FBI Closes Investigation of 100 Unsolved Civil Rights Killings

FBI efforts to investigate more than 100 unsolved killings linked to the Civil Rights Movement will go a long way to ensuring equal justice for all.

Three years after promising to investigate the killings, the FBI has wrapped up its investigations. Not all of the cases will result in prosecutions, though.

"There's maybe five to seven cases, where we don't know who did it," FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who is heading the bureau's effort, told the Washington Post. "Some we know; others we know but can't prove. For every other case, we got it."

Revealing the results, though, will let the public know that crimes based on race will not be swept under the rug. Some of the investigations have answered long-standing mysteries.FBI agents have uncovered that an Alabama state trooper was responsible for the death of an innocent, unarmed civil rights protester. The 1965 killing brought Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the state. Others did not point to a smoking gun or were not related to civil rights at all.

According to the Washington Post:

In nearly one-fifth of the 108 cases, they learned that the deaths had no connection to the racial unrest pulsing through the South at the height of the civil rights struggle. In at least one case, the victim had been killed by a relative, but the family blamed the Ku Klux Klan. In other cases, a victim drowned or was fatally knifed in a bar fight. Two black women registering voters in the hot Mississippi summer died in a car accident. One man died under his mistress -- a bedroom secret kept for more than four decades until the bureau came calling.

"These racially motivated murders are some of the greatest blemishes on our nation's history," Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights told the Washington Post. "We owe it to people who were all a part of this struggle to be persistent. . . . If we can solve a number of these cases, that's fantastic. But if we can bring to closure all of these cases, I think this will be well worth the effort."

Federal officials say they are hampered by limited federal civil rights law when the crimes occurred. However, murder does not have a statute of limitations. If possible, states should step in to prosecute people accused of civil rights crimes.

Even if the alleged perpetrators are old and decrepit, the promise of justice should be upheld. It's like the occasional prosecutions we hear about for Nazi war criminals. The international courts have pulled 89-year-old men in to court with oxygen tubes attached to their hospital beds.

It's important that the nation's civil rights operation maintain that same sort of vigilance. Combined with the pursuit of new civil rights violations, such as the unfair lending practices that spawned the subprime mortgage crisis, the civil rights division should put those looking to take advantage of people because of their race on notice.