Review: A look at civil rights cases in `Race Against Time'

"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era,” Simon and Schuster, by Jerry Mitchell

As the court reporter for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, Jerry Mitchell developed an obsession with four of the most notorious civil rights cases of the 1960s, including the murder of Medgar Evans on his front yard and the killing of three civil rights workers. But witnesses had died, memories had faded and documents had been destroyed. Finding enough evidence to reopen cases seemed like a worthy but impossible mission.

Mitchell pursued these cases on his own initiative, sometimes straying outside his editor’s guidelines and often thoroughly frightening his wife by, for example, visiting suspected killers at their houses, in remote areas, after sundown. As Mitchell’s stories revealed more and more information on the cases, district attorneys took note and ultimately brought indictments.

This time, jurors convicted those whose crimes has been unpunished for decades.

Mitchell’s work deserves applause for his tenacity in bringing justice where the system failed miserably. His work also highlights the value of high-ideals journalism in a democracy. Were he reporting in Washington or New York, Mitchell would be a nationally renowned journalist, mentioned in the same sentence as Woodward, Bernstein and Hersh.

But Mitchell’s labors were in a poor Southern state, often passed over by the national media.

In the cases he chronicles here, the degree of sheer evil and overt corruption was numbing. Police officers were Klansmen. Witnesses were threatened. Jurors were coerced. The guilty were celebrated. Bible passages were invoked for justification of murdering blacks and civil-rights workers.

Traveling in areas of the old...