Race Against Time

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

By Jerry Mitchell

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020; 421 pages, $28

by Jo Freeman

Justice delayed is not justice denied, is the major conclusion one reaches after reading Jerry Mitchell’s quest to convict the killers of 1960s civil rights activists. But it is a race against time. Many of these killers died normal deaths without serving any time for their misdeeds. But not all. Some lived long enough to be convicted decades later, by juries that could not have existed, let alone convicted, in the 1960s.

Mitchell was a journalist for the Clarion-Ledger, a daily newspaper published out of Jackson, Mississippi but read state-wide. Originally from Texas he joined its staff as a court reporter in 1986. In 1989 he watched Mississippi Burning, a fictional film about the FBI’s investigation of the disappearance and murder of Mickey Schwerner, Andy Goodman and James Chaney near Philadelphia, Mississippi at the start of the 1964 Freedom Summer. The first two were whites from New York. Chaney was a black Mississippian. They were investigating the suspicious burning of a Neshoba County church when they were arrested by deputy sheriff Cecil Price for speeding and held in the Neshoba County jail. Released late at night on June 21, they were stopped by two carloads of KKKers, murdered and buried in an earthen dam several miles away.

Murder is not a federal crime, but the DoJ was the only governmental agency willing to prosecute. Since the sheriff’s office was involved, the DoJ charged 18 men with the federal offense of conspiring to deprive the three of their civil rights under color of law. When federal district judge William Harold Cox dismissed the charges, the DoJ appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which reversed Cox in March of 1966. Despite overwhelming evidence, the jury in the October 1967 trial only convicted seven, after an initial deadlock. The longest term was six years (out of a possible ten).

Mitchell became obsessed with persuading Mississippi authorities to try the perpetrators for murder and finding sufficient evidence to convict them. He partially succeeded when 41 years after the crime, the man who organized the KKK abduction and killing was convicted of manslaughter in a county court and spent the rest of his life in jail.

That was not the only murder he pursued. Other chapters look at the killers of Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, and the four little girls who lost their lives in the September 15, 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church. Those chapters are just as exciting as those on the three young men. Only in the Epilogue does he list the victims whose cases he worked on that did not result in convictions.

Early in the book Mitchell indicts the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency created in 1956 to preserve segregation, for encouraging and facilitating many of the murders. For twenty years it paid people to spy on civil rights organizations and activists, using the information to undermine the movement. It also funded the white Citizens’ Councils.

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