BY DR. GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
SPECIAL TO THE FLORIDA COURIER
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote in “Requiem for a Nun.’’ “It’s not even past.”
In “Race Against Time,’’ Jerry Mitchell applies this aphorism to racially motived murders of the 1960s: The assassination of Medgar Evers; the fire-bombing of the home of Vernon Dahmer; the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four girls; and the Mississippi Burning killing of James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
A journalist for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi for more than three decades and the founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Mitchell braved death threats to play a pivotal role in reopening and prosecuting these cold cases. Sobering and suspenseful, his book is a must-read during Black History month.