While many studies of race relations have focused on the black experience, Race against Time strives to unravel the emotional and cultural foundations of race in the white mind. Jack E. Davis combed primary documents in Natchez, Mississippi, and absorbed the town's oral history to understand white racial attitudes there over the past seven decades, a period rich in social change, strife, and reconciliation. What he found in this community that cultivates for profit a romantic view of the Old South challenges conventional assumptions about racial prejudice.

Jack E. Davis is an associate professor of history at the University of Florida. He is editor or coeditor of several books, including Making Waves: Female Activists in Twentieth-Century Florida and The Civil Rights Movement.