Justice plays catch-up
A QUIET campaign against the old shibboleth that justice delayed is justice denied is being waged in communities across the country, particularly in the South. An arrest in January of a 71-year-old man in connection with a 1964 race killing follows a now familiar pattern, in which family members who lost their loved ones to racist violence decades ago press interminably for criminal prosecution and other forms of redress.
The Mississippi Klansmen who killed Henry Dee and Charles Eddie Moore 43 years ago were confident they would never have to answer for the torture and murder of these two African-American 19-year-olds -- until four months ago, when a US grand jury indicted one of them in the abductions and slayings.
The killers had picked up the two youths, who were hitchhiking near a federal forest, then tortured them and dropped their bodies in the Mississippi River, where they were found two months later during the massive hunt for the murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. A cover-up investigation cleared the accused in the Dee-Moore killings, but Charles Moore's brother, Thomas Moore, would not let the case die. His efforts bore fruit last January; the case is a priority of the FBI's new program to solve these old hate crimes.
Recently, Mississippi has shown a particularly robust appetite for revisiting its violent racist past. With more black elected officials than any other state, the political infrastructure is now there to support community reconciliation, of which prosecution is a necessary feature.
In May 2006, a state judge there exonerated posthumously a man who had been framed and imprisoned in 1960 after he tried to integrate a state college. Prosecutors have won convictions in the Klan killings of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted and sentenced to 20 years for his role in the deaths of civil rights workers Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman in 1964.
And in 2003, a 72-year-old man was convicted by a federal jury in Jackson in the 1966 slaying of an elderly black sharecropper. Prosecutors said the crime was intended to bring Martin Luther King into the state to be assassinated. In Alabama, a jury convicted two men in 2001 for murder in connection with the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
These murder cases reflect the most heinous of the hundreds of crimes committed against Americans during the civil rights movement. By one scholar's account, more than 20,000 people were wrongfully arrested in the struggle to break the back of segregation. State and local law enforcement colluded with the perpetrators of anti-civil rights violence, who consequently enjoyed full immunity. When the offenders were brought to court, typically -- as in the Dee-Moore murders -- they were undercharged and released after sham proceedings.
The fresh prosecutions are only one facet of a multi pronged movement to restore justice to the victims of the mid-century breakdown in law enforcement that was designed to crush civil rights protest. Some public officials have granted pardons to the wrongfully accused.
In 2000, President Clinton pardoned the political scientist Preston King, who in 1960 was drafted in retaliation for insisting on being addressed as "Mr. King" by his Georgia draft board. King's federal conviction led to a 40-year exile that ended with his triumphant return to Albany, Ga., after the presidential pardon.
In 2000, the Virginia Legislature established a $2 million scholarship fund to benefit black students whose education was interrupted by the state's "massive resistance" campaign against Brown v. Board of Education. And some civic groups have established South African-style Truth and Reconciliation hearings to explore the impact of biased law enforcement during the civil rights era.
Taken together, these developments signal a countrywide endeavor to understand how law enforcement can be misused and manipulated in times of political turmoil. This weekend at a conference at Northeastern and Harvard universities, relatives of those who were murdered during this period -- relatives of Evers, Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman, Dahmer, and Moore -- will join with the cold-case prosecutors, Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson, and others to contemplate where this movement to secure justice, so long denied, is headed.
Margaret Burnham is a professor at Northeastern University's School of Law. 
