reviewed by Randall Kennedy
RACE AGAINST TIME
A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era
By Jerry Mitchell
A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era
By Jerry Mitchell
In “Race Against Time,” Jerry Mitchell chronicles belated efforts — many of them spurred by his own work as a journalist — to prosecute perpetrators of racially motivated violence in Alabama and Mississippi during the 1960s. Beginning in the 1980s, as a reporter for the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell decided to reinvestigate unsolved civil-rights-era murder cases, pursuing old leads, uncovering new evidence and publishing article after article after article. His journalistic coups revealed an uncanny ability to wheedle incriminating remarks from defensive suspects and damning observations from unfriendly witnesses.
A vivid, quick-paced, accessible account of horrific crimes, “Race Against Time” focuses on four cases in which Mitchell’s reporting played a role. One is the assassination of Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963. A stalwart leader of the Mississippi affiliate of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Evers organized challenges to Jim Crow oppression in every conceivable guise, a daunting mission that kept him busy in the country’s most racially retrograde state. Alighting from his car late at night in front of his home, and clutching a bundle of T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Jim Crow Must Go,” he was hit by a rifle shot and fell to the ground bleeding. His wife and three small children did what they could to comfort him in his last minutes of life.
State authorities twice prosecuted for the murder Byron De La Beckwith, a fervent white supremacist whose guilt was supported by overwhelming evidence. But he escaped conviction owing to hung juries. Nearly three decades later, Mitchell’s revelation that the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a pro-segregationist state agency, had secretly assisted De La Beckwith’s defense put pressure on officials to consider another trial. In 1994, in one of the South’s first “atonement” prosecutions — widely understood as seeking to expiate past wrongs and highlight racial progress in the Deep South — a third jury (the first in the case to include black jurors) finally convicted him.
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