(CN) — Years after legislation creating it was signed into law, the Senate has finally confirmed members to a board whose task is to help compile and release records surrounding the racially motivated crimes that have lain unsolved since the Civil Rights era.
For decades, investigators, journalists and victims’ families have long sought answers surrounding bombings and shootings committed during the struggle for civil rights whose perpetrators were never caught or who skated through the justice system.
They’ve waited on record requests filed through the Freedom of Information Act. They’ve tried to piece together what happened by poring over the all-caps, teletype dispatches that pinged between FBI offices that, when initially released, were run through with blocks of redactions.
In 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law a bipartisan piece of legislation originally drafted by a group of high schoolers that treats records of these cold cases that happened between 1940 to 1979 like the records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which were compiled at the National Archives and made available to the public.
In mid-February, the Senate confirmed four individuals to the Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board: a former journalist who won the Pulitzer-prize in history, a law professor who was the first Black female judge in Massachusetts, an instruction archivist and a history professor at University of California, Los Angeles.
Their task? To determine just what records fall under the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018 and whether a document’s release should be delayed.
But before that work begins in earnest, the members must be sworn in and there’s paperwork to do, staff to hire.
“That will take some time,” said William Bosanko, chief operating officer for the National Archives and Records Administration.
But time is not on the board’s side.
As the administration in Washington changed hands, the board remained unfilled. The clock is ticking, as the law says the review board’s work will end four years after the law first passed, although the board could vote to extend that time for a year further.
“Absent congressional intervention and a change in the law, the board doesn't really have a fighting chance. They're going to need more time in order to deal with these very important and very weighty issues around these cold cases,” Bosanko said.
Those weighty issues include the act’s scope. A couple years ago, the federal government compiled and reviewed 161 unsolved homicides carried out during the struggle for civil rights. The cases included the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and the Mississippi Burning case involving the deaths of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.
But Bosanko said the Cold Case Records Collection Act was written to encompass more than those cases and could include, say, violations to the Fair Housing Act.
There’s also the sheer volume of records, where Department of Justice documents stored at the National Archives that could fall under the act is not measured in the thousands of pages, but in the thousands of cubic feet.
Bosanko said the National Archives has already identified some of the low hanging fruit, some of the most notable Civil Rights-era cold cases, cases that the administration suspects may be of interest to the board and whose records they could quickly get in front of the group.
The archives, however, is stymied when it comes to crafting and issuing guidance to other federal agencies because it does not yet know what the board will determine is the scope of the act.
In the meantime, some departments have been at work. For instance, in a footnote of a report, the Criminal Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division said between July 2019 to September 2020 it spent nearly 1,800 hours working on issues surrounding cold cases, including compliance with the records collection act.
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