There's no rest for justice seekers.
In March 2006, we profiled Kansas City's Alvin Sykes, who has spent years methodically working to create a way for the U.S. Justice Department to address one of our country's most shameful legacies: countless unsolved murders from the Civil Rights era. Last fall, Sykes saw one of his main efforts rewarded when the Senate passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2008, creating a Justice Department office to investigate and prosecute those murders.
Sykes, among others, had successfully pushed the government to open an investigation into the lynching of Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was murdered, and his body mutilated, while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955. His killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, later confessed to the crime but went unpunished and have long since died. Others may have been involved -- particularly Bryant's wife Carolyn. Young Till earned his Mississippi death sentence simply for whistling at the white woman. Carolyn Bryant is still alive, but in February 2007 a LeFlore County, Mississippi, grand jury declined to return any new indictments, citing insufficient evidence.
But the fact that there was even an investigation was its own form of
justice. As Sykes told me in 2006, "J. Edgar Hoover said there would never be an investigation."
Now there's the promise of more investigations. In fact, Sykes says, the Justice Department has 26 active investigations into cold cases from the Civil Rights era.
The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights act authorizes two new positions at the FBI and in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, but Congress has yet to appropriate the money to actually fund them. Sykes isn't waiting around. He's launched a national campaign to put pressure on Congress to make sure Justice gets its money, and to raise additional funds for the effort it will take to bring other cases.
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I came to this site by researching the most amazing blues track I ever heard: TONKY BOOGIE by FORREST SYKES recorded in 1947.
Alvin is his grandson.
Alvin's life is even more incredible.
Only the internet can unearth such meaningful stories.
Thank you.
Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center
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Philadelphia, MS Civil Rights Murders:
Neshoba county still fails to indict others
4 years after Killen indictment
Four years have passed since the indictment of Edgar Ray Killen, and Neshoba County and the State of Mississippi still fail to indict others in the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
On January 6, 2005, a state grand jury in Philadelphia, Neshoba County, Mississippi returned the first-ever state indictment in the Neshoba murders case. Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen was indicted.
The grand jury heard testimony for less than one full day despite the fact that there were ten living suspects at that time. There was a massive amount of evidence against several of these suspects, including the 3,000 page transcript from the 1967 federal trial for conspiracy to deny civil rights.
That 1967 trial resulted in the conviction of seven individuals. Four of those convicted in the 1967 federal trial for conspiracy to deny civil rights were still living in 2005. Why could not Neshoba County and the State of Mississippi at least indict them in 2005 on state charges?
And others should have been convicted in the 1967 federal trial.
Two of those suspects who were convicted on federal charges in 1967 are still alive now. Why cannot Neshoba County and the State of Mississippi indict them now? There was enough evidence to convict them on federal charges in 1967.
Why only Killen?
Why no more state indictments four years after the indictment of Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen?
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Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center
Neshoba civil rights murders case
Overwhelming evidence against suspects
The State of Mississippi and Neshoba County have yet to indict any additional suspects beyond Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen, in spite of their being, in the words of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals "ample, in fact, overwhelming" evidence against two of the still living suspects for the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Given the evidence that is available against these two suspects, it appears likely they could be persuaded to be cooperative witnesses against others rather than be defendants. If they refuse to cooperate, they could be defendants themselves.
The Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals ruled in 1969 that:
"There is ample--in fact, overwhelming--untainted evidence that the defendants conspired together to have Price, a deputy sheriff, arrest Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, United States citizens; that Price would hold them in custody until such time that when released, Price, Arledge, Barnette, Roberts, Snowden, Jordan and Posey could and would intercept them, assault and kill them; and that each was present at and participated in the murder of the three men and the disposal of their bodies by burial fifteen feet beneath the top of an earthen dam deep in the woods.
....Specifically, we find ample proof of conspiracy and each appellant's complicity in a calculated, cold-blooded and merciless plot to murder the three men."
Eight people who faced federal conspiracy to deny civil rights or other charges in the 1960s related to the murders of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi are still living.
But only Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen has finally faced state charges.
Why only Killen?
What about the others?
Earl Akin - presently living, Mississippi
Olen Burrage - presently living, Philadelphia, MS
James Thomas "Pete" Harris - presently living, Meridian, MS
Billy Wayne Posey - presently living, Meridian, MS
Jimmy Snowden - presently living, Hickory, MS
Jimmy Lee Townsend - presently living, Philadelphia, MS
Richard Willis - presently living, Noxapater, MS
Why only Killen prosecuted by Mississippi on state charges?
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To provide information on the Neshoba murders case, any of the fifty other known Mississippi civil rights murder cases, of which only four have had any prosecution by the State of Mississippi,
or any civil rights murder case, please contact:
Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center
Ark_Delta_Truth_and_Justice_Ctr@yahoo.com or
arrow@inet-direct.com
(870) 972-9248
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