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Franklin County is a county located in the U.S. state of Mississippi. As of the 2020 census, the population was 7,675. Its county seat is Meadville. The county was formed on December 21, 1809, from portions of Adams County and named for Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. It is bisected by the Homochitto River, which runs diagonally through the county from northeast to southwest.
Troup County is a county located in the west central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 69,426. The county seat is LaGrange.
Harris County is a county located in the west-central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia; its western border with the state of Alabama is formed by the Chattahoochee River. As of the 2020 census, the population was 34,668. The county seat is Hamilton. The largest city in the county is Pine Mountain, a resort town that is home to the Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park. Harris County was created on December 14, 1827, and named for Charles Harris, a Georgia judge and attorney.
Morris Seligman Dees Jr. is an American attorney known as the co-founder and former chief trial counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), based in Montgomery, Alabama. He ran a direct marketing firm before founding SPLC. Along with his law partner, Joseph J. Levin Jr., Dees founded the SPLC in 1971. Dees and his colleagues at the SPLC have been "credited with devising innovative ways to cripple hate groups" such as the Ku Klux Klan, particularly by using "damage litigation".
Edgar Ray Killen was an American Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights activists participating in the Freedom Summer of 1964. He was found guilty in state court of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the forty-first anniversary of the crime, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He appealed the verdict, but the sentence was upheld on April 12, 2007, by the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, six days before his 93rd birthday.
The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, also known as the Freedom Summer murders, the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders, or the Mississippi Burning murders, were the abductions and murders of three activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June 1964, during the Civil Rights Movement. The victims were James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City. All three were associated with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and its member organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). They had been working with the Freedom Summer campaign by attempting to register African Americans in Mississippi to vote. Since 1890 and through the turn of the century, Southern states had systematically disenfranchised most black voters by discrimination in voter registration and voting.
James Joseph Reeb was an American Unitarian Universalist minister, pastor, and activist during the civil rights movement in Washington, D.C., and Boston, Massachusetts. While participating in the Selma to Montgomery marches actions in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, he was murdered by white segregationists and white supremacists, dying of head injuries in the hospital two days after being severely beaten. Three men were tried for Reeb's murder but were acquitted by an all-white jury. His murder remains officially unsolved.
The lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981, was one of the last reported lynchings in the United States. Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, a 19-year-old African-American, and hung his body from a tree. One perpetrator, Henry Hays, was executed by electric chair in 1997, while another, James Knowles, was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty and testifying against Hays. A third man was convicted as an accomplice and also sentenced to life in prison, and a fourth was indicted but died before his trial could be completed.
The Northeastern University School of Law (NUSL) is the law school of Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded as an evening program to meet the needs of its local community, NUSL is nationally recognized for its cooperative legal education and public interest law programs.
The Groveland Four were four African American men, Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. In July 1949, the four were accused of raping a white woman and severely beating her husband in Lake County, Florida. The oldest, Thomas, tried to elude capture and was killed that month. The others were put on trial. Shepard and Irvin received death sentences, and Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison. The events of the case led to serious questions about the arrests, allegedly coerced confessions and mistreatment, and the unusual sentencing following their convictions. Their incarceration was exacerbated by their systemic and unlawful treatment—including the death of Shepherd, and the near-fatal shooting of Irvin. Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and Irvin in 1968. All four were posthumously exonerated by the state of Florida in 2021.
A death in custody is a death of a person in the custody of the police, other authorities or in prison. In the 21st century, death in custody remains a controversial subject, with the authorities often being accused of abuse, neglect and cover-ups of the causes of these deaths.
James Ford Seale was a Ku Klux Klan member charged by the U.S. Justice Department on January 24, 2007, and subsequently convicted on June 14, 2007, for the May 1964 kidnapping and murder of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two African-American young men in Meadville, Mississippi. At the time of his arrest, Seale worked at a lumber plant in Roxie, Mississippi. He also worked as a crop duster and was a police officer in Louisiana briefly in the 1970s. He was a member of the militant Klan organization known as the Silver Dollar Group, whose members were identified with a silver dollar; occasionally minted the year of the member's birth.
Mississippi Cold Case is a 2007 feature documentary produced by David Ridgen of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about the Ku Klux Klan murders of two 19-year-old black men, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, in Southwest Mississippi in May 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement and Freedom Summer. It also explores the 21st-century quest for justice by the brother of Moore. The documentary won numerous awards as a documentary and for its investigative journalism.
James Cordie Cheek was a 17-year-old African-American youth who was lynched by a white mob in Maury County, Tennessee near the county seat of Columbia. After being falsely accused of raping a young white girl, Cheek was released from jail when the grand jury did not indict him, due to lack of evidence. The county magistrate and two other men from Maury County abducted Cheek from Nashville, where he was staying with relatives near Fisk University, took him back to the county, and turned him over to a lynch mob. The mob mutilated the youth and murdered him by hanging.
George Junius Stinney Jr., was an African American boy, who at the age of 14 was convicted, in a proceeding later vacated as an unfair trial, and executed, for the murders of two young girls in March 1944 – Betty June Binnicker, age 11, and Mary Emma Thames, age 7 – in his hometown of Alcolu, South Carolina. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed by electric chair in June 1944, thus becoming the youngest American with an exact birth date confirmed to be sentenced to death and executed in the 20th century.
Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) is an African American youth organization in the United States. Its activities include community organizing, voter mobilization, and other social justice campaigns focused on black, feminist, and queer issues. The national director is D'Atra "Dee Dee" Jackson.
Margaret A. Burnham is an American lawyer and academic who is a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law and the founder of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. She is a Senate-confirmed nominee to be a member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board.
Austin Callaway, also known as Austin Brown, was a young African-American man who was taken from jail by a group of six white men and lynched on September 8, 1940, in LaGrange, Georgia. The day before, Callaway had been arrested as a suspect in an assault of a white woman. The gang carried out extrajudicial punishment and prevented the youth from ever receiving a trial. They shot him numerous times, fatally wounding him and leaving him for dead. Found by a motorist, Callaway was taken to a hospital, where he died of his wounds.
John Earl Reese was an African American teenager who was murdered in Gregg County, Texas.
Henry Williams was an African American Private in the United States Army during World War II. He was killed by a bus driver in Mobile, Alabama on August 15, 1942.
References
- ↑ "The Goal: To Remember Each Jim Crow Killing, From The '30s On". NPR . January 3, 2015. Archived from the original on January 3, 2015. Retrieved January 3, 2015.
- ↑ "The Dee and Moore Case" Archived 2015-11-20 at the Wayback Machine , CRRJ, Northeastern University, 2015
- ↑ "CRRJ Brings Justice to Youngest Person Executed in US History" (Press release). Archived from the original on January 3, 2015. Retrieved January 3, 2015.
- ↑ CRRJ Provides First Full Account of Notorious 1947 Georgia Jailhouse Killing, Civil Rights Restorative Justice Project, August 22, 2016, retrieved August 25, 2016
- 1 2 Dunn, Tara; Kong, Ariel Goeun Lee (2016). Henry Gilbert. Northeastern University School of Law (Report). Boston, MA: Civil Rights Restorative Justice Project. Archived from the original on August 26, 2016. Retrieved August 25, 2016.
