NATCHEZ —Why not let the past rest?

The answer — or many answers — to that question were explored Friday during a Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration forum featuring investigative reporters Jerry Mitchell and Stanley Nelson and New York Times best-selling author and Natchez native Greg Iles.

The writers’ works have revolved around civil rights murders and race relations, and the forum explored the reasoning behind why Mitchell, Nelson and Iles have dedicated their work to those topics.

The answer in the case of Mitchell, who is an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, is more than just the convictions that came as a result of his work, the Pulitzer Prize finalist said.

Mitchell’s work helped convict Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers; Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for ordering the fatal firebombing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer in 1966; Bobby Cherry for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four girls and blinded another girl; and Edgar Ray Killen for helping organize the 1964 killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

Mitchell spoke about his experiences in reporting on the cold cases and covering the trials.

Mitchell’s work, along with the work of other investigative reporters, has resulted in 24 convictions for civil rights cases.

“A lot of people deserve credit, and it’s a matter of faith to me, but I believe God’s hands are involved in these cases,” he said.

The most amazing result of the work, Mitchell said, has not been the convictions.

“It’s been some of the racial reconciliation,” he said.

Mitchell told a story of how Billie Roy Pitts, who was involved in the arson of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer’s home that later killed Dahmer, ran into Dahmer’s widow, Ellie, during the trial in the courthouse and apologized and asked for her forgiveness.

“And she forgave him,” Mitchell said. “And she began to cry, and then the Dahmer children who were there began to cry, and (Pitts) began to cry, and I began to cry.

“Isn’t that really what redemption is all about? Trying to make things right even after they have gone so terribly wrong in the past? Mississippi is embracing redemption, and I think it’s a great thing.”

New York Times best-selling author and Natchez native Greg Iles spoke less about his own work and more about the work of Concordia Sentinel Editor Stanley Nelson, to whom Iles said he owes a great debt.

Nelson’s cases, Iles said, form a fictional background for Iles’ next trilogy, which begins with “Natchez Burning.” Iles commended the tireless effort Nelson has put into investigating civil rights cold cases.

Nelson has written hundreds of stories about civil rights murder cold cases, including that of Frank Morris who died in 1964 after four days of suffering from third-degree burns on 100 percent of his body. The injuries came after a group of Ku Klux Klansmen burned down his Ferriday shoe shop in the middle of the night, with him inside.

Nelson was honored in 2011 as a Pulitzer Prize finalist for local reporting for his investigative reporting on the murder of Morris.

Iles showed a 21-minute documentary put together largely by Iles’ 17-year-old son, Mark, over the past five days.

The film was made for Nelson, Iles said, and shows Concordia Parish as a center of operations for the violent Silver Dollar Group and tells the stories of civil rights murder victims, including Joseph “Joe-Ed” Edwards, who worked at the Shamrock Motor Hotel in Vidalia.

The murder was depicted in the film, with Cathedral School senior Ishmael Blackmon playing Edwards .

The film also tells the story of Morris, and Nelson says in the film that the day he first wrote about Morris was the day he first heard his name.

“All I knew that I could do, or any reporter could do … was to stay with the story, and luckily the Sentinel had owners that let me do that, let me stay with the story for so long, because I think most people in this region right now know who Frank Morris is and know who Joseph Edwards is, and they know about the Silver Dollar Group, and they know about our very violent racial history back in those days that I don’t think anyone would have wanted to admit before.”

Before the film began, Iles said he was not there to criticize Natchez or Concordia Parish.

“One of the most asked questions is, ‘Man, you’re a best-selling writer, you could live anywhere in the world. Why in the world do you live in Natchez?’” Iles said.

“You either can’t answer or you talk for 24 hours about why that’s true.

“I’m not here to slam Natchez. I’m not here to slam Concordia Parish. Most people here are good people. Most of them always were. But I think we have to remember what Martin Luther King Jr. said, which is when history is written, years hence, it will not be these terrible acts of these evil people that will be remembered; it will be the appalling silence of the good people.”

Mitchell and Nelson have done “what we have not,” Iles said, in working to uncover and publicize the real truth.

Iles went on to say after the film that, “If the question of this conference is why not let the past rest, have we not answered that question already with what you just saw?”

“Is it even a conversation?” he said. “If those were white men who had been killed that way, would we even be sitting here this many years later discussing it?”