Researching lynching cold cases, Northeastern University law students restore history

Marshall Project

The document is more than 85 years old, handwritten and hard to read. Many death certificates from this period are ambiguous or euphemistic: the victim died from a “broken neck.” Not this one. The cause of death, recorded in loopy cursive, is “hanged by mob.”

Robert Appleberry, 22 and known as Hollie, was murdered in 1930 in the tiny Mississippi town of Wahalak, in a time and place where lynchings were so common the county was called “Bloody Kemper.” Appleberry was one of three black men lynched in Kemper County that day. When law student Kellie Ware-Seabron got her hands on his death certificate this fall, it was “equal parts gratifying and horrifying,” she said. She had set out to research the other two victims — dragged from sheriffs’ cars and hung after being accused of robbing a white couple — and inadvertently discovered a third.

During the reign of racial terror that lasted from the end of Reconstruction through the 1950s, thousands of African-Americans were killed by mobs, mutilated, kidnapped from jails and hung from trees. Historians have tried to catalogue these deaths — a recent report by the Equal Justice Initiative includes a list of 4,075 names — but Appleberry does not appear on any of the lists. His name might have been lost to history but for the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, run out of Northeastern University’s law school.

The project aims to create an archive of documents, photographs, news clippings, and interviews about as many of these deaths as possible — particularly the overlooked and unnamed among them. The idea is to create a record of each murder, a trove for historians and researchers and family members to plumb in years to come.

“Restoring these stories to history is a piece of restorative justice,” says Rose Zoltek-Jick, the program’s associate director. “The work of the archive is to prevent closure, to lift them up out of the silence.”

Law students who enroll in the project’s semester-long “clinic” are each assigned a dossier of death: a list of a half-dozen murdered African-Americans, some with little more to go on than a newspaper headline reading “unknown Negro found in swamp.” In 11 weeks, the students learn as much as they can about the victims’ lives and deaths. They unearth news reports, NAACP files, birth, death, and marriage certificates. They submit records requests to the FBI and to local courthouses. They locate witnesses and relatives.

Many of these deaths have never before been investigated, let alone tried. Sometimes documents listing the perpetrators as “persons unknown” coexist in Northeastern’s archive side-by-side with striking black and white photographs of the murderers posing with the lynched man’s body. In some instances, the perpetrators were tried in pro forma legal proceedings in which all-white juries acquitted them in a matter of minutes.

The project focuses on the years 1930 to 1970 — “not all that distant,” yet fast fading from view, says Margaret Burnham, a law professor at Northeastern and the founder and director of the project. “The persons who have knowledge about these events — the family members, the witnesses — are aging. The documents are disappearing. And if we don’t do this now, this piece of our history will be lost to us and to future generations.”

The project began in 2007, the same year that Congress passed the Emmett Till Act, named for the 14-year-old boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955; his mother’s decision to invite the national media to the open-casket funeral of her mutilated son catapulted the reality of racial violence into the consciousness of white Northerners. The law directs the Justice Department to re-investigate unsolved civil rights–era cases. Initially, Burnham envisioned the archive as a resource for the lawyers and family members working on these cases, and to provide support and fodder for reparations initiatives that had sprung up around the country during the previous decade.

One of the project’s first major undertakings was a 2008 civil suit against Franklin County, Miss.; the Justice Department had, the previous year, successfully prosecuted a former Klansman in the 1964 kidnapping, torture, and murder of two black teenagers who disappeared while hitchhiking in the tiny town of Meadville. Evidence from that case suggested the sheriff knew enough of the Klansmen’s plans to have prevented the murders but did nothing, and did not investigate it after the fact. In support of the case, Northeastern students interviewed surviving witnesses, analyzed FBI files, and gathered other evidence.

In 2010, Franklin County agreed to a settlement for the victims’ families. The amount was confidential, but Burnham says the attorneys’ portion was enough to ramp up the project, which had emerged as a powerful teaching tool for her law students. With this new financial footing, they decided to move away from legal actions in favor of investigating the many hundreds of murders that had never been studied. Most lacked enough evidence for court, but Burnham felt they deserved the same dogged research too often reserved for prosecutions.

“We’re not looking for a legal solution, but we are trying to understand something about how law operates — what the absence of law creates, what impunity looks like,” says Zoltek-Jick. [MORE]