Over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend some attention turned to US Senator John Kerry’s (D-MA) renewed effort to open the FBI records of Dr. King. Civil Rights Cold Case reporter Jerry Mitchell reported:
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.
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§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 22, 2010 at 8:20 am
USA Today reports that the FBI Field Office in Jackson, Mississippi may soon be named after James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman—the three civil rights workers murdered by Klansmen in Neshoba County, MS, June 21, 1964.
JACKSON, Miss. — This state, whose civil rights history is marred with negatives, wants to name its new Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters after slain civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
“Given our state and its history, it would do a lot to show that Mississippi has changed,” said U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat.
“I think it’s an excellent idea and one that I would support,” Thompson said.
The Jackson City Council will vote today on a resolution supporting the move. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were killed June 21, 1964, while participating in Freedom Summer, an intensive voter registration drive aimed at breaking Mississippi’s resistance to civil rights for African Americans….
“It could send a signal to the rest of the nation that we at least understand some of the things that have happened in the past and realize that this is in tune of correcting some of the negatives back then,” Smith said.
FBI spokeswoman Deborah Madden said the agency will defer to Congress for a final decision on naming the building, which the federal government is leasing….
Angela Lewis, Chaney’s daughter, said naming the building after the trio would be “a very nice gesture” that could contribute to a better understanding of the era.
I’m ambivalent about this possibility of a Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman FBI Field Office. In 1964, when the field office was established, attention to the three murdered civil rights workers precluded attention to most other of the numerous incidents that warranted investigation and response. In his book Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-72, historian Kenneth O’Reilly writes:
The reason for skepticism about the FBI presence was obvious. The violence had not abated. By COFO’s estimate 450 incidents makred the three months beginning June 15. Segregationists three voter registration workers in Hattiesburg as Hoover made his speech [at the opening of the Jackson Field Office]. (171)
Despite enormous resources expended by the Bureau on solving the Neshoba murders, there was much skepticism about that as well. As Dick Gregory remarked at the time:
If these Mississippi white Klansmen, who do not know how to plan crimes, who are ignorant, illiterate bastards, can completely baffle our FBI, what are those brilliant Communist spies doing to us?
Though Edgar Ray Killen was finally convicted in 2005 on manslaughter charges for his role in the murders, the case is far from resolved.
The FBI has been been trying to set a different tone in the present day, but questions remain about what the Bureau will accomplish.
It is meaningful that US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who is a Mississippi Civil Rights Movement veteran, as well as the Mississippi NAACP and James Chaney’s daughter Angela, support the name change. It is worth noting, however, that journalist Chris Joyner has no quotes from Ben Chaney, brother of James Chaney, Rita Schwerner-Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, or David Goodman, brother of Andrew Goodman. All three regularly make public statements regarding the Neshoba murders and are outspoken advocates for a broad approach to justice for their murdered family members—and for the countless other victims, many still nameless to the world at large.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 29, 2009 at 5:17 pm
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