Murders Around Mississippi

Once a SNCC volunteer protester, U. S. Rep. John Lewis is carried away by police




Wednesday, September 5, 2007, 02:23 PM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

U.S. Rep. John Lewis went before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, tying the disarray in the U.S. Justice Department to Georgia’s voter ID law.

Here’s the gist of his printed remarks:

“During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we knew that individuals in the Department of Justice were people who we could call any time of day or night….

“And we felt during those years that the civil rights division of the Department of Justice was more than a sympathetic referee, it was on the side of justice, on the side of fairness.

“During the movement, people looked to Washington for justice, for fairness, but today I’m not so sure that the great majority of individuals in the civil rights community can look to the division for that fairness…

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Labels: Birdia Keglar, Charles Eddie Moore, civil rights movement, Cleve McDowell, cold cases, Goodman, Gordon Lackey, Henry Dee, Henry Hezekiah Dee, James Ford Seale, John Lewis, KKK

A bill that could reopen thousands of civil rights-era crimes was reintroduced Thursday, Feb. 8, in Congress where it died last year when the Missouri Republican who introduced it lost his re-election bid.

Three Democrats and a Republican took up the bill that would establish a cold-case Justice Department unit to investigate unsolved civil rights crimes.

The Jackson, Miss., Cllarion-Ledger reports Sens. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Kenny Hulshof, R-Mo., reintroduced the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, named after the 14-year-old African American from Chicago who was killed in Money in 1955.

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Labels: civil rights, crime, Emmett Till, John Lewis