest of us still sit around with our fingers up our asses?”


There is always the fear that, in the same situation, we of today would be no better than those people of yesterday that we happily deplore. I can’t put myself in that past, though, and neither can you. We just have to be thankful for such progress as has been made and try to be vigilant against the backward things we can slip into so easily. With mankind, it’s always one step forward and one behind.

Founding Editor Donna Ladd is a writer, journalist and editor from Philadelphia, Miss., a graduate of Mississippi State University and later the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was an alumni award recipient in 2021. She writes about racism/whiteness, poverty, gender, violence, journalism and the criminal justice system. She contributes long-form features and essays to The Guardian when she has time, and was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press. She co-founded the statewide nonprofit Mississippi Free Press with Kimberly Griffin in March 2020, and the Mississippi Business Journal named her one of the state's top CEOs in 2024. Read more at donnaladd.com, follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @donnerkay and email her at donna@mississippifreepress.org.