Seven years later in Memphis, Tenn., and just a few days
after participating in a civil rights demonstration, 16-year-old Larry Payne was
found shot to death in a city housing project -- allegedly by a police officer
who accused him of looting.
The deaths of Freddie Robinson and Larry Payne are just some
of nearly 100 unsolved civil-rights-era deaths that the U.S. Justice Department
in conjunction with the FBI will consider reopening as part of a widespread
agency initiative announced last month.
The National Urban League, NAACP and Southern Poverty Center
will also be working with federal authorities to help produce evidence and
witnesses that and who could be helpful in solving some of these
"cold" cases from a bygone era when, to quote a recent Seattle Times
editorial, it was open season on Blacks in the South.
Recent successful prosecutions of three high-profile
civil-rights-era murders brought out of the cold-case file prompted national law
enforcement officials to consider taking another look at unsolved deaths of
blacks from the 1950s and 1960s.
In 2001, a jury convicted Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank
Cherry for the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Ala. In 2003, Ernest Avants got life in prison for the 1966 murder
of Ben White, an elderly black farm worker.
And Edgar Ray Killen was sentenced in 2005 to three 20-year
terms for his involvement in the 1964 deaths of three civil rights workers in
Mississippi.
And I have to say it's about time our federal government took
comprehensive action to wash the stain of the senseless violence against
Americans of color throughout the South in the 1950s and 1960s out of the fabric
of our society.
But better late than never.
Interestingly enough, the news of the new Justice Department
initiative, interestingly enough, came down on the same day that a grand jury
failed to deliver an indictment against Carolyn Bryant, the wife of one of the
suspected killers of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicagoan who made the fatal
error of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.
Bryant was thought to have been in the truck that hauled Till
off to his death. Her husband Roy and J.W. Milam, the two main suspects in
Till's killing had died long ago.
The Till case illustrates just how difficult it is for the
justice system to deliver indictments let alone convictions in murder cases in
which the witnesses are getting on in years and/or the evidence has been lost or
damaged or has aged.
Attorney Doug Jones, who in 2001 won convictions against two
of the Birmingham 1963 church bombers, expressed skepticism over whether the
initiative would break down the reticence of witnesses of murders from so long
ago and bring about a deluge of new information in these cases.
"We brought tons of people to the grand jury (for the
church bombing case), some of whom I'm absolutely convinced committed perjury,
saying they didn't know about something. Could I prove it? No way," Jones
told the Birmingham News recently.
"But if there was ever a case for people to step forward
to do some reconciliation or right a wrong, it was one when four innocent girls
were killed in a bomb in a church. And guess what? We didn't have anybody like
that."
But I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Jones. Reopening
these cases may seem like a waste of time and resources to some in light of the
years that have lapsed.
But even if the Justice Department's initiative garners no
new indictments or no new convictions, it is well worth the effort.
At the very least, it serves as a symbolic gesture of a
nation trying to come to grips with a tumultuous past.
African Americans who lived in the South before the civil
rights movement know all too well about terrorism - decades before the nation
witnessed Muslim extremists slamming commercial jets into the World Trade Center
towers on September 11, 2001.
The brand that affected southern blacks came packaged
differently - or rather euphemistically - in the form of "Jim Crow" or
"the Southern way of life."
In the century after the Civil War, southern blacks endured a
reign of terror.
They watched their homes, businesses and churches burn to the
ground.
They grieved for their loved ones and friends who were beaten
and murdered by lynch mobs.
Not in a million years would the federal government resist
seeking justice in the World Trade Center terrorism case.
Why should it be any different in the cases of innocent
African Americans taken out by lynch mobs in the South?
With so many years passed, closure may not come for all the
civil-rights era lynchings but at least we as Americans can say we tried to
right a grave wrong from our past.
That way we are much less likely to repeat it.
Let me applaud the Justice Department and FBI for attempting
to prove, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "the arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com
