Newly Formed Board To Review Civil Rights –Era Cold Cases Faces Time Crunch
Emmett Till - one of those murdered whose case will be reviewed and opened.
(CN) — Years after legislation
creating it was signed into law, the Senate has finally confirmed members to a
board whose task is to help compile and release records surrounding the
racially motivated crimes that have lain unsolved since the Civil Rights era.
For
decades, investigators, journalists and victims’ families have long sought
answers surrounding bombings and shootings committed during the struggle for
civil rights whose perpetrators were never caught or who skated through the
justice system.
They’ve
waited on record requests filed through the Freedom of Information Act. They’ve
tried to piece together what happened by poring over the all-caps, teletype
dispatches that pinged between FBI offices that, when initially released, were
run through with blocks of redactions.
In 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law a bipartisan piece of legislation
originally drafted by a group of high schoolers that treats records of these
cold cases that happened between 1940 to 1979 like the records relating to the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which were compiled at the
National Archives and made available to the public.
In
mid-February, the Senate confirmed four individuals to the Civil Rights Cold
Case Review Board: a former journalist who won the Pulitzer-prize in history, a
law professor who was the first Black female judge in Massachusetts, an
instruction archivist and a history professor at University of California, Los
Angeles.
Their
task? To determine just what records fall under the Civil Rights Cold Case
Records Collection Act of 2018 and whether a document’s release should be
delayed.
But before
that work begins in earnest, the members must be sworn in and there’s paperwork
to do, staff to hire.
“That will
take some time,” said William Bosanko, chief operating officer for the National
Archives and Records Administration.
But time
is not on the board’s side.
As the administration in Washington changed hands, the board remained unfilled. The clock is ticking, as the law says the review board’s work will end four
years after the law first passed, although the board could vote to extend that
time for a year further.
“Absent congressional intervention and a change in the law, the board doesn’t really have a fighting chance. They’re going to need more time in order to deal with these very important and very weighty issues around these cold cases,” Bosanko said.
Those weighty issues include the act’s scope. A couple years
ago, the federal government compiled and reviewed 161 unsolved homicides carried
out during the struggle for civil rights. The cases included the 1955 murder of
Emmett Till and the Mississippi Burning case involving the deaths of
Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.
But
Bosanko said the Cold Case Records Collection Act was written to encompass more
than those cases and could include, say, violations to the Fair Housing Act.
There’s
also the sheer volume of records, where Department of Justice documents stored
at the National Archives that could fall under the act is not measured in the
thousands of pages, but in the thousands of cubic feet.
Bosanko
said the National Archives has already identified some of the low hanging
fruit, some of the most notable Civil Rights-era cold cases, cases that the
administration suspects may be of interest to the board and whose records they
could quickly get in front of the group.
The
archives, however, is stymied when it comes to crafting and issuing guidance to
other federal agencies because it does not yet know what the board will
determine is the scope of the act.
In the meantime, some departments have been at work. For
instance, in a footnote of a report, the Criminal Section of the
Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division said between July 2019 to
September 2020 it spent nearly 1,800 hours working on issues surrounding cold
cases, including compliance with the records collection act.
In June 2021, the White House announced nominations to the five-member board. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a confirmation hearing for four nominees in mid-January.
Introducing
the nominees during the remote hearing conducted over teleconferencing
software, former Senator Doug Jones said he couldn’t think of a better group
for the committee to consider.
The former
prosecutor who helped try two of the Klansmen responsible for the 1963 bombing
of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, said the Civil Rights
Cold Case Records Review Act was one of his signature pieces of legislation.
“There
have been a handful of people over the last 20 or 30 years … that have taken a
real interest in these cold civil rights cases,” Jones said in a later
interview, and two of those individuals were former journalist Hank Klibanoff
and law professor Margaret Burnham.
Klibanoff,
a professor at Emory University, is director of Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases
Project at the university and Burnham, a law professor at Northeastern
University School of Law founded the school’s Civil Rights and Restorative
Justice Project.
“They were
just naturals to me because of their interest. And they see this in a bigger
picture,” Jones added, saying the two educators see the importance a complete
record for truth and reconciliation for the communities affected by the old
violence.
During the
hearing, Burnham said the nomination to the board was the highlight of her
career working for civil rights. In 1977, Burnham became the first Black woman
to sit on the bench in Massachusetts. She sat on Boston’s municipal court,
“Serving ordinary working people in their disputes that arise in their lives,”
she said.
After a
career as a civil rights attorney and a law professor, Burnham said in an
interview the nomination to the review board brought her full circle back to
public service.
Burnham
began looking into Civil Rights-era cold cases after President George W. Bush
signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act in 2007, legislation
that directed the federal government to take another look at many of the cold
cases from that time.
She said
she realized the act wouldn’t reach every case of racial violence that ended up
with a death. Working with students, she began investigating, relying on legal
expertise to navigate the FOIA system to obtain documents from the government.
Burnham
said she wanted to learn how the law failed, and how federal prosecutors at the
time managed professional ethics.
“I was
interested in what federal prosecutors in these local areas did,” Burnham said.
“They had to thread a needle between satisfying the local power structures with
whom they were quite connected and upon whom they were sometimes dependent,
while at the same time, meeting the new interests that were emanating from
Washington to these cases.”
Klibanoff
said in his prepared statement to the committee that the board’s task was not
to solve crimes, but to make government records more readily available.
“I have seen with my own eyes and felt in my own heart the
extraordinary good that can come when families of those who were killed sit
down with a couple of hundred pages of government records and unlock decades of
mysteries, myths and misunderstandings,” Klibanoff wrote in his written testimony to the committee.
Gabrielle
Dudley, an instruction archivist at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose
Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library told the committee she understood
how there was a balance between the release of records while protecting
individuals’ privacy.
When
Dudley was in high school, growing up in the Birmingham area, some of klansmen
responsible for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing faced prosecution. As an
intern at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, she collected oral histories
from individuals, some of whom would mention the people they knew who were
murdered, she said in an interview.
“You would
call and they would just, it was almost like they were just ready to tell these
stories,” Dudley said.
As the
board is preparing to begin its work, lawmakers are trying to give it more
time. In February, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, and Texas Senator
Ted Cruz, a Republican, introduced a bill that would buy the board three more
years, extending the time it meets from 2024 to 2027.
At the end of March, the Civil Rights Cold Case Investigations
Support Act of 2022 passed the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
A
spokesman for Cruz said in a statement that the senator was pleased to work on
this bill and he hoped the extension would allow victims and their families to
find justice.
Stuart
Wexler, the history teacher at Hightown High School in New Jersey whose
students originally drafted the bill that became the cold case records act,
said the most pressing issue surrounding the act and the release of the cold
case records is the extension being considered by Congress.
“That’s
obviously the number one priority because the board is not going to have time
to do its work,” Wexler said.
As a
high-schooler, Wexler was fascinated by the JFK assassination and he followed
the early meetings of the board formed to review those assassination records in
the 90s. That review board, in its hunt for records, accepted letters from the
public offering tips and called witnesses, Wexler said.
For the
board reviewing the JFK assassination records, “a big issue for them was trying
to find autopsy materials and to authenticate what autopsy materials they had,”
Wexler said. “So they call a bunch of people like the photographer involved
with the autopsy, the autopsy doctors.”
According
to the legislation, The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board has the
ability to issue subpoenas for records and its members receive security
clearances.
Meanwhile,
National Archives COO Bosanko said he hopes that the records once released will
allow people more accessibility to the records. No longer will people have to
plan a trip to the National Archives’ facility at say, College Park, Maryland.
Once the
project is complete, with records of old cold cases posted online, he hopes
that, for instance, a rural schoolteacher could drive home lessons surrounding
the struggle for civil rights by examining events that happened in that locale.
“For me,
being the most open and transparent we can as a nation with our history,”
Bosanko said, “and then making it discoverable and usable, that’s what this act
is about.”
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