An inside look: Novelist Greg Iles talks with 'Race Against Time' author Jerry Mitchell

Greg Iles
Special to Clarion Ledger

Novelist Greg Iles ("Cemetery Road" "Natchez Burning") takes a break from his quarantine writing to interview Jerry Mitchell, a former longtime investigative reporter for The Clarion Ledger whose pursuit of unpunished killings is featured in his new book, "Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era,” (Simon and Schuster).

"Race Against Time" by Jerry Mitchell

Iles: First, Jerry, let me say congratulations on your great book. You've always been a first-class writer, and "Race Against Time" is an important achievement. You’ve had some bad luck, timing-wise, with the COVID-19 outbreak occurring in the middle of your book’s publication. 

"Race Against Time" chronicles very important work. I hope people isolating at home will check it out. Now, as a fellow author, I want to ask you some questions that might differ from the usual publicity type interviews we get from book critics and reporters. 

Iles: You’ve worked some very high-profile civil rights murder cases, but also other killings of what Southerners call “regular black folks,” people who had no history of activism but who nevertheless were targeted at random. Tell us about the differences —if there are any — between investigating and writing about the two kinds of cases. Have you found it more difficult to get readers at large — or the media — to pay attention to the cases that had less well-known victims?

Mitchell: In terms of getting attention for lesser known victims, it has been difficult. In the summer of 1964, the press walked away from the killings of two young African Americans after the FBI learned the bodies weren’t the missing civil rights workers. Two years later, Klansmen killed a handyman named Ben Chester White in hopes of luring Martin Luther King Jr. to Natchez, Mississippi, to assassinate him.

Jerry Mitchell

Those killers also went unpunished, and the press ignored that case. 

The national press also ignored cases involving lesser known activists. That’s why I took the time in my reporting to paint a picture of Vernon Dahmer, an NAACP leader from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, who fought his whole life for the right of all Americans to be able to vote.

On Jan. 10, 1966, a group of Klansmen set his house on fire and began shooting into the house. Dahmer woke up, grabbed his shotgun, ran to the front of the house and began firing back at the Klansmen so that his family could escape safely out a back window. Unfortunately, the flames of the fire seared his lungs, and he died later that night.

A few weeks later in the mail came his voter registration card. He had fought his whole life for all Americans to be able to vote, but he had never been able to cast a ballot himself. Most Americans don’t know the name Vernon Dahmer, but they should.

Review: 'Race Against Time'

Iles: Are there cases other than the Medgar Evers assassination where you’ve had to work especially hard to gain the trust of victims’ surviving family members, friends, and co-workers? Has the fact of you being a white man been a problem in this regard?

Mitchell: I can’t say enough good things about the families I’ve met and encountered. It would have been easy for them to distrust me — I mean, here I am this Southern white guy — but they did come to trust me. I think Myrlie Evers, the widow of Medgar Evers, and her family developed that trust after seeing my work over time.

And after Medgar Evers’ assassin was indicted in late 1990, other families approached me. The son of Vernon Dahmer, who died defending his family from a KKK attack in Mississippi, telephoned me about his father’s murder, and I began working on that case.

Greg Iles

Iles: When I deal with Hollywood in regard to my "Natchez" trilogy, I’ve found that some studios have this wish that my heroic journalist would be a young black reporter in the series version. That would make for a satisfying narrative, of course, as it seems that’s how it should be: a young, idealistic black reporter seeks the buried truths of the old, unsolved civil rights murders.  But in real life — at least in the large number of cases worked by you and by Stanley Nelson, who inspired the reporter in my trilogy — it’s a couple of middle-aged white guys who did the digging. That’s the truth of it.

 What drove you as a younger man to pursue these cases? And then to continue working them through middle age? Have you met many young black journalists, male or female, working any of the old murders?  If so, who are they?

Mitchell: I’ve met a lot of people, young and old, black and white, male and female, interested in these cases. I know African American documentary filmmaker Keith Beauchamp has pursued many of them. It is true that a number of white guys like Stanley Nelson, John Fleming, David Ridgen, Ben Greenberg and myself have pursued these cases. In fact, we even formed a Civil Rights Cold Case Unit to help us in that pursuit.

What made these crimes so terrible 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.

Iles: Given our home state’s sometimes well-deserved reputation for backwardness and stupidity, I’ll ask you a question I get asked a lot. How have Mississippians reacted to the work you are doing, and the writing you do about it? The perception outside the state is that Mississippians will resent “dredging up the past.” Has that been your experience? Has the local reaction changed over the past 30 years?

Mitchell: When I first started writing about these cases in 1989, I faced a lot of hostility. After I wrote about the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers, a white man called on the telephone and said, “What are you doing writing about this dead n-----?” I had more than a few people question me about why I was “writing about the past,” and that I was simply going to stir up hard feelings. I often responded with a question, “How would you feel if it was your loved one?”

But as the years passed, attitudes began to change. More and more support emerged for the prosecution of these cases. Since then, I’ve had many Mississippians, white and black, come up to me and thank me for my work, believing that these convictions have helped to bring healing to this state.

Iles: Finally, do you ever feel a tension between working on cases where the victims are long dead, and those where people’s lives are still at stake, such as the nightmare presently going on in the Mississippi prison system? Clearly those old cases are critically important, but the prison scandal involves the lives of thousands of men and women. And you’ve done very important work on that story. How do you decide where to put the majority of your energy?

Mitchell: The main idea of exposing injustices is to see something done about them, to see justice finally done. That’s what "Race Against Time" is about, attempting to squeeze at least some measure of justice out of these murders that went unpunished for so long. And I see the prison crisis in much the same way. This is a hidden world, where many injustices unfortunately take place. The Justice Department is now investigating our prisons, and hopefully something will be done about these injustices.

Iles: Jerry, I want to congratulate you again on "Race Against Time." Again, I hope people looking for escape from the tedium of quarantine will get the book and read about your quest for justice for those to whom it was denied for so long. I think it will give them a sense of hope that great things can be accomplished in the face of overwhelming odds.