New York, NY: Simon & Schuster (pub: February 2, 2021)

Paperback.

"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, New York Times and National Book Award finalist author of The Splendid and The Vile and The Devil in the White City

An award-winning investigative reporter shares the real-life detective story of how Klansmen came to justice in notorious unsolved civil rights cold cases—decades after they had gotten away with murder.

The MacArthur Genius investigative reporter tells the tick-tock story of three infamous, unsolved Civil Rights Era murders and how he reopened these cold cases, ultimately bringing Klansmen to justice, decades after they'd gotten away with murder.

On June 21, 1964, in the middle of Freedom Summer, over twenty Klansmen gathered on a deserted dirt road in rural Mississippi and murdered three civil rights workers, gunning them down and burying the bodies. The killings--in what would become known as the "Mississippi Burning" case--were among the most brazen acts of violence in the Civil Rights Era. Justice wasn't served until 2005. Since 1989, Mitchell has reopened and resolved some of the nation's most notorious Civil Rights Era murders: not just the Mississippi Burning case but the 1963 assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls, and the 1966 firebombing of activist Vernon Dahmer. In Race Against Time, Mitchell brings to life the moment-by-moment tick-tock of how he brought these cases back to life.

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.