It is never to late to seek the truth.
“This is not just a piece of investigative journalism, it is some A+ storytelling” –Wiley Cash
Jerry Mitchell has been a reporter in Mississippi since 1986. The founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, much of his career has been devoted to pursuing unsolved crimes from the Civil Rights era, and it was his work that ultimately led to the prosecution of man who murdered Medgar Evers thirty years after the crime had been committed.
The Evers assassination was a high-profile case, but Mitchell has also investigated cold cases of less well known crimes, such as that of Vernon Dahmer, who managed to save his family when the Klan set fire to his house in 1966, but who died himself from injuries he sustained that night. “What made these crimes so terrible,” Mitchell says in an interview with Greg Iles, “was not just that these Klansmen got away with murder — it was the fact that everybody knew these Klansmen got away with murder. These were injustices at their height. That’s what drove me as a young reporter, and that’s what continues to drive me today.”
Last month Mitchell spoke to Wiley Cash about Race Against Time, his account of some of the cold case investigations he undertook into unsolved crimes from the Civil Rights era as part of the Reader Meet Writer Author Series:
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In this issue:
Bookseller Buzz: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz
Reviews of The Baddest Girl on the Planet by Heather Frese, The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans, Kalamata’s Kitchen by Sarah Thomas, Derek Wallace, Jo Kosmides Edwards (Illus), Infinite Country by Patricia Engel, What’s the Difference? by Brette Warshaw, and The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner.