Hank Klibanoff, James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently commented on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act for the Courthouse News Service. Conceived of by New Jersey high school students and signed into law in 2019, the Cold Case legislation directs the National Archives and Record Administration to compile documents related to unsolved cases of the civil rights era. A five-member board designated to review those documents has yet to be appointed. In the article Klibanoff discusses the significance of the legislation, which he sees as opening up productive avenues for solving cold cases and achieving justice for victims and their families. Read an excerpt from the piece below along with the full article: “Empty Board Hampers Effort to Release Records on Civil Rights-Era Killings.”

“Hank Klibanoff, director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Atlanta’s Emory University, said the law will help researchers dig into old documents on these killings ‘without having to jump through three, four, five hoops.‘

“It’s a process Klibanoff knows well: He had to file two different requests, one to the FBI and another to the National Archives, to get information about the killing of Isaiah Nixon, a Black man shot in 1948 for voting in Georgia.

“Klibanoff said the law drafted by the students – known formally as the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018 – could make more of a difference than when the federal government tried to reopen a bunch of the cases a few years ago in the hopes of closing them. In many instances, the government closed the cases when they concluded there was no one left alive to prosecute. 

“‘This, you don’t have to have a living perpetrator,’ Klibanoff said. ‘This allows the perpetrators – even if they are deceased – to still face the judgement of history. This allows historians, or families and newspaper reporters, to come in, look at them and write stories about what the record shows happened.‘”