Truth rules. This has been a guiding principle of mine throughout my career. Truth rules, while hate thrives on obfuscation, murkiness, and fear. – Jerry Mitchell
Jerry Mitchell is a reporter’s reporter. His book about the stories he has reported—stories that finally brought justice to the families of the victims of the most infamous hate crimes of the civil rights era, making Mitchell a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—titled Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era, is appropriately gritty, just-the-facts journalism delivered with keen insight, and is an utterly gripping narrative.
Mitchell started working for the Clarion-Ledger, the daily paper in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1988, and just happened to fall into writing about long-cold investigations into famous cases involving the murders of civil rights activists by local Ku Klux Klan members in the course of his daily work as a cops-and-courts reporter.
It started when he went to a local screening of Mississippi Burning, the Hollywood movie about the infamous murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964. Seated around him in the theater were FBI agents who in fact had worked the original case, and their remarks set Mitchell to snooping. It was clear, after all, that many of the men who had killed Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman had largely gotten away with murder, and that those who had done jail time had received slaps on the wrist.
Mitchell set to work to expose the crimes that those men, still alive and smirking, were in fact still liable for committing, since there is no statute of limitations on murder. However, the Philadelphia case soon turned stone-cold, despite his best efforts at digging.
In the process, though, Mitchell was tipped off to a similar notorious murder right in his own backyard: the 1963 assassination of NAACP official Medgar Evers, mowed down by a sniper’s high-powered bullet in the driveway of his home in Jackson as his wife and children looked on in horror.
A white Mississippi Klan member, Byron De La Beckwith, was charged at the time with the killing, but was freed after an all-white jury deadlocked. As Mitchell began digging into the case, he uncovered a wealth of evidence, much of it gathered well after the fact, proving Beckwith’s guilt largely beyond doubt. Moreover, Beckwith, believing he was untouchable, had taken to boasting about the killing.
Mitchell’s subsequent stories, including interviews with Beckwith, in the Clarion-Ledger set off both local and state investigations. Eventually, Beckwith was retried, found guilty, and imprisoned for the rest of his life. (Beckwith died in 2001 at age 80.)
The success of Mitchell’s investigation into the Evers case led to projects in which he applied similar research and interview techniques to reopen official investigations into similarly infamous cases: the assassination, by Klan members, of another civil rights figure, Vernon Dahmer Sr., in 1966 in Hattiesburg; the murders of four schoolgirls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—by Klansmen who had planted a bomb at the church in Birmingham, Alabama, they attended in September 1963.
Part of what gives Race Against Time its propulsive feel is Mitchell’s step-by-step accumulation of evidence against these hateful men, as well as their endless threats against him for exposing them. But a lot of what makes it such a satisfying read is that he also actually succeeded in getting law enforcement officials to haul the men back into the courtroom, convict them, and put them away.
Eventually, Mitchell is able to return to the case of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, too—and finally obtain the justice that case deserved. In all these cases, the killers had become fairly elderly. But, as Mitchell’s story makes plain, they never ceased being vicious. They never do.