The history books remember 1964 for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nobel Prize win and the Freedom Summer campaign in Mississippi.

But other equally important events that happened in 1964 never found their way into the history books. In December 1964, two men belonging to the Ku Klux Klan organization broke into Frank Morris’ shoe repair store, trapped him inside and set the building on fire. He died four days later of third-degree burns that covered his entire body.

In February, the FBI closed Morris’ case after concluding that the men likely responsible are dead.

Morris’ case is just one of many racially motivated murders that occurred in 1964. Fifty years later, justice remains elusive for him and many other victims of similar crimes being investigated by the Cold Case Justice Initiative. The CCJI, an interdisciplinary program at the Syracuse University College of Law, serves as an important link between the civil rights movement and the victims’ family members who decades later are still struggling with the aftermath of these crimes.

To emphasize this connection between past and present, the CCJI is holding a conference this weekend called “Looking Back, Moving Forward: 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the civil rights movement 1964-2014.” The three-day conference will include workshops and discussions on social justice issues and non-violent activism, a poetry jam and a dinner honoring civil rights icons including the Rev. C.T. Vivian and Diane Nash.

“This is not just a commemoration event. It’s not just to remember civil rights but it’s also to bridge the gap. There are still civil rights issues today and we need to recognize the civil rights issues and we also need ways in which to combat those issues,” said Susan Schneider, a second year law student who helped organize the conference.

Part of bridging this gap between past and present involves getting justice for the victims of these decades-old cold cases, said Paula Johnson, co-director of the CCJI. Most of the CCJI’s work involves researching and identifying these cases on their own and then pushing the FBI to investigate or re-open these cases. Often, the FBI is reluctant to devote the time and resources needed to fully examine these cases, she said.

In 2008 Congress passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which called on the Department of Justice to “expeditiously investigate unsolved civil rights murders” and “provide all the resources necessary to ensure timely and thorough investigations in the cases involved.”

The bill also authorized the Attorney General to request up to $10 million each year for this purpose from 2008–2017.  No Attorney General has ever requested the full $10 million authorized in the act, according to an NAACP resolution calling on the U.S. Attorney General to fully implement the act.

Instead of doing full investigations, the FBI has only been doing “paper reviews,” said Janis McDonald, co-director of the CCJI. This means that the FBI reads the original 1964 written report, determines if the main suspect is dead and if so, the FBI usually closes the case.

However, even though the person who pulled the trigger may be dead, there could still be other individuals alive who ordered the suspect to carry out the murder. Much of the CCJI’s work involves identifying these individuals, fighting for the FBI to interview them and talk to family members of the victim, McDonald said. But too often the first contact many of the victim’s families have with the government is when the FBI comes to deliver a letter stating that their case has been closed, she said.

The FBI started with a list of 120 cases to investigate, which was only a partial list to begin with, McDonald said. The agency later added four cases to the list, including two that the CCJI advocated for. In the first few years after the Till Act was passed, the FBI closed almost half of the cases. The FBI has not yet issued a report for 2013, but McDonald said there are likely only about 20 cases that are still open. There have been no indictments issued in connection with these cases and only one grand jury hearing, she said.

“One has to question: where is all of the might and the resources that the government can bring to bear? When they want to get somebody, invariably they do,” said Johnson, the co-director.

But justice for these victims does not always mean finding the killers or guilty parties and convicting them, Johnson added. Part of justice is remembering the victims and making sure that people never forget about these individuals and how they died, she said.

What many people don’t realize about cold cases is that while the incident may have happened decades ago, each victim has children and grandchildren who have to live with the reality of these murders every day, McDonald said.

“People grow up in families where generation to generation they pass on this wound and this anger and this frustration with people not understanding or even trying to listen,” she said.

Getting people to listen and starting a dialogue about race in America is another goal of the conference. Both Johnson and McDonald note that Americans are often afraid to talk about race and stressed that it’s necessary to confront these types of issues in society.

But conference organizers are not just asking attendees to remember and be aware of these issues, Johnson said. They also want attendees to do something about them.

The conference will cover a wide range of subjects that both directly and indirectly relate to civil rights issues, giving people plenty of topics to learn about and respond to, Johnson said. Some of these topics include a master class in nonviolent activism and workshops on racial, gender and social economic justice, violence in communities, social media in social justice movements and access, equality and diversity in higher education.

“The conference is about activism,” Johnson said. “So we are encouraging people to get information, to become more aware, but we’re also saying to them: do what you can do.”

Published on March 20, 2014 at 12:52 am

Contact Jessica: [email protected] | @JessicaIannetta