Better late than never

The following editorial appeared Saturday in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

After promising to help prosecute old murder cases from the civil rights era, the FBI has done little but let those cases get even colder.

FBI Director Robert Mueller last year announced that his agency would work with civil rights organizations to try to bring justice in killings that have gone unsolved for decades. But since then, there has not been a single prosecution under the FBI’s “Cold Case Initiative,” leaving many civil rights leaders justifiably wondering whether those still alive and responsible for slayings will ever be brought to justice.

Just as bad, legislation to allocate $10 million annually to investigate civil rights cold cases has stalled in Congress. The so-called Emmett Till bill recognizes the black teenager murdered for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955.

Admittedly, the FBI faces an uphill battle. Some of the killings occurred 60 years ago and will likely be hard to prosecute. In many cases, evidence has been destroyed or lost, memories have faded or key witnesses have died. But there have been successful prosecutions of old civil rights cases, with at least 23 convictions since 1989. Most were brought by state authorities, and the FBI should take a lesson from them.

Among the cases that won delayed justice was the 1994 conviction of Byron De La Beckwith in the murder three decades earlier of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers.

In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted in the 1964 murders in Mississippi of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were kidnapped and shot by Klansmen.

Many cases, however, were never fully investigated by local law enforcement and never prosecuted. The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center calls the victims of those crimes “The Forgotten.” These cases remain a painful and frustrating reminder of this country’s shameful history of racial intolerance.

Time is running out for prosecution as more witnesses and suspects die. But the FBI probes have gone nowhere because the agency hasn’t gotten the ball rolling. Civil rights leaders who have compiled tons of data on unsolved killings say they are still waiting to forge a partnership with the agency. More than two dozen cases forwarded to the Justice Department for prosecutorial analysis have been sitting there for more than a year.

The FBI has disclosed little information about its Cold Case Initiative. FBI unit chief Nancy Nelson says her office is “passionate” about the cases and will continue looking at them. But there’s little evidence of that.

The FBI apparently has been more forthcoming with filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, who said the agency gave him a list of its top five cold cases. His documentaries on these killings — “Murder in Black and White” — are scheduled to air next month on cable channels.

Maybe response to Beauchamp’s new documentaries can spur the FBI to action.