Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 51, Ed. 1 Monday, September 22, 2014 Page: 4 of 18
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Monday, September 22, 2014
NATIONAL
Denton Record-Chronicle
From Page 1A
Till Act
memories had faded. And Con-
gress hasn’t appropriated mil-
lions of dollars in grant money
that was meant to help states
fund their own investigations.
Perhaps most frustrating, an
unknown number of slayings
haven’t even gotten a look be-
cause the law doesn’t cover any
killings after 1969. That saddens
people like Gloria Green-
McCray, whose brother James
Earl Green was shot to death on
May 14,1970, by police during a
student demonstration at Jack-
son State University in Jackson,
Mississippi.
The family never learned the
name of the shooter, and no one
was ever prosecuted.
“We’ve never really got any
closure because of the investiga-
tion not being thorough and ev-
erything just being kicked out,”
said Green-McCray. “It was like,
‘Just another black person dead.
I mean, so what?”’
In a January report to Con-
gress, the Justice Department
said prosecutors are still con-
tinuing their work.
Hoping to spur more action,
the NAACP and the Southern
Christian Leadership Confer-
ence have passed resolutions
asking the federal government
for more thorough reviews and
to spend the money that was au-
thorized in 2007.
SCLC President Charles
Steele Jr. called the Till Act a
major disappointment and said
it may be time for marches.
“We can never let people
think they can get away with
these types of horrific crimes,” he
said.
The law expires in 2017 un-
less Congress extends it. The
NAACP’s vice president for ad-
vocacy, Hilary Shelton, said sup-
porters have had “informal dis-
cussions” about expanding the
law, partly to allow for the review
of deaths that happened after
1969.
Passed with bipartisan sup-
port and signed by then-Presi-
dent George W. Bush in October
2008, the Till Act gave new
hope to families who lost loved
ones during the civil rights era,
when Southern authorities and
juries often looked the other way
when a black person was killed.
Law professor Janis McDo-
nald, who helps lead a program
at Syracuse University to identi-
fy and investigate suspicious
deaths from that era, said the
Justice Department never
formed regional task forces to
probe killings, and it didn’t do
much more than review docu-
ments in many cases. While
some hoped the program would
get a jump start when Barack
Obama became the nation’s first
black president, little progress
has been made, McDonald said.
“For whatever reason the
leadership does not seem to
have made it a priority,” said
McDonald, co-director of the
AP file photo
Then-Sen. Walter Mondale, D-Minn., left, and Sen. Birch Bayh,
D-Ind., right, are shown on May 20,1970, looking from shat-
tered windows onto the area where two people were shot to
death at what is now Jackson State University in Jackson,
Miss. Pointing out the view is student Carl Griffin. No one was
ever prosecuted for the deaths.
Cold Case Justice Initiative at
Syracuse.
The Till Act did land one
courtroom victory.
Former Alabama trooper
James Bonard Fowler pleaded
guilty four years ago to shooting
Jimmie Lee Jackson during pro-
tests in Marion in 1965. The lo-
cal prosecutor, District Attorney
Michael Jackson, said the FBI
assisted with the case by letting
him search for photographs in
Washington.
The lingering cases include
the shooting deaths of three civil
rights workers killed 50 years
ago in Philadelphia, Mississippi,
in what is known as the “Missis-
sippi Burning” case after the
movie by the same name. While
seven people were convicted on
federal civil rights charges in the
deaths in 1967 and one person
was convicted on a state man-
slaughter charge, the case re-
mains open.
The Justice Department had
a civil rights “cold case” initiative
that helped with four successful
prosecutions before the law was
signed. It closed its investigation
into the killing of the law’s
namesake, 14-year-old Till, in
2007. The suspected killers had
been dead for years and a Mis-
sissippi grand jury declined to
indict others who might have
had a hand in the death.
“Although our investigations
have reached an end in the large
majority of the matters re-
viewed, our work on the remain-
ing matters continues in ear-
nest,” the Justice Department
said in its progress report to
Congress in January.
The Till Act set aside $10 mil-
lion annually for investigations;
$2 million for grants to states;
and $1.5 million for getting com-
munities involved.
The Justice Department
didn’t respond to questions
about how much has actually
been spent, but none of the $20
million in grant money was ever
requested by states or appropri-
ated by Congress.
McDonald, the Syracuse pro-
fessor, said her students have
found about 200 more cases
that deserve investigation, and
an Associated Press review
found more than two dozen sus-
picious deaths after 1969 that
could be reviewed.
McDonald said the 1969 cut-
off date was a “somewhat arbi-
trary” decision linked partly to
the idea that 1970 marked an
upswing in protests over the
Vietnam War. The decision on
timing meant federal agents
couldn’t use the Till Act to take
another look into the May 1970
death of Earl Green, Green-
McCray’s brother.
Green, 17, and Jackson State
student Phillip Gibbs were shot
to death by law officers at Jack-
son State during a protest that
had roots in years of racial un-
rest in Jackson; frustration over
civil rights progress; the Viet-
nam War; and the killing of four
students in Ohio at Kent State
University just 10 days earlier.
Green-McCray and her sis-
ter, Mattie Hull, would like fed-
eral officials to investigate, even
if no one ever is prosecuted.
“It would show there are still
caring people in the world, that
somebody still cares and means
to do the right thing,” Hull said.
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 111, No. 51, Ed. 1 Monday, September 22, 2014, newspaper, September 22, 2014; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1124475/m1/4/: accessed July 8, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .