Four and a half years after the FBI announced it would reopen and investigate more than 100 cases of unsolved civil rights-era killings in the South, the bureau has yet to initiate charges in any of the cases. It has instead closed all but 39 of those cases without recommending prosecution.
FBI agents have closed almost half of the 122 unpunished killings from the civil rights era that four years ago they announced they were investigating.
Convicted Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen says there wasn't enough legal evidence to imprison him for the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers and that God is going to get whoever helped put him away. Reporter Admin co-reported this story.
In 1989, according to Clarion-Ledger reports, secret files showed that at the same time the state was prosecuting Byron De La Beckwith in 1964 for Evers’ murder, another arm of the state was secretly assisting Beckwith’s defense, trying to get him acquitted. That other arm was the state’s segregationist spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which was headed by the governor.
U.S. Sen. John Kerry plans to introduce legislation next week that would pave the way for the release of thousands of FBI documents on the life and death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The bill calls for creating a Martin Luther King Records Collection at the National Archives that would include all government records related to King. The bill also would create a five-member independent review board that would identify and make public all documents from agencies including the FBI - just as a review board in 1992 made public documents related to the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination.