3/28/2007 6:04:00 PM Dearman to receive prestigious Silver Em journalism award
UNIVERSITY - Stanley Dearman, the retired editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, will be awarded the University of Mississippi's most prestigious journalism award next month.
Dearman, who led the newspaper for 40 years before retiring in 2000, will be presented the Department of Journalism's Silver Em award which recognizes an outstanding journalist with a Mississippi connection.
The award announcement cited Dearman's editorial writing that spurred the call for justice in the 1964 civil rights murders, but he editorialized relentlessly throughout his career for such noble causes as the public library, he railed against a booming bootlegging trade in the 1970s and exposed a corrupt county hospital administration.
The award will be presented on April 19 at the Oxford-University Club downtown by Chancellor Robert C. Khayat. The public is invited. For tickets, call the Journalism Department at 662-915-7146.
He was nominated for the honor by Jerry Mitchell, a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger who won the award in 2000 for his own work, which has led to several convictions in old civil rights murder cases.
"Stan deserves a tremendous amount of credit," Mitchell said, for establishing a climate in the Philadelphia, Miss., community that encouraged prosecutors to seek a new trial.
The call for justice led to the conviction of a local man, Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen, who was convicted in 2005 of manslaughter in the Neshoba County case.
Dearman's selection was made by a committee representing the journalism department at Ole Miss.
Dearman graduated from The University of Mississippi in 1959 and was editor of the campus newspaper his senior year.
He took over operation of The Neshoba Democrat at a time when the county had become infamous for the disappearance of three young men during the 1964 "Freedom Summer" campaign. Their bodies were later found buried in a makeshift grave. The case drew international interest and was portrayed in the 1988 movie, "Mississippi Burning."
Though seven men allied with the Ku Klux Klan were found guilty of conspiracy charges in Federal Court in 1967, the case was never prosecuted by the state of Mississippi until Dearman called for action.
He and other Philadelphia residents used the 25th anniversary of the case to begin pushing for justice in 1989.
After high-profile convictions in the 1990s for civil rights crimes committed in the 1960s - Byron de la Beckwith was found guilty of the assassination of Medgar Evers and Ku Klux Klan leader Sam Bowers was convicted of orchestrating the murder of Vernon Dahmer - Dearman succeeded in reviving the Neshoba County case with an editorial in 2000.
"It's time for an accounting," he wrote. "We hope that the attorney general and the district attorney conclude that the case can be effectively prosecuted. It's time."
The case sullied the image of Neshoba County, provoking Dearman to write: "None of this would be an issue if a group of self-appointed saviors of the status quo had not taken it upon themselves to murder three unarmed young men who were arrested on a trumped up traffic charge and held in jail like caged animals until night fell and they could be intercepted by the Ku Klux Klan."
He characterized the Klan as cowardly nightriders "whose bravery increases in direct proportion to their numbers and how long the sun has set."
When Dearman retired, Carolyn Goodman, the mother of Andrew Goodman, one of the murder victims, came to Philadelphia, to pay tribute to the editor.
"You gave to me and my family an understanding and warmth that we needed so desperately at a time when it seemed our wounds would never be healed," she told him at a retirement reception.
James E. Prince III, who succeeded Dearman as editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, wrote in 2001: "Dearman's reporting has changed many of our perspectives regarding that incident which has haunted this community . . . His warmth and compassion cut through the bitterness and grief, the anger that would have surely engulfed any of us had it been our family member."
Prince would go on to co-chair the Philadelphia Coalition that issued the call for justice in 2004.
Susan Glisson, executive director of the University of Mississippi's William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, recalled that "one of the highlights of my life will be the memory of Stanley Dearman's expression as the multiracial Philadelphia Coalition filed into city hall in May 2004, to issue the first community call for justice in the deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. He told me that he never thought he'd live to see such a day, but his very life and work and courage ensured that the day would come."
Dearman was inducted into the Mississippi Press Association's Hall of Fame in June 2005 in the middle of the Killen trial, as it would happen.
Dearman in 1989 was the first recipient of Neshoba County's Citizen of the Year award.
The Silver Em has been awarded yearly since 1958. Among the winners are the late Turner Catledge, a Neshoba County resident and former Neshoba Democrat staffer who went on to become managing editor of The New York Times; Bill Minor, a figure in Mississippi journalism for 60 years; Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief of The Los Angeles Times; William Raspberry, former columnist for The Washington Post; and three late Mississippi editors and publishers who won Pulitzer Prizes for defying local conventions: Hodding Carter, Hazel Brannon Smith and Ira Harkey.
Reader Comments
Posted: Thursday, April 05, 2007
Article comment by:
Joan Dearman Geiger
Thanks for the good article and for giving Stan credit he deserves. As a man who loves nothng more than to quietly enjoy playing his piano and listening to excellent music, he is a fiesty fellow who will do whatever he feels he must, to bring about the positive ends which he desires to see. We are thankful he made the decision he did, let his moral compass guide him, and in doing so, contribute to positive change for the good of the people he cares so much about in Neshoba county. He said, just after moving to Philadelphia, "There are a few who are bent on causing destruction. Someone has to start building bridges." I think he has laid a good foundation for the bridge now rising from the land, strong enough to support the coming together around the simple reality of a shared community. Thanks, Jim, for your good work, Keep it going.
