Today, in  Jackson, Mississippi's Clarion-Ledger, I published the first investigative news report about the 1964 racial murder of Clifton Walker:

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.

"Few, if any, of these cases will be prosecuted," the Department of Justice has acknowledged to Congress.

Despite its most vigorous efforts, the FBI has said, it has not been able to overcome "difficulties inherent in all cold cases: subjects die; witnesses die or can no longer be located; memories become clouded; evidence is destroyed or cannot be located; original investigations lacked the technical or scientific advances relied upon today."

But none of those reasons explains why the FBI has been able to gain little ground in a case that is still open - the slaying of Clifton Walker, a 37-year-old African American who was ambushed by a white mob and brutally gunned down in his car on an unpaved backwoods road outside the southwest Mississippi town of Woodville on Feb. 28, 1964. Walker was married and the father of five children.

For Walker's children, the FBI's own management of the case raises questions

Read the rest at the Clarion-Ledger or at USA Today, which also ran the story.

Also today, fellow Civil Rights Cold Case Project reporter Stanley Nelson interviewed me about the Clifton Walker case for his newspaper, the Concordia Sentinel, in Ferriday Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from southwest Mississippi, where Clifton Walker was murdered. Stanley gave me a nice opportunity to talk more about Clifton Walker and his family.

Clifton Walker was born in Woodville, Miss. in 1927. The youngest of nine children, he was nicknamed "Man" as a child, which stuck through adulthood, as his older siblings tended to look up to him.

Clifton Walker met Ruby Phipps on her way home from Sunday school in 1943. They were married in 1945 and had five children together. The Walker children remember their parents as a strong unit. After they were put to bed, the children would hear their parents talking about life and planning for their needs, how to pay for a car or a washer or what to buy their kids for Christmas.

Clifton Walker served in the U.S. Army in the Korean War. After his discharge, following a knee injury, Walker went to work at International Paper plant in Natchez, where he was a laborer in the wood yard and a member of the black union, St. James Local 747 Pulp, Sulfite and Paper Mill Workers. At the time of his death he made a good wage for a black worker, reportedly $8/hour.

Read the rest at the Concordia Sentinel.

Be sure to watch the trailer posted with the article (as well as here, on hungryblues.net) to see portions of my investigation unfold, meet three of Clifton Walker’s children and visit the crime scene, where he was murdered.

(Cross-posted at the Civil Rights Cold Case Project.)

This Sunday, July 22, the Clarion-Ledger will publish my article about the the 1964 killing of Clifton Walker, a black man from Woodville, Miss.

On February 28, 1964, Clifton Walker was ambushed by a white mob on his drive home from the late shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, Miss. On the last stretch of Walker's drive home on the dark, twisty, unpaved Poor House Road, near Woodville, his attackers stopped his car, gathered around it with shotguns and fired in at close range, blowing Walker's face apart. The FBI and Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol investigated for about nine months in 1964 and in November recommended two suspects for arrest to the DA—who claimed there was insufficient evidence for him to act.

In February 2007, the FBI announced it would be probing about 100 of the unsolved civil rights era cold cases. Since then, the FBI says, it has closed all but 39 them. But the Clifton Walker murder case is still open.

In the Clarion-Ledger this Sunday you can read the first full telling of what is currently known about the case—through federal and state documents, through the voices of Clifton Walker's children and their Mississippi neighbors and through my investigation of the case since 2007. For Clifton Walker's children, the FBI's own management of the case raises questions. Learn why this Sunday.

In the trailer, above, you can watch portions of my investigation unfold, meet three of Clifton Walker's children and visit the crime scene, where he was murdered.

James Baldwin and my father, Paul Greenberg, at the AG Gaston Motel, Birmingham, Alabama, August 4, 1963. (Photo credit: Robert Adamenko)

In time, however, blogging led to investigative journalism about unpunished lynchings and other violence from the civil rights era.

In the summer of 2007, I returned to Mississippi to look into violence that had taken place near Woodville in the southwest part of the state. After I interviewed an NAACP official, a black woman in her early 70's who owned a shop in the town center stopped me on the street. "You a reporter?" she asked. Before long, she and her husband were sharing stories of violence against blacks in Woodville in the '50's and '60's. They asked if I had ever heard of Man Walker whose given first name was Clifford or Clifton. He was shot in his car on Poor House Road and they thought his children lived nearby in Louisiana.

Since I was on my way to Hattiesburg to do research in the McCain Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi, I couldn't stick around to learn more. Yet at the archives, I found a number of Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol reports on the Clifton Walker case. The reports were riveting. I had to investigate.

I've located a number of Walker's family members and have been working closely with three of his children since 2008. One daughter, Catherine, has joined me in questioning those with possible involvement in her father's murder. On one occasion there was a surprising moment of reconciliation between Catherine and a member of a white Woodville family. Walker's murder had allegedly been planned at this family's truck stop, and at the end of the interview with the elderly business owner and his daughter, Walker and the other daughter hugged. Catherine had not expected to meet whites from Woodville willing to talk about the murder. This small but significant step toward the closure that she and her siblings need gave us a taste of what might be possible for her family and for this small backwoods Mississippi community that is still largely committed to silence and to protecting murderers.

I tell this story in the Fall 2011 issue of Nieman Reports, which is devoted to cold case reporting. The issue also includes stories by my colleagues from the Civil Rights Cold Case Project:

• David Ridgen, It Takes a Hard-Driving Team to Uncover the Truth of a Cold Case, The Bonds of Our Reporting: The Civil Rights Cold Case Project
• John Flemming, Compelled to Remember What Others Want to Forget
• Jerry Mitchell, The Case of the Supposedly Sealed Files—And What They Revealed
• Stanley Nelson, Who Killed Frank Morris?
• Hank Klibanoff, Here’s What People Want to Know: Why Do Journalists Tell These Stories?
• Robert J. Rosenthal, The Enduring Ambition of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project
• Paul C. Johnson and Janice L. McDonald, When Lawyers and Journalists Share Common Cause

The issue also includes stories by Simeon Booker, Bill Minor and Jan Gardner.

Frank Morris is tallest in the picture, 4th from left in the line wearing visor. Frank is seen here standing in front of his shoe shop in Ferriday, La circa 1950s. Photo courtesy of the Concordia Sentinel and William Brown, 2010. www.coldcases.org

I'm covering the developments in the Stanley Nelson's Frank Morris murder investigation at Colorlines today:

On Dec. 10, 1964, a 51-year-old, black shoe-shop owner named Frank Morris was burned alive inside his store in Ferriday, La. Morris miraculously survived severe burns to all of the skin on his body, was hospitalized and lived four more days in agony and morphine-induced delirium before he finally died. On his deathbed, Morris told the FBI how his store was broken into and how the intruders had poured gasoline inside the store. He said there were two white men.

The FBI investigated twice in the 1960s with no conclusion. Today, in Ferriday’s Concordia Sentinel, its editor Stanley Nelson reports compelling evidence that Leonard Spencer, an admitted former member of the Ku Klux Klan living in Richland Parish, La., helped set the 1964 fire that killed Frank Morris.

Remarkably, Nelson’s witnesses to confessions by Spencer are his former brother-in-law, Bill Frasier, and his son, Boo Spencer. Additionally, Leonard Spencer’s ex-wife, Brenda Rhodes, attests to hearing an alleged fellow Klansman and close friend of Spencer confess to working with Spencer to set the shoe shop on fire.

“I’m somewhat encouraged,” Nelson told me in a telephone interview. “I think there’s evidence to believe that the majority of the white folks would like to see these cases solved, too.”

Many of the familiar civil rights era racial murders are stories of retaliation for activism. The victims’ names are embedded in our cultural memory of the era’s violence: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner; Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, Wharlest Jackson, Louis Allen, Herbert Lee, Birdia Keglar and Adlena Hamlett---to name just a few in Mississippi.

But there were other victims, like Frank Morris, who were targeted for reasons that are less overtly political, and perhaps even more insidious. These are stories in which there seem to be an accumulation of hostilities towards a black male that reach an unpredictable breaking point. Three main things animate the hostilities towards this different class of victim, often occurring in combination: their financial success, their willingness to stand up to whites and allegations of their having liaisons, real or perceived, with white women.

(Read the rest at Colorlines.)

Stanley Nelson's articles:

• Rayville man implicated in Frank Morris case (Concordia Sentinel)
• Feds vow to solve Frank Morris murder (Concordia Sentinel)

More coverage of news implicating Arthur Leonard Spencer in 1964 murder of Frank Morris

• Paper names ex-Klansman in civil rights murder (CNN)
• Solving A 1964 Cold Case: Mystery Of Frank Morris (NPR)
• Reporter on Quest to Close 1964 Civil Rights Case (NYT)
• Murder at the Shoe Shop - Cold Case Documentary (CBC)
• 46 Years Later: Justice for a Civil Rights Murder Victim (The Takeaway)
• Stanley Nelson’s reporting could bring justice in unpunished 1964 killing (Jerry Mitchell)

Stanley Nelson and I both investigate civil rights era racial violence in conjunction with the Civil Rights Cold Case Project.

Frank Morris' burned out shoe shop. Taken December 1964. Photo courtesy of the Concordia Sentinel and August Thompson, 2010. www.coldcases.org

(Left to right) Shirley Walker, Clifton Walker, Jr., Catherine Walker on Poor House Road, Wilkinson County, MS, near the spot where their father Clifton Walker was gunned down by Klansmen.

As far as I knew, none of the children of Clifton Walker had ever been contacted by FBI agents  regarding the February 28, 1964 racial killing of their father, near Woodville, MS. Still, I thought I should confirm this,  so a few nights ago I gave a call to Walker's second daughter Catherine and asked her if her family has heard from the FBI.

"I wish we had, no," Catherine answered.

I was checking with Catherine because I had just received the DOJ's second annual report on its activities regarding civil rights era racial murders (PDF), as required by the Emmet Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act. In the section of the report on "Notifying Victim Family Members," I read:

The FBI has devoted considerable resources to locating the next of kin for the victims, successfully locating family members for 93 of the 122 victims.

I thought: well, I located the Walkers two and a half years ago with almost no resources and without the benefit of even standard reporters' tools, like access to Lexis Nexis. The Walkers haven't reported hearing from the FBI previously, but maybe they've heard from the Bureau since I last talked to them.

"Nobody has contacted me," Catherine said.

"Could the FBI have contacted one of your sisters or your brother," I asked?

"No," Catherine said, "they would have told me."

The Till Bill requires that the Department of Justice "expeditiously investigate unsolved civil rights murders" and "provide all the resources necessary to ensure timely and thorough investigations in the cases involved."

Thus the DOJ reported:

As part of the department’s efforts to uncover relevant information regarding our unsolved civil rights era homicides, we continue to engage in a comprehensive outreach program, meeting with a broad array of interested individuals and organizations.

Outreach has not included reaching the Walkers---though, as you'll see in the list of cases, below, the Clifton Walker murder is one of the 50 some cases that is still open and under active investigation. What has FBI outreach involved, then?

• Two meetings with NGOs that investigate and do advocacy regarding civil rights era racial murders
• An unspecified number of meetings with national civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, National Urban League and Southern Poverty Law Center "to encourage those organizations to reach out to their field offices and to try to obtain information on cold cases"
• Attending the Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans Conference in Jackson, MS in 2009 and 2010
• Attending a conference on an long unresolved case in Monroe, GA
• Attending a town hall meeting at a film screening held in Syracuse by the Syracuse University School of Law Cold Case Justice Initiative
• Attending a town hall meeting at a film screening held in Baton Rouge, LA
• Outreach to FBI field offices and US Attorney's offices in districts where there are open cold cases
• Presenting at the 2009 Criminal Civil Rights Conference at the National Advocacy Center in Columbia, SC
• Participation in the annual conferences of the National Black Prosecutors Association
• Meeting with the Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol, the Alabama Bureau of Investigation and "numerous other state and local law enforcement agencies"

The report does not detail any time spent in the communities where the murders that they say they are investigating have occurred.

The Clifton Walker FBI file, which I've obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, mentions in passing seven other victims whose names are not included on the list of cases the FBI is addressing. All of the reporters that I know who work on civil rights era cold cases have found the same thing: one case leads to another. To draw out the connections and make the necessary discoveries, investigators have to go into the communities where the murders occurred and give local people the opportunity to come forward and share what they know and what they've heard.

When I called Catherine Walker I had two important pieces of news to share with her: first, that the DOJ report shows that the FBI has not closed her father's murder case and second, that Wiley Cavin died in Woodville on July 22 at the age of 85. To our knowledge, Cavin was the last living member of the racially mixed carpool that Clifton Walker rode with to and from work at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS the day he was murdered. Cavin was therefore one of the last people to see Walker alive.

I spoke with Cavin over the phone last summer. He recalled being interviewed by the FBI as well being under FBI surveillance during the spring of 1964, following the murder:

They set up at that little old store and watched me like a hawk watching a chicken.

Cavin had not been re-contacted by the FBI at the time when we spoke last summer. In fact, none of the  living subjects mentioned in state and federal documents, whom I have interviewed over the last three years, have reported being contacted by the FBI outside of 1964.

It turned out Catherine had some news for me, too:

Remember Wright Williams, my uncle, the one who went to Baton Rouge to contact the FBI about Daddy's murder? He died last weekend, in Atlanta.

"They are dying real fast," she went on.

That's three in the year 2010. First Mr. Nettles ((J.B. Nettles owned the truck stop where Clifton Walker's murder was allegedly planned. I interviewed him with Catherine in 2009. He died in February 2010.)), then Wiliey Cavin and Wright Williams. There is an urgency I feel to get the FBI and the Justice Department to get some answers before they die. Once they're dead that's the end of it. We never get closure.

It is heartening to know that the Walker case has not been closed, but what exactly does it mean that it's open? The Till Bill has not been fully funded by Congress---and that may be a significant part of the problem. These investigations cannot be part-time work for agents or for the federal and local government prosecutors and investigators assigned to these cases. Regional task forces, including full time special agents and attorneys need to be assigned for every area involved.

Without that kind of structure in place, the FBI cannot make the "great progress" that the DOJ report claims has been made on civil rights era unsolved murders. Not one single suspect is under federal indictment, fifty four cases are being closed and only two new investigation files have been opened this year. The Justice Department has not empanelled a single investigative grand jury.

Even where prosecutions are not possible, the FBI has a responsibility to provide as much information as it can to the victims' families. "The truth is the only thing that can take this big burden off of our shoulders," Catherine said "to know exactly who it was that killed Daddy."

(Cross-posted on The Civil Rights Cold Case Project)

Related Reading

• Hank Klibanoff, "The glacial pace of justice," Washington Post, August 8, 2010
• John Flemming, "Cold cases challenge the search for civil rights-era justice," Anniston Star, August 8, 2010.
• Stanley Nelson, "FBI adds Joseph Edwards to unsolved 1960s cold case list," Concordia Sentinel, August 5, 2010
• Jerry Mitchell, "Report: Half of FBI's civil rights-era cold cases are closed," Jackson Clarion-Ledger, August 3, 2010

Documents

• The Attorney General's Second Annual Report to Congress Pursuant to the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act of 2007, May 13 2010 (PDF)

Though the DOJ and FBI has frequently alluded to a list of  more than 100 victims, this report is the first instance that I am aware of where the full list has been made public, along with information about whether or not the case is still open. I've pulled the list out of the report for easier access. You can view it, below.

DOJ Civil Rights Cold Case List

I explained to him how important today is: “DADDY’S birthday” How I need his Dad’s # to speak with him to move forward with the Justice quest. He understood.

For months, Catherine Walker and I have wanted to speak with a black man who reportedly witnessed the planning of the murder at Nettles Truck Stop, about 6 miles north of Woodville, MS. The FBI documents say the man

left the vicinity of Woodville, Mississippi, immediately after the murder of Walker ... he [said he] knew what would happen if he continued to hang around.

Some Woodville residents who know the possible eyewitness have told me they saw him about four years ago and that he told them he was at the truck stop on the night of the murder, February 28, 1964, and the planning of the murder was what he saw there.

I was pretty sure I’d located the possible eyewitness, and I was in Louisiana, so Catherine and I were making plans to go see him ourselves. Over the last year, both Catherine and I have been in touch with our subject's son, who lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The son told us that his family is actually kin to the Walkers and that he knows some of Catherine’s cousins well. He has information about the murder that he's heard from extended family currently living in Louisiana who were in Woodville in 1964. The son has been eager to help. He’s shared the information with us, but he hasn't felt comfortable arranging a meeting with his father. We originally thought he was trying to protect his father, but he eventually revealed to Catherine that he and his father do not get along.

We wanted the son to tell us his father’s general location or phone number so I could verify that my information was correct. Finally, on Clifton Walker’s 83rd birthday, the son came through, and his information matched mine.

The man we were looking for was at church when we got to his place. His wife and a slew of grandkids were all hanging out in a shotgun shack in a working class black neighborhood outside of New Orleans.

We sat in Catherine’s car outside the house and waited.

A few weeks after his 37th birthday, on February 28, 1964, Clifton Walker was ambushed on the deserted, unpaved Poor House Road, outside Woodville, MS. He was on his way home from the 3-11 pm shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS. Gunmen shot up his car, blew out all the windows, and shot Clifton Walker at close range, multiple times in the head. No arrests were ever made. Walker’s wife Ruby died in 1992 not knowing what really happened. Clifton and Ruby’s five children are still in the dark about the murder.

For the two years I’ve known Catherine, we’ve been gaining on the case, but the progress is slow. We have a collection of federal and state documents, but we haven’t obtained any new documents for over a year. Many of the people mentioned in the documents are dead. Few of them who are still living have been willing to talk. People with knowledge of the case are dying off.

But on Sunday we were feeling hopeful. Catherine made a good connection with the wife of the possible eyewitness when we went up to the house and found out he was at church. Afterwards, while we sat in the car waiting the man to return, Catherine said:

I’m glad he’s in church. That means he’s gonna come back with the spirit in him and he’s gonna be really nice to us. That’s what he’s gonna do. He’s gonna talk to us.

Even if he doesn’t, if he was afraid, he can just tell us what he heard, what he knows that made everyone else think he knew too much. That would help.

Our man came back from church in the late afternoon and we talked with him at length. Though he admitted knowing the people in Woodville that I talked to, he denied having any first hand knowledge of the murder.

But he had some other information we did not expect him to have. He recalled an encounter with the FBI in 1964.

The FBIs came up to my house. They had his picture and all that where he got shot. They had him naked, laying out on the table.

According to him, the photo showed that Walker was shot on his right side---twice in the shoulder, twice in thigh and twice in the lower leg. He also said that the right side of Walker’s face was shot off “on an angle,” as if he was leaning over to the right when he was taking it in the face.

The information our interviewee recalled from the FBI's photo comports with first- and second-hand accounts of numerous bullet holes in at least one side of Walker's car. It also potentially corroborates what Catherine's mother Ruby told her---that she, Ruby, was told by FBI agents in 1964 that they found empty shotgun shells all along the banks of the road where Walker was shot. Our new information about the wounds on just the right side of Walker's body could also help to establish with more certainty the sequence of events that occurred out on Poor House Road.

For three years we’ve had a 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol (MHSP) report that described the wounds to Walker’s head but made no indication of wounds to other parts of the body. In the report, highway patrolmen recount photographing Walker's body at the funeral home at about 7:30 pm on February 29, before the pathologist had arrived to do the autopsy. The photo that the FBI reportedly showed our interview subject may have been one of the MHSP photos or it may have been from the autopsy which was performed later the same night. If this eyewitness report concerning the photo is correct, it raises questions about why such crucial details would have been left out of the MHSP report.

If there was a crowd of men firing on Walker's car from the banks of Poor House Road road, that substantially increases the likelihood that there are still living perpetrators. And for each person directly involved, there are possible others with knowledge of the perpetrator's actions.

If the FBI had the photo taken either by the MHSP or the coroner, then there were likely multiple copies and there is a better chance that the photo still exists somewhere. "I would like to even have those pictures," Catherine said.

(Cross-posted on Civil Rights Cold Case Project)

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.

Kerry, D-Mass., said the bill, which failed in 2006, can pass this year in honor of King. "I want the world to know what he stood for," Kerry said. "And I want his personal history preserved and examined by releasing all of his records."

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.

Mitchell spoke with Kerry and other prominent supporters of the legislation, including US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and pulitzer prize winning King biographer Taylor Branch. MItchell also spoke with others from the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, who believe Kerry should expand the focus of his important initiative.

Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Cold Case Truth and Justice Project, believe[s] Kerry's idea should be expanded to include the release of documents involving not only King's assassination, but also other racial slayings from the civil rights era....

Klibanoff met last summer with Attorney General Eric Holder and suggested creating an independent review board to make public "all files, documents and other historic materials related to the racial terror and hate crimes that occurred in the South during the modern civil rights era."

In an Oct. 27 letter, Holder responded that the Justice Department was discussing the best ways to make "the most responsible public disclosure possible."...

Ben Greenberg of Boston, whose father served as a special assistant to King in 1962 and 1963, praised Kerry's legislation. "The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. was a trauma that our country will not recover from unless we can clear the air about what really happened," he said.

Greenberg, who has spent recent years investigating a number of unsolved killings from the era, including the 1964 killing of Clifton Walker near Woodville, said documents on many other racial slayings from the 1950s and 1960s should be made public, too.

"The effects of these murders linger throughout the South," he said.

Some FBI documents continue to conceal the name of suspects in these killings, he said. "The people named in the documents, the family members and the perpetrators are dying every day. It is time for the truth to be told and for justice to be done. We need the information while there is still time to use it."...

Recently the FBI asked for the public's help in solving 33 killings from the civil rights era — a third of them in Mississippi.

Journalist John Fleming, whose work for The Anniston Star led to an arrest in the 1965 killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma, Ala., questioned how the FBI can ask for the public's help in solving killings but fail to make public the names of crucial witnesses who could shed light on these cases.

Boston Globe reporter Bryan Bender was also on the story.

Nearly half a century after the height of the civil rights movement, hundreds of thousands of pages of government files about the volatile era remain shielded from the American public, buried in FBI field office cabinets, blocked by resistant bureaucracies, or available only with large sections blacked out, according to US officials and researchers.

The situation has prompted a new push in Congress, led by Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, to require that all records relating to the life and death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. be located, reviewed, and released by a review board at the National Archives similar to those established for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and for Nazi war criminals

Kerry’s plan to introduce legislation this week, however, is seen as only the first step in a broader movement to force the government to disclose what it knows - and did - about violence against blacks during the civil rights era, including scores of unsolved lynching and bombing cases.

Bender spoke with Thomas Moore, who, as brother of murder victim Charles Eddie Moore, now works with Cold Case project as a family advocate.

Thomas Moore is among the few family members to see the murder case of a loved one reopened decades after the height of the civil rights movement.

But that was only after a journalist obtained previously unreleased federal and state records about the killing of his brother, Charles.

“It wasn’t until 2005 that I was able to receive the unredacted FBI files,’’ Moore said. And it was not until this month, he added, that he obtained the Mississippi autopsy photos.

As for countless other cases, Moore said he believes “there is still a lot of information out there. It should have been released a long time ago.’’

Bender spoke with me as well:

Part of the problem, many researchers say, is that unless they know which specific documents to request there is little chance of success, and as a result there needs to be an alternate mechanism along the lines of what Kerry is advocating for King files.

They insist that what the government knew at the time about widespread racial violence could be crucial in solving some murders, such as the brutal killing of Clifton Walker, a father of five who was shot in the face on his way home from work in Woodville, Miss., in 1964.

“The FBI documents I have [on the case] are highly redacted. I stare at them every day,’’ said Ben Greenberg, 40, a freelance journalist in Somerville who is working with the Cold Case Project. “If I knew whose name was under there or could better piece together what circumstances are being described, I’d be further down the path.’’

He thinks government files about a rash of racially motivated killings at the time in southwest Mississippi might contain information that could help solve multiple cases.

“If these files were more broadly available and not redacted they could provide a road map,’’ said Greenberg, whose father, Paul, worked for King in the early 1960s.

There's more in Bender and Mitchell's articles.

Since I first posted about The Civil Rights Cold Case Project, we've added the trailer for the documentary mini-series that we are currently developing in partnership with WNET.org and Paperny Films. I'm on there with the Clifton Walker Case a few times, starting at around 00:45.

I am pleased to announce that The Civil Rights Cold Case Project website is now up and running at http://coldcases.org.

My previous blog post, about my most recent trip to Mississippi, was cross posted from the Cold Case Project site.

The Civil Rights Cold Case Project brings together the power of investigative reporting, narrative writing, documentary filmmaking and interactive multimedia production to reveal the long-neglected truths behind scores of race-motivated murders, and to facilitate reconciliation and healing.

Our reporters are reopening and investigating several cold cases—producing important evidence that prosecutors have used to build criminal cases against killers and conspirators who have walked free for more than 40 years.

The photo from the home page slideshow, above, is one I took on Poor House Road, in the area where Clifton Walker was murdered on February 28, 1964.

There's more on the site and much more to come.