Meet This Year's MacArthur 'Geniuses'

A newspaper reporter who refuses to forget decades-old murders is among 24 recipients of this year's $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius grants." As in previous years, a wide variety of fields are represented on the list of recipients: There is a novelist and an applied physicist, a photojournalist and a molecular biologist, a painter and a biochemist, physicians and a short story writer, a bridge engineer and poet.

Jerry Mitchell, a reporter with the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., has spent two decades investigating Civil Rights-era slayings, reminding readers that among them were graying old men who had gotten away with murder. Mitchell's reporting on the 1963 murder of civil-rights activist Medgar Evers was instrumental in a new trial and conviction, in 1994, of Byron de la Beckwith.
For the complete list, see the link below.
(More MacArthur Foundation stories.)