I was working on a story in Philadelphia, Miss., that dealt in part with the deaths many years earlier of three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner. The operating principle behind the cold case board is that Price was wrong: We must not let bygones be bygones. The history of racial violence in the United States is replete with cold cases. Many people are familiar with the Emmett Till case, which was reopened by the Justice Department in 2017 as part of its own cold case efforts, and then closed again last month with no further prosecutions. The new board’s modest goal is to make sure files and records of unsolved civil rights crimes are in the public domain, available at the National Archives for historians, journalists, researchers and others to study.

Source: Los Angeles Times January 23, 2022 10:03 UTC