Vol. 74/No. 35      September 20, 2010

In February 2007, Alberto Gonzales, attorney general under the George W. Bush administration, promised that the Justice Department would find and prosecute those who murdered Blacks and were never brought to justice. “You have not gotten away with anything. We are still on your trail,” he stated.

“There have been no federal indictments since Mr. Gonzales’s announcement, which heralded the Civil Rights-Era Cold Case Initiative,” the New York Times reported August 23. “Very little of the millions of dollars approved by Congress to finance the initiative has materialized.” No FBI field agents are currently assigned full-time to pursue any of the cases.

For several decades relatives of those killed by the Klan have been fighting for the government to indict and convict those guilty of these crimes. A few have had success. In some 20 cases the government prosecuted the rightists and won convictions.

But many families are still waiting for justice. “Everybody put me on the back burner for years and years,” said Henry Allen, 65, whose father Louis Allen, a civil rights worker, was killed in front of his house in Liberty, Mississippi, in 1964. “Here’s the people you can contact, here’s their phone number, here’s their address,” he told the Times. “I don’t have the authority to go knock on their door, but you do—and it still doesn’t get done.”

Stanley Nelson, editor of the Concordia Sentinel, a weekly newspaper published in Ferriday, Louisiana, has been writing articles connecting the killing of a number of individuals in that area with the Silver Dollar Group, a Klan organization. “Some of those killed were civil rights activists, others were not. Some whites were killed as well as Blacks,” he told the Militant in a phone interview.

Among the cases he has been writing about are: Joseph Edwards, a Black hotel porter who was killed because he had a relationship with a white woman, and Frank Morris, a Black cobbler who did work for whites as well as Blacks. He died when his shop was set on fire. Three years after the arson attack, a Klan leader told the FBI that local Klansmen may have carried it out, accusing Morris of flirting with white women.

At the time, Deacons for Defense was active in Louisiana organizing armed self-defense to beat back Klan attacks in Black neighborhoods. Former Deacons members have been helpful in unearthing facts about the Klan’s actions, noted Nelson.

Nelson said, “The FBI wants information from you but they won’t tell you anything. It’s hard to know what they’re doing. The public and the families deserve a revealing answer.”

In the fall of 2008, President Bush signed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act into law. Till was a Black teenager from Chicago who was beaten and killed in Mississippi in August 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Two men accused as the killers were acquitted. The bill authorized spending $13.5 million for each of the next 10 years to investigate unsolved racial killings before 1970. No money was allocated in fiscal year 2009. This year the Justice Department received $1.6 million. The FBI received an $8 million increase for its civil rights division, part of it for cold cases.
 
 
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