Attorney General to Civil Rights Era Killers: 'We Are Still on Your Trail'

Beatings. Lynchings. Murders. Cold cases still cast a shadow on the struggles of the civil rights era. Richard Cohen, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, offers a story from 1959: "Mack Charles Parker -- he was taken out of jail and lynched by eight people, including the jailer, a former deputy sheriff, and a preacher. No one was ever arrested for that crime."

"The history of lynchings and racial violence in this country has left a stain on the fabric of our country," says National Urban League Executive Director Stephanie Jones. "And it is up to all of us to work to eradicate that stain." Now, Jones' and Cohen's groups, along with the NAACP, are pooling resources with the Department of Justice and the FBI to cast a wider net for tips to solve some of these decades-old cases.

"And so we have joined together, forming these new partnerships to combat an old scourge," says FBI Director Robert Mueller. "Many trails ran cold, and many cases were effectively closed. But for the victims, and their parents, children, siblings, friends, the wounds are never closed."

The Next Step

This move is part of a broader FBI initiative started in February 2006. At that time, the FBI asked its 56 field offices to take a second look at many of these unsolved cases. During the past year, those offices worked with state and local law enforcement, civil rights organizations and community members to put together information on nearly 100 cases. "New information, sometimes an innocuous small bit of information," notes Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, "can be crucial to breaking these decades-old cases."

This thought, echoed by Cohen, has guided him through his work. "Some of those cold cases turned out to have a few burning embers, and leads were pursued," he continues, "and we hope that some of the cases that are today still considered cold turn out to have some burning embers."

Rekindling Interest in Forgotten Cases

The Southern Poverty Law Center is quite familiar with cold cases. The group started gathering names and cases for a civil rights memorial in the late 1980s. "And I think we realized at the time some names had been forgotten and names where justice had not been achieved," says Cohen, "so what we did was to build the civil rights memorial to try to rekindle interest in some of these cases." The memorial, dedicated in 1989, includes the names of 40 individuals who died during the tumultuous times. Since then, the SPLC has compiled information on 76 additional black men and women who died under suspicious circumstances between 1952 and 1968.