WATERVILLE (AP) – Investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, whose journalistic efforts led to criminal convictions of Ku Klux Klansmen stemming from the Civil Rights era, is this year’s winner of Colby College’s annual Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award.

Mitchell, 47, is a writer for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., and will receive the award and an honorary degree from Colby on Sept. 17.

Mitchell’s work over the years has helped uncover historical evidence that led to trials and convictions of Ku Klux Klansmen, according to Colby officials.

Mitchell wrote about Byron De La Beckwith, convicted in 1994 for the 1963 killing of NAACP worker Medgar Evers, and Edgar Ray Killen, who was convicted last year in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. He also wrote about Bobby Cherry, convicted in 2002 in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church that killed four girls, and Sam Bowers, convicted in 1998 in the 1966 firebombing that killed Vernon the Vernon Dahmer of the NAACP.

Mitchell, 47, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.

Matthew Storin, retired Boston Globe editor and chairman of the Lovejoy Selection Committee, said Mitchell’s work won’t let people forget the racial wrongs of the past.

“Year in and year out, living among the people he both pleases and angers, he ensures that truth marches on,” Storin said.

The Lovejoy award, which was established in 1952, is named for a native of Albion, Maine, and an 1826 graduate of Colby who was killed in 1837, in Alton, Illinois, while defending his abolitionist newspaper against a pro-slavery mob.

Last year’s recipient was Atlanta newspaper columnist and editor Cynthia Tucker, and past recipients have included Studs Terkel, Bill Kovach, David Halberstam, Ellen Goodman, and Daniel Pearl, who received the 2002 award posthumously.