Over the past 20 years, every unsolved civil rights murder case that has been reopened and successfully prosecuted in the South was the direct result of an investigation initiated by a journalist.
So the FBI’s decision to close, without prosecution or further disclosure, all but a few of the 108 unsolved murder cases it began re-examining three years ago, only highlights the vital need for investigative reporting that can find the truth, tell the stories and fill in the gaps in our nation’s history.
The Civil Rights Cold Case Project (www.coldcases.org), a team of investigative reporters, documentary filmmakers and interactive media producers, is digging into unsolved civil rights murders in the South. Led by the Center for Investigative Reporting and Paperny Films, the project -- which includes Clarion Ledger reporter and recent MacArthur Genius award winner Jerry Mitchell, and Pulitzer Prize winner Hank Klibanoff -- has been focused for more than two years on race murders and crimes primarily in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.
“These cases are not cold when it comes to the relatives and friends of the victims,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting. “Our reporting has found that these cases resonate powerfully today. Too many Americans are unaware of the terror of that era and how it has affected our country in terms of race and reconciliation.”
In a Washington Post story, the FBI said that it was discontinuing its pursuit of all but a handful of the cases it believed had great potential for prosecution when the initiative was announced in 2007. Cynthia Deitle, head of the FBI’s civil rights unit, told the Post that agents and prosecutors concluded that almost a fifth of the cases were not racially motivated. In other cases, agents hit dead ends or dead perpetrators. It continues to investigate a few cases.
“While we welcomed FBI involvement in these cases,” said Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, “we always felt that our goals – deep reporting, story-telling and racial healing – had significance and value regardless of whether federal agents and prosecutors felt they could win a conviction. So while the FBI might pass on cases because the killers have died, we remain intensely interested because these stories are compelling and worth telling. There are family members of victims and perpetrators who deserve to know what happened, and there are history books and classrooms that are incomplete without this information.”
The Civil Rights Cold Case Project also urged the FBI to make all the files of the closed cases available to the public without redactions and without the long and difficult processes demanded by the federal Freedom of Information Act.
“There’s no reason now for this history to remain hidden,” Klibanoff said. “And there are compelling reasons for the records to be opened. A perpetrator of a racial murder should not be given special protection from disclosure and scrutiny simply because he had the misfortune of dying before he could be prosecuted.”
The Project also urged Congress to pass legislation that would ease public access to government-held records from the modern civil rights era. Working with Northeastern University Law Professor Margaret Burnham and her Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, Klibanoff has helped develop ideas for legislation that would create an independent review board to examine all those government-held civil rights records and release as many as possible, as soon as possible. The Civil Rights Cold Case Project supports this effort.
Congress acted in a similar manner twice before, both in the 1990s, when it created independent review boards to examine the John F. Kennedy Assassination Papers and the Nazi/Japanese War Crimes Papers; in both cases, Congress declared that the federal Freedom of Information Act had fallen short of its purpose – a situation the Civil Rights Cold Case Project believe exists today with civil rights records.
Sen. John Kerry recently introduced legislation that would create such a board to examine and release papers related to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Kerry’s office has said the senator would favor broadening the bill to include records of all civil rights murders.
The Project’s aim is to secure adequate funding to bring on additional reporters to join the existing team and produce ongoing reporting for newspapers and websites; a series of short and long-form documentaries for public television, in partnership with WNET.org in New York; reporting for National Public Radio; and a groundbreaking website and educational outreach effort that would engage victims’ families and communities in the investigative process.
Klibanoff noted that at least two of the handful of cases the FBI is still pursuing were prompted by Civil Rights Cold Case Project reporters.
Reporting by John Fleming of The Anniston Star led to federal criminal charges against a former Alabama state trooper for the 1965 shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama, an act that helped trigger the historic Selma to Montgomery March. The trooper awaits trial.
In Ferriday, Louisiana, weekly newspaper editor Stanley Nelson’s extraordinary reporting on the 1964 murder of black shopkeeper Frank Morris led to a current FBI and local investigation, the posting of a reward and the possibility a grand jury will be empanelled. Nelson, working with thousands of pages of government documents that took nearly two years to obtain and aided by the children of former Klansmen, also has revealed important new information about a violent Klan offshoot, the Silver Dollar group, and its involvement in two other murders: Wharlest Jackson in 1967 and Joe Ed Edwards in 1964. Significant work has been done on those cases by two allies of the cold case project, law professors Paula C. Johnson and Janis L. McDonald, who run the Cold Case Justice Initiative at Syracuse University.
Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi has been responsible since the late 1980s for prosecutions and convictions in some of the nation’s highest profile civil rights cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham church bombing, and the “Mississippi Burning” murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, MS. Mitchell continues to find stories in the 40,000 pages of “Mississippi Burning” documents.
Two other team members, Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen and Thomas Moore, the brother of a young black man abducted and murdered in Meadville, Mississippi, produced documentary reporting that led to the federal prosecution and conviction of a Klansman for the murder – and a public apology by another Klansman.
Project reporter Ben Greenberg continues to break new ground on the 1964 murder of Clifton Walker, who was driving home from work in Woodville, Mississippi, when he was shot multiple times on a lonely road. Greenberg has found witnesses who were long ago believed to have died or disappeared.
“Investigative reporting takes enormous time and resources, and it’s even more challenging at a time when reporters are being called on to help their newsrooms by covering an ever-changing array of topics and stories,” Klibanoff said. “It is our hope that we can attract the resources to free up those reporters and many others who want to join us as we dig out and tell these hidden stories from our difficult past.”
Mexico’s brutal drug war has rattled that country’s sense of security, deepened its economic crisis and shifted attention from other pressing concerns. Leading journalists and scholars explore the roots of the violence, what its lasting impact may be, and how the drug war might be resolved. They examine ways that the narco-violence is affecting – and affected by – the United States. And they discuss how the U.S. press is covering the issue and what stories about Mexico we might be missing.
A panel of journalists who have covered Mexico discuss their work and their observations. They will be joined by the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies to go behind the headlines and talk about the political and economic forces shaping Mexico today.
The event is jointly sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the Graduate School of Journalism, both at UC Berkeley.
Reporting on Mexico: Drugs, Violence and the Prospects for a Nation’s Future
Andrew Becker, Center for Investigative Reporting
Steve Fainaru, Washington Post
Susan Ferriss, Sacramento Bee
Prof. Harley Shaiken, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies
Moderated by Tyche Hendricks, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
North Gate Hall Library
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
5:30 p.m.
National Public Radio, in collaboration with the Center for Investigative Reporting, will broadcast tonight the first in a three-part series on foreigners who work as confidential informants.
CIR reporter Andrew Becker along with Michael Montgomery, a producer with CIR’s California Watch project, produced the third story in the series about an informant who went public with his case last summer after immigration officials tried to deport him. The story will air Saturday, Feb. 13 on NPR’S Weekend Edition program.
The Los Angeles Times will run a separate story on the treatment of such informants.
CIR’s 10-month investigation on the treatment of informants who do not have legal immigrant status in the United States found several instances of informants who say they have been wronged by drug agents and immigration officials.
>> Visit CIR's complete reporting project on immigration courts in the U.S.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Craig Pyes will speak about prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy on Tuesday, February 2, from 4-6 p.m. More info here:
More than 160 detainees have died in American military custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, many classified as homicides. But were these deaths properly investigated? Craig Pyes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose reporting launched an Army probe into two detainee deaths and their cover-up by a U.S. Special Forces team in Afghanistan, will argue that cases of homicide where abuse is suspected should be re-examined because the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID) did not vigorously pursue suspected war crimes. Pyes will discuss his own multi-year investigation of a rogue Special Forces detachment in Afghanistan that adapted harsh interrogation techniques promoted by the Pentagon, that were later judged responsible for the vast majority of prisoner abuse. Ten detainees held at the base said they had been tortured, yet questions remain unanswered about the culpability of the Special Forces team six years later, despite the decision by the U.S. Army to close the criminal investigation - not once, but three times.
Craig Pyes is a human rights investigator and an award-winning investigative reporter with extensive experience in Afghanistan and other conflict zones. As a special investigator for the non-profit Crimes of War Project, Pyes looked into possible breaches of U.S. and International law in the armed conflict in Afghanistan. While working as an investigative reporter for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, he wrote about the looming threat of the al Qaeda terrorism network both before and after the September 11th attacks on America, and profiled the corrosive and national security effects of drug corruption in Mexico. During the civil war in El Salvador, he and a colleague were the only reporters to reveal the inner workings of Salvadoran death squads that had killed more than 40,000 people with impunity. Pyes has received two Pulitzer Prizes, as well as awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Los Angeles Times, and the Latin American Studies Association. In 2002, he was a finalist for Harvard's Shorenstein Center's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Currently based in Los Angeles, he investigates human rights abuses for lawyers and non-profits, and is a court-appointed death penalty mitigation specialist.
A few weeks ago we asked you to send in your questions on climate change for our reporter Mark Schapiro while he was in Copenhagen covering the talks.
Many of you did, sending them via webcam, email and from the summit itself. Questions came in from Tibetans, Russians, Pacific Islanders, Brazilians and many Americans.
As soon as the Bella center shut up shop at the weekend, we found the festive if freezing King's Square in downtown Copenhagen to put your questions to Mark, and get his initial thoughts on what had been achieved there.
The analysis of what did or should have happened at the summit is only just beginning to surface, and we'll be following the road from Copenhagen to Bonn and Mexico Ciity where the next crucial stages of these talks will take place in the coming months.
Over the next year, FRONTLINE/World and CIR will report on key issues of climate change in a joint project—Carbon Watch—focusing on the multi-billion-dollar carbon trading market. We’ll look at which proposals to reduce emissions by 2020 really add up; at the hidden interests behind these solutions; and the new industry players.
California Watch’s story on corporate farmer Stewart Resnick and Dianne Feinstein sparked a Sac Bee editorial.
Dianne Feinstein was quick to respond in September when a big corporate farmer sought her help in challenging limits on the export of water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Unfortunately, she's rarely shown that level of interest in representing the concerns of commercial salmon fishermen.
They are arguably far more vulnerable to how those flows are regulated. An article by the investigative group California Watch, which appeared in last Monday's Bee, revealed some of Feinstein's priorities.
...
It would behoove Feinstein, and the state she represents, if she spent as much personal time with dry-docked salmon fishermenas corporate farmers who have a fairly limited view on the subject of water. The salmon fishermen's claim on the water flows that course though the Delta is just as compelling as agriculture's.
The world is watching Copenhagen. Here is your chance to be heard. Send your comments and questions about the climate change summit to CIR senior correspondent Mark Schapiro via FRONTLINE/World's new web-cam tool:
Whatever your concerns are about climate change and wherever you live in the world, we'd love to hear from you. For the next 10 days we have a team from FRONTLINE/World covering the U.N. Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen. As they report from this chaotic gathering and track down some of the major stakeholders, we wanted to invite our viewers to ask Mark Schapiro, our lead reporter there, your most pressing questions. You can do this by using a great new video record tool. It's simple and fun to use. Just click on the record button below, leave your message, and submit. We will then take a selection of your questions for an interview with Mark that we will post before the summit ends on December 18th.
California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, is implementing a new distribution model to reach diverse California communities in multimedia formats.
On November 19, California Watch published an in-depth report, which found that class sizes in K-3 grades in California are reverting in some districts to levels not seen for over a decade, despite more than $20 billion spent on a program to reduce class size.
Since then, the story has been distributed in five languages, through a variety of media outlets – web, broadcast, and print – highlighting California Watch’s approach of focusing on important statewide issues with local appeal and collaborating with media outlets to customize the content and engage local communities. The combined daily print circulation was close to 1,000,000. Many more Californians had access to the story through television, radio and Web-based media.
Distribution outlets included the following:
The story was accompanied by a set of interactive tools produced by California Watch including a state-by-state comparison of teacher-student ratios, a Web video featuring interviews with teachers from Plummer Elementary School in Los Angeles, and an interactive map with detailed information on class sizes in the state’s 30 largest school districts. The full report, plus related multimedia material, can be viewed at www.californiawatch.org.
About The Investigation
California Watch reporters Louis Freedberg and Hugo Cabrera took an in-depth look at a class-size reduction program initiated in 1996 that provided generous subsidies to schools that limited K-3 classrooms to 20 students per teacher. Since then, the state has invested over $20 billion to keep classes at or close to that level. Today, most of California's largest school districts are increasing class sizes – some to as many as 30 students -- eroding the most expensive education reform in the state’s history. The shift has parents and teachers concerned that the academic performance of millions of children will suffer. California’s K-12 teacher-student ratios already rank 48th in the nation. The overall project was coordinated and edited by editorial director Mark Katches.
About California Watch and The Center for Investigative Reporting
California Watch, the largest investigative team operating in the state, was launched in 2009 by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). Priority areas of coverage include education, health and welfare, public safety, the environment and the influence of money on the political and regulatory process. The goal is to expose hidden truths, prompt debate and spark change. California Watch receives funding from The James Irvine Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Founded in 1977, the Center for Investigative Reporting is the nation's oldest nonprofit investigative news organization. CIR reports have reached the public through television, print, radio and the web, appearing in outlets such as 60 Minutes, PBS Frontline, NPR, The Los Angeles Times<, Washington Post, Politico and U.S. News & World Report. CIR stories have received numerous journalism awards including the Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University Silver Baton, George Polk Award, Emmy Award, Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, and National Magazine Award for Reporting Excellence. More importantly, its reports have sparked congressional hearings and legislation, United Nations resolutions, public interest lawsuits and change in corporate policies. CIR founded California Watch to help create a new model for regional investigative and other high-impact reporting.
About twenty percent of women who attend college will become victims of rape or attempted rape before they graduate, according to a new report funded by the Department of Justice. A nine-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that a culture of silence at many universities prevents many victims from reporting incidents.
The first and second articles in a series were published this week on CPI's website, along with audio slideshows—interviews with women who reflect on their own experiences. From CPI:
Many victims don’t report at all, because they blame themselves, or don’t identify what happened as sexual assault; one national study found that more than 95 percent of students who are sexually victimized do not report to police or campus officials. Local criminal justice authorities regularly shy away from such cases, because they are “he said, she said” disputes sometimes clouded by drugs or alcohol. That frequently leaves students to deal with campus judiciary processes so shrouded in secrecy that they can remain mysterious even to their participants.
Critics question whether faculty, staff, and students should even adjudicate what amounts to a felony crime. But these internal proceedings actually grow from two federal laws, known as Title IX and the Clery Act, which require schools to respond to allegations of sexual assault on campus and to offer key rights to victims.
Institutional barriers compound the problem of silence, and few victims in fact make it to a campus hearing. Those who do come forward can encounter secret disciplinary proceedings, closed-mouth school administrations, and off-the-record negotiations. At times, school policies and practices can lead students to drop complaints, or submit to gag orders—a practice deemed illegal. College administrators generally believe the existing processes provide a fair and effective way to deal with highly sensitive allegations, but the Center’s investigation has found that these processes have little transparency or accountability, and regularly result in little or no punishment for alleged assailants.
>> See the full project here: "Sexual Assault on Campus"
Long Island University is seeking nominees and submissions for The George Polk Awards, which are given for investigative work in print, radio, photojournalism, TV, and web. Entries must include two original clips or recordings (with two copies of printed text plus URLs for digital submissions). They should come with an explanatory letter and be postmarked no later than January 8, 2010.
The address for submissions is:
John Darnton, Curator
The George Polk Awards
Long Island University
The Brooklyn Campus
1 University Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11201-5372
Visit the website for more information.