Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial
Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial

Three years after the FBI promised to investigate more than 100 unresolved civil rights-era killings, they have  made some surprising discoveries.  Most of the cases will close without indictments. .  The investigations led to very few indictments even though most of the cases were technically solved.  The passage of time left many witnesses too traumatized by events, witnesses  and perpetrators dead and other problems that are unique to cold cases.

Five to seven cases still remain unsolved.  According to the Washington Post:

“There’s maybe five to seven cases where we don’t know who did it,” said FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who is heading the bureau’s effort. “Some we know; others we know but can’t prove. For every other case, we got it.”

Even without taking cases to court, the project has filled in broad gaps in the stories of the murdered, many of whom were forgotten victims from a brutal chapter of American history.

Officials now believe, for example, that an Alabama state trooper killed an unarmed civil rights protester in 1965, a case that helped inspire the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to march in the state. In the deaths of two North Carolina men in police custody — one found in 1956 with a crushed skull and the other who refused medical treatment in 1960 after a heart attack — the agency concluded that there was no federal law it could use to pursue the cases.

Investigators have walked through rural cemeteries looking for clues, searched yellowed documents in government archives and interviewed witnesses, some so shattered by their experiences that they still refused to talk. Along the way, officials discovered a more complex story than they had imagined.

The FBI also made some very surprising discoveries that had nothing to do with civil rights tensions or crimes:

In nearly one-fifth of the 108 cases, they learned that the deaths had no connection to the racial unrest pulsing through the South at the height of the civil rights struggle.

In at least one case, the victim had been killed by a relative, but the family blamed the Ku Klux Klan. In other cases, a victim drowned or was fatally knifed in a bar fight. Two black women registering voters in the hot Mississippi summer died in a car accident. One man died under his mistress — a bedroom secret kept for more than four decades until the bureau came calling.

Those who wanted issues resolved and closure after decades are probably disappointed.  Some things simply cannot be rectified.  A very pitted and scarred chapter of our national history cannot be undone.  We can only learn from the past.  Prosecuting decades old civil rights cases is beginning to take on the tone of hunting and prosecuting Nazis.  So many of the perpetrators are dead or are so old, it hardly seems worth it to go to the expensive of prosecuting them.  When do we, as a society, decide that it is time to close the book on these types of cases?

The Washington Post article makes for an interesting read.  It asks some probing questions and gives some details that have remained fairly hushed up for decades.   It definitely probes into our comfort zone and stirs up some bad feelings.  For some of us, these events happened in our life times.  For others, the time period falls into ‘back in olden days.’  Perhaps the FBI simply made promises it could not keep, promises that could not stand up to the test of time.  It that case, it seems best to let it go on to the ages.  To do otherwise simply opens up old wounds like a can of sardines and in the end, ultimately solves nothing.

3 Thoughts to “Civil Rights-Era Killings Investigation Ready to Close”

  1. Wolverine

    If you want to get a better feel for how some of this happened back in the civil rights era, get a book called “J. Edgar Hoover; The Man and the Secrets” by Curt Gentry (Plume Books; New York, New York; 1991). It’s a big book but very interesting.

  2. Thanks for that recommendation, Wolverine. For those of us with Kindle, does it have a lot of pictures or is it mainly reading? I have always felt Hoover was evil. Does the book reinforce that idea?

  3. Wolverine

    A goodly number of pictures but mostly reading. It covers Hoover’s career from his appointment in the 1920’s to his sudden death in 1972 — and a bit beyond. Looks to me like it tells all in a seemingly well-researched way. It was a national bestseller when it came out in 1991. Obviously slanted against much of the way Hoover operated but still often complementary of what his FBI did for the country in some critical security areas, especially during World War II. The later years — not so good in many ways. J. Edgar was a very complicated man.

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