Jerry Mitchell remembers what so many others want to forget. For more than three decades, he worked as an investigative reporter for The Clarion Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi. During that time, his dogged reporting helped put four Klansmen in jail after they had eluded justice year after year for their heinous crimes in the 1960s.

Mitchell tells this story of justice delayed and finally done in his new book, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era.

When I began teaching Southern history, I wondered how my neighbors who grew up here would react. And I’ve learned to assume ignorance, rather than hostility. So let’s have the truth, because without it we can’t be set free. Mitchell told me:

“My sense is when you talk about this particular history is that a lot of people don’t know it. That’s the reaction I’ve gotten to my book, which has kind of been fascinating. . . . The civil-rights movement has unfortunately gotten short-handed into Rosa Parks sat down, Martin Luther King stood up, and African Americans got their rights.”

Mitchell joined me on Gospelbound to discuss what compelled him to seek justice, the Christian pretensions of the Ku Klux Klan, and whether the gospel can finally bring healing to this beautiful and broken land, especially the Deep South we call home.