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Race Against Time

A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era

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About The Book

“For almost two decades, investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell doggedly pursued the Klansmen responsible for some of the most notorious murders of the civil rights movement. This book is his amazing story. Thanks to him, and to courageous prosecutors, witnesses, and FBI agents, justice finally prevailed.” —John Grisham, author of The Guardians

On June 21, 1964, more than twenty Klansmen murdered three civil rights workers. The killings, in what would become known as the “Mississippi Burning” case, were among the most brazen acts of violence during the civil rights movement. And even though the killers’ identities, including the sheriff’s deputy, were an open secret, no one was charged with murder in the months and years that followed.

It took forty-one years before the mastermind was brought to trial and finally convicted for the three innocent lives he took. If there is one man who helped pave the way for justice, it is investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell.

In Race Against Time, Mitchell takes readers on the twisting, pulse-racing road that led to the reopening of four of the most infamous killings from the days of the civil rights movement, decades after the fact. His work played a central role in bringing killers to justice for the assassination of Medgar Evers, the firebombing of Vernon Dahmer, the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham and the Mississippi Burning case. Mitchell reveals how he unearthed secret documents, found long-lost suspects and witnesses, building up evidence strong enough to take on the Klan. He takes us into every harrowing scene along the way, as when Mitchell goes into the lion’s den, meeting one-on-one with the very murderers he is seeking to catch. His efforts have put four leading Klansmen behind bars, years after they thought they had gotten away with murder.

Race Against Time is an astonishing, courageous story capturing a historic race for justice, as the past is uncovered, clue by clue, and long-ignored evils are brought into the light. This is a landmark book and essential reading for all Americans.

Excerpt

Chapter 1 1
The Ford station wagon topped a hill before disappearing into the darkness. Mickey Schwerner drove, deep in thought. Fellow New Yorker Andy Goodman propped his body against the passenger door, drifting off to sleep. Mississippi native James Chaney, the lone African-American, swallowed hard, shifting in the backseat.

Two cars and a pickup truck raced to catch up. Schwerner spotted them in his rearview mirror. “Uh-oh.”

The noise woke Goodman. “What is it? What do they want?”

Schwerner rolled down the window and stuck out his arm, motioning for the car to pass. “Is it a cop?”

Goodman gazed back. “I can’t see.”

The car crunched into the wagon, and Schwerner wondered aloud if their pursuers were playing a joke.

“They ain’t playin’,” Chaney said. “You better believe it.”

Metal and glass smashed again. “What are we going to do?” Goodman asked.

Schwerner told his fellow civil rights workers to hold on. He jerked the wagon off the blacktop onto a dirt road, sending up a swirl of dust. His pursuers weren’t shaken. Instead, they flipped on police lights and began to close the distance again.

Schwerner spotted the crimson glow in his rearview mirror and cursed. “It is a cop.”

Goodman advised, “Better stop.”

“Okay, sit tight, you guys. Don’t say anything. Let me talk.”

Schwerner turned to Chaney. “We’ll be all right. Just relax.”

The wagon squeaked to a stop. Doors opened and slammed shut, interrupting a chorus of frogs.

Flashlights bathed them in light. A Klansman with a crew cut told Schwerner, “Y’all think you can drive any speed you want around here?”

“You had us scared to death, man,” Schwerner replied.

“Don’t you call me ‘man,’ Jew-boy.”

“No, sir, what should I call you?”

“Don’t call me nothing, nigger-lovin’ Jew-boy. You just listen.”

“Yes, sir.”

The crew cut moved closer to the driver and sniffed. “Hell, you’re even startin’ to smell like a nigger, Jew-boy.”

Schwerner reassured Goodman, “We’ll be all right.”

“Sure you will, nigger lover.”

“He seen your face,” a fellow Klansman advised. “That ain’t good. You don’t want him seein’ your face.”

“Oh,” the crew cut replied, “it don’t make no difference no more.”

He pressed his pistol against Schwerner’s temple and pulled the trigger. Blood spattered against Goodman. “Oh, shit, we’re into it now, boys,” one Klansman said.

Three shots echoed in the night air.

“You only left me a nigger, but at least I shot me a nigger,” another Klansman said with a chuckle, joining a choir of laughter.

Everything went dark. White letters spelled out on a black screen: “Mississippi, 1964.”

I was one of several dozen people watching the film Mississippi Burning tonight, squeezed inside a theater where coarse blue fabric covered metal chairs. Nothing distinguished this movie house from thousands of other multiplexes across America. Except, of course, that this was not just any place.

This was Mississippi—a place where some of the nation’s poorest people live on some of the world’s richest soil, a place with the nation’s highest illiteracy rate and some of the world’s greatest writers. Decades earlier, Mississippi had bragged in tourist brochures about being “The Hospitality State.” What it failed to mention was it led the nation in the lynchings of African-Americans between the Civil War and the civil rights movement.

Through newspaper photographs and television news, Americans had witnessed the brutality in Mississippi for themselves. In spring 1963, they saw police dogs attack civil rights workers in Greenwood. Months later, they observed the trail of blood left by NAACP leader Medgar Evers when he was assassinated in the driveway of his Jackson home. During the summer of 1964, Americans watched sailors tromp through swamps in search of the three missing civil rights workers, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, who were last seen leaving the small town of Philadelphia, Mississippi.

For forty-four days, the drama unfolded before the nation. Mississippi’s US senator Jim Eastland told President Lyndon B. Johnson that he believed the missing trio were part of a “publicity stunt,” and Mississippi governor Paul Johnson Jr. suggested they “could be in Cuba.” Days before the FBI unearthed their bodies on August 4, 1964, the governor spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, just two miles from that grisly discovery. He told the cheering crowd there were hundreds of people missing in Harlem, and “somebody ought to find them.”

The killings came to define what the world thought of Mississippi, and no subsequent events had dislodged it by the time I came here in 1986 as the lowliest of reporters for the Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper The Clarion-Ledger. I arrived the day before my twenty-seventh birthday, the same day the paper carried a story about the burial of Senator Eastland, the longtime chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who had bragged about having extra pockets sewn into his jacket to kill all those civil rights bills.

The days of Jim Crow had long passed when I drove into this capital city of nearly 200,000 with my wife and our baby daughter. Jackson was bursting with New South pride and Old South prejudice, but doing its best to conceal the latter. I had been here three years now, from 1986 to 1989, and put thousands of miles on my Honda hatchback in that time, trying to find my feet as a reporter while trying to understand this beautiful and haunted state. When I first heard Mississippians refer to “the War,” I thought they were talking about Vietnam—only to discover they meant their great-grandfathers’ Civil War, which their descendants, it seemed, had never stopped fighting.

At my desk, I had read the January 9, 1989, issue of Time magazine, which featured the Mississippi Burning movie on the cover. Jackson had been abuzz about the film since last spring, when some residents complained about “Hollywood liberals” invading their town. Disdain turned to curiosity when word spread that actor Gene Hackman had been spotted at Hal and Mal’s, a popular pub and eatery. Lunch crowds doubled.

I was curious, too, about this movie and how it would impact Mississippi. I had volunteered to cover its state premiere at a January 10 press screening. At The Clarion-Ledger, the statewide medium-sized newspaper, I felt like little more than a rookie. And tonight’s assignment seemed like a welcome break from the court beat, where I faced the daily battle of getting scooped by my more talented rival at the Jackson Daily News, Beverly Pettigrew Kraft. I could hardly count it as a victory that she wasn’t in attendance. This was, after all, a minor story.

But I hadn’t counted on the attendance of the man sitting next to me at the screening. After the opening scene, his voice startled me, deep and resonant. “That’s not accurate,” he said, gesturing up at the title card. He leaned over and explained that it was Chaney, not Schwerner, who was the driver that night.

As the night wore on, I learned just how much he knew. His voice blended with the images on-screen. After a young African-American witnessed KKK violence, FBI agents in the film concealed his identity with a cardboard box, driving him around Neshoba County to look for his attackers. The man next to me leaned my way and said, “That really happened.”

When the house lights came on, I asked what he thought of the movie.

“It’s fiction, all right,” the white-haired man replied, explaining that the movie had fictionalized how the FBI had solved the case.

I jotted down his words on a legal pad I was carrying, and I began to chat with the man, who had firsthand knowledge of the case. Roy K. Moore was the retired special agent in charge of the FBI in Mississippi, which investigated the June 21, 1964, killings we had just seen reenacted on-screen. I was grateful he had come, allowing me to tie Hollywood to the real history in tomorrow’s newspaper.

Moore turned to speak to the two men behind us. They included Jim Ingram, a six-foot-four Oklahoma native who had been involved in the investigation and headed the FBI’s civil rights desk in Mississippi, and veteran journalist Bill Minor, who had covered the killings and invited the pair here.

While the rest of the press left, I lingered and listened to these old men, wondering why my history teachers had failed to mention these events in class. I peppered the men with questions about the case. They told me that more than twenty Klansmen had taken these three young men out to a dark, remote road and executed them. They said locals knew these suspects, yet no one turned them in. The perpetrators kept working and walking the streets as if they had been caught speeding, rather than carrying out a triple murder.

“No one was ever prosecuted for murder?” I asked.

“Nobody,” Moore replied.

I had heard of people getting away with murder before, but I had never heard of twenty people getting away with murder at the same time—no less, in a case that made headlines around the globe. They had shot to death these three young men, and the state of Mississippi had done nothing about it. How was that possible?

Even now, the former investigators seemed at a loss to explain it.

Mississippi Burning became one of the nation’s most controversial films. Critic Roger Ebert called it “the best film of 1988,” saying it makes “an important statement about a time and a condition that should not be forgotten.” But veterans of the civil rights movement bashed the movie for turning agents from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI into heroes while portraying activists as cowards.

The bickering blazed hotter in Mississippi than anywhere else. Crowds flocked to the film, some to be entertained and some to be outraged. Mississippi governor Ray Mabus, who had Hollywood good looks to go with his Harvard University education, appeared on the Today show and spoke to the National Press Club. “The message I don’t want people thinking is, ‘That’s Mississippi today.’ The message I do want them coming out with is how far Mississippi has come. I know that there are things in our past that everybody would like to change—in all of our pasts—but we can’t affect that. What we can affect is the future.”

As I wrapped up my story on the film premiere, I sought a comment from Mabus’s office, telephoning his press secretary, Kevin Vandenbroek. He echoed the party line about the film: “A mixed blessing. If there’s a silver lining, it gives Mississippi a chance to say, ‘That was then’ and, ‘This is what’s going on now.’?”

But there was something else he wanted to say. He asked to go off the record, and I agreed. An award-winning radio and TV reporter before taking his current job, Vandenbroek couldn’t resist sharing a little advice. “Have you ever thought about the case, the real murders being revisited?”

“No,” I said.

“You know it’s not too late. Bill Baxley, the attorney general over in Alabama, prosecuted some Klan cases back in the seventies. Went after those bastards that blew up those four girls in the Birmingham church.”

“I didn’t know that. How can you—?”

“I thought you were a court reporter.”

“I am.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What’s that?”

“There is no statute of limitations for murder.”

About The Author

James Patterson

Jerry Mitchell has been a reporter in Mississippi since 1986. A winner of more than 30 national awards, Mitchell is the founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. The nonprofit is continuing his work of exposing injustices and raising up a new generation of investigative reporters.

Product Details

Raves and Reviews

“For almost two decades, investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell doggedly pursued the Klansmen responsible for some of the most notorious murders of the civil rights movement. This book is his amazing story. Thanks to him, and to courageous prosecutors, witnesses, and FBI agents, justice finally prevailed.”
—John Grisham, author of The Guardians

"Chilling and gripping. And rest assured, Jerry Mitchell is the real deal—a dogged, fearless crusader for truth, and one hell of a story teller."
—Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and The Vile

“Jerry Mitchell's memoir revives promise for journalism. In this stirring, insider's account of four notorious crimes from the 1960s, his tenacious allies defy race and resignation to win historic miracles for justice.”
—Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters

"Jerry Mitchell is an instrument of redemption for Mississippi, and boy do we need him now. Read his story and be inspired by it.”
—Greg Iles, New York Times bestselling author of Cemetery Road and Natchez Burning

Race Against Time chronicles Jerry Mitchell’s relentless and fearless pursuit of truth in decades old crimes from the civil rights era that provided justice for families and communities and put murderous Klansmen behind bars for life. He is living proof of the central role investigative journalism plays in preserving our democracy. This book should be read and studied for many years to come."
—U.S. Senator Doug Jones

“It’s one thing to have a great story to tell. But it’s another thing to have it told by a great storyteller. Jerry Mitchell has written this book with power, talent, and conscience."
—Rick Bragg, author of All Over but the Shoutin’

“This is a deep dive into the soul of America, a must-read for anybody interested in the Civil Rights Movement.”
—Jeff Steinberg, founder of the Sojourn Project

“I’ve never met anyone so committed to the truth and revealing the truth than Jerry Mitchell. He ignited the movement to bring justice to my family and so many others.”
Reena Evers-Everette, daughter of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers

“The nation owes Jerry Mitchell a debt of gratitude.”
—David Goodman, brother of slain civil rights worker Andrew Goodman

“Brave, bracing and instructive…Race Against Time admirably assumes the heavy burden that Jerry Mitchell takes on; it warrants praise, gratitude, and a wide audience.”
—Randall Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review

“Taut and riveting…Race Against Time provides a sobering view of white-supremacist politics…Like a child turning over rocks in a creek bed to reveal what slimy creatures lie beneath, Mr. Mitchell has taken pleasure in making life difficult for these homegrown terrorists.”
—Joseph Crespino, The Wall Street Journal

“[A] valuable memoir…no other journalist has made a greater contribution to cold-case investigations.”
—David J. Garrow, The Washington Post

“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.”
—Jeff Rowe, Associated Press

"Race Against Time is [Mitchell's] spellbinding account of how his dogged reporting and relentless pursuit of the truth changed history. Think Spotlight meets All the President’s Men."
Southern Review of Books

Race Against Time provides the pleasures of both a detective novel and a courtroom drama....And the raw material for Race Against Time is storyteller’s gold: a compelling pursuit of justice combined with a real-life Southern Gothic atmosphere....an important and often compelling book. And Mitchell is a national treasure."
Christian Science Monitor

“Exacting and nail-bitingly exciting...[Race Against Time is] a far-reaching, sometimes quixotic quest for the truth.”
O Magazine

"[A] fast-paced account of the slow path to justice in a series of racially motivated murder cases...A fine work of investigative journalism and an essential addition to the history of the civil rights movement."
Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"[A] superb first book...Under death threats, [Jerry Mitchell] raced against time to interview witnesses before they died and bring justice to families who had been denied it. This thrilling true crime account deserves a wide audience."
Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[Race Against Time] is riveting...this is both an important Civil Rights document and a timely read in the wake of the recent rise of hate crimes."
Booklist, starred review

“In what would be the genesis of a far-reaching, sometimes quixotic quest for the truth, ultimately leading to a conviction in that case and others, Mitchell experienced ‘the electric feeling of discovering a story that needs to be told.’ Readers can expect the same sensation on every page of Mitchell’s vital and timely inquiry, especially as his remarkable shoe-leather effort finally brings the justice King dreamed of.”
Oprahmag.com

"With a title that could not be more apt, Race Against Time is an expansion of Jerry Mitchell's work as an investigative reporter. It reads like a fictional thriller, but is an all-too-true account of horrifying past crimes and those who perpetrated them."
Newsweek

“Gripping…It is, on one level, the closest memoir can get to a John Grisham thriller. On another level, it’s a profound firsthand testament to how, per Faulkner, the past is never dead, but neither is the need for justice.”
Garden & Gun

"In [Race Against Time], Mitchell never portrays himself as a hero. Readers, however, might correctly conclude that 'hero' is an appropriate word."
Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Mitchell has made it his life’s work to bring to trial the homegrown terrorists who fostered white supremacy and hatred for decades in the American South, particularly in Mississippi. He has done so at great personal sacrifice and risk, and [Race Against Time] is a compelling record of his efforts."
Washington Review of Books

"[This] riveting book tells the harrowing and triumphant story of an uncompromising quest for justice."
The Philadelphia Sun

“[An] uncovering of some of the South’s deepest, darkest secrets.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Sobering and suspenseful...a must-read."
Florida Courier

"We cannot know where we are going, unless we know where we have been. Mississippi investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell has reported for decades on southern racist violence. His book, Race Against Time, offers a clear-eyed assessment of race relations in America that helps us come to term with our painful past. There is a through line from slavery, to Jim Crow, to the protests of today. We are in a "race against time" to save our democracy from itself, an existential crisis born of our own original sin. Read this book, and begin the work that needs to be done, now."
—Jami Floyd, Host & Legal Editor, New York Public Radio

"In an era of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, Race Against Time is required reading. Before cellphone videos could move a nation to action, Race Against Time tells the stories of how murders of black men were covered up, how white perpetrators were protected, and how so many cases grew cold. But the coldest of cases were no match for Jerry Mitchell. With his fearless, truth-at-all-costs investigative reporting, Mitchell found the evidence needed to send klansmen to jail, to expose the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, and find justice in some our countries most storied cold cases. Race Against Time tells the stories of the most infamous cold cases of the civil rights movement—the assassinations of Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer, the Sixteenth Street church bombing, and the Mississippi Burning murders—and, decades later, the story of one reporter’s unstoppable quest for justice."
—Dave Tell, author of Remembering Emmett Till

"It’s really tempting in reading Jerry Mitchell's riveting book, Race Against Time, to stare at the face of evil and miss the obvious: white Southerners of all stripes dutifully protected these Klansman for decades. Minus some brave journalists and prosecutors, these terrorists could have lived out their days, drawing air from the white supremacy that formed them. In 2020, we’re witnessing in excruciating detail how noxious that environment remains—and just how widespread. Mitchell's harrowing narrative forces us to look closely at law enforcement in 1960s’ America, only to see that a Cecil Price and Lawrence Rainey are perhaps more common than we could have possibly imagined.”
—Davis Houck, co-editor of The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer

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