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VT law student investigates racial killings

Dan D'Ambrosio
Free Press Staff Writer

Loy Harrison, left, shows Sheriff J.M. Bond, center, of Oconee County, and Coroner W.T. Brown, of Walton County, where four African-Americans were slain by a mob of white men on July 25, 1946, in Monroe, Georgia. Harrison said the mob took the African-Americans, two men and two women, from his car and carried them into the woods where they were shot. Bond holds the rope which the mob used to bind the hands of the two men together.

BOSTON – On Nov. 4, 1935, a 30-year-old black laborer and part-time bootlegger named Baxter Bell was taken to an abandoned road in Cheatham County, Tennessee, by a group of five white men, where Bell was shot once in the chest.

The killing came in response to Bell's alleged slapping of a white woman in a bar where Bell had been drinking.

Bell's case is among thousands of similar racially motivated slayings in the South in the mid-20th century that have largely been lost to history — but which continue to reverberate across the country, especially following police killings in Ferguson, Missouri; New York City; Aurora, Colorado; Madison, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

A project launched in 2007 at Northeastern University's law school in Boston is aiming to correct the record from this bleak period in American history, from the 1930s through the 1960s. The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which relies on law students to investigate these cold cases, also is dedicated to somehow restoring justice, even if that means nothing more than marking an unmarked grave or correcting the cause of death on a death certificate.

One of the students in the program is a Vermonter.

"If the case has legal potential, prosecution that still could be pursued, we try to follow those trails wherever they lead," said law professor Margaret Burnham, who started the program. "But you know we work as much to preserve the history of cases and in engaging families and communities to learn the full legal history. What happened and how did justice go wrong?"

The leader of the group of men who ended Bell's life was the white woman's husband, along with four of his cousins. At the time Bell was taken, he was under arrest for assault and in the custody of two police officers who were having a meal at the local diner before transferring Bell to county jail. The officers were disarmed by the group of men. Their weapons were returned after Bell was killed.

"It's sort of unclear how they took pistols away from the police officers," said Samantha Lednicky, a 26-year-old law student from Shelburne who investigated the case.

Later the five men were arrested and charged with murder, but they were acquitted in a trial where they claimed self-defense.

"They said they were just going to take Baxter Bell and 'discipline' him for slapping a white woman, but he picked up a rock," Lednicky said. "They felt their lives were threatened, and they shot him."

Law student Samantha Lednicky discusses research into racially motivated killings during the mid-20th century. She is a student at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. Looking on is professor Rose Zoltek-Jick, deputy director of the Restorative Justice Project.

Taking names

Lednicky, a graduate of the University of Vermont, chose Northeastern's law school because of its reputation for activism and hands-on learning. In her second year at Northeastern, Lednicky took a clinic on prisoners' rights. She jumped at the chance to join the Restorative Justice clinic for an 11-week stint last fall.

"I'm drawn to any clinical work," Lednicky said. "I learn by doing."

Lednicky was one of 16 students in the fall session of the clinic , sitting at two rows of computers in one corner of a large, open room at the law school.

The investigative process begins with names.

"We're all given names and maybe a sentence or two," Lednicky said. "I have to find out who this person was, how they died and as much history as I can about that."

Lednicky said there are three main resources for the students to draw upon: a Google search, the NAACP papers and archival records of black newspapers through a database called ProQuest. The NAACP gathered as much information as it could on lynchings and other killings during the period in question, Lednicky said. Those investigations are preserved in letters, which are available online, or at Harvard University in hard copy.

"So you find a letter, pinpoint the exact date a person was killed; here's the correct spelling of his name," Lednicky said. "The letter says the killing happened in this town, so now you can use keywords and search them in black newspapers in another database. Black newspapers were active in the time period we're researching."

In the Baxter Bell case, a Google search failed to turn up anything, but a search of black newspapers revealed an account of the slapping incident. That eventually led to a gold mine: Buried in the library archive at Fisk University in Nashville were the handwritten notes of an investigator hired in 1935 by famed sociologist Robert Ezra Park, who had worked closely with Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute.

Lednicky and her research partner were unable to travel to Nashville themselves to look at the archive. The Restorative Justice Project operates on an annual budget of just $150,000. Professor Margaret Burnham said she needs five times that amount to run the program properly.

"We have to pick and choose who we send on research trips," Burnham said. "In the Baxter Bell case, Sam and the young woman working with her hired a researcher down there to go over to Fisk to look at the documents. You can do that, but you don't know if that researcher is picking up everything you need. You want to do the work yourself."

Still, Lednicky and her partner were able to learn about a remarkable development in the Bell case. The judge, Circuit Judge William Wirt Courtney, had refused to accept the jury's acquittal.

"I am astounded at your verdict," Courtney admonished the jury. "By your action you will make Cheatham County the dumping ground for lawlessness in the future."

Unable to charge the men with murder again because of double jeopardy, the state instead charged them with conspiracy to inflict corporal punishment. They had admitted as much during the trial. The jury ended up convicting the defendants of simple assault, and three of the five served a year in jail.

Hardly justice, Lednicky said, "but it was unheard of, unprecedented."

Lamar Howard, 19, of Monroe, Georgia, points to bruises he reports to have received in Atlanta on Jan. 2, 1947, from two white men. Howard said they tried to force from him his testimony before a federal grand jury investigating the lynching of four black men near Monroe the summer before.

At the tipping point

The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project has investigated 350 cases since 2007, creating paper and digital archives of what Northeastern law students have uncovered. Margaret Burnham and the project's associate director, law professor Rose Zoltek-Jick, hope the digital archive will become a publicly searchable document by town, year, nature of crime and family name.

"We have hundreds of cases, but there are thousands out there," she said.

Burnham said the project will be complete when "we feel like we've scraped the data clean." Meanwhile, the names keep coming.

When Lednicky was investigating the Baxter Bell case, she came across a list in the NAACP papers with the names of more than 30 lynching victims from 1935 alone.

"We're at that tipping point," Zoltek-Jick said. "More often than not we say, 'We know about that one.' There still are many cases we have left to do, but we're starting to have a critical mass. We've accomplished a lot in the seven to eight years the clinic has been alive and working."

Zoltek-Jick estimated the project is about halfway home, with another five to seven years of work to do. Burnham agreed.

Burnham was inspired to create the project after the Emmitt Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007 was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George Bush a year later. The act called on the FBI, the Department of Justice and other authorities to "expeditiously investigate" unsolved civil rights murders that occurred on or before Dec. 31, 1969.

"Any racial homicide that occurred before 1970, the Justice Department is empowered to go in and help local agencies work up a case," Burnham said. "This is an acknowledgment by the federal government there had been many miscarriages of justice based on race during this earlier period of time."

The scope of the mandate in the Emmitt Till Act is national, Burnham said, but the focus is on the "states of the former Confederacy."

"That's certainly been our focus," she said.

Under the auspices of the Emmitt Till law, the Justice Department in 2007 pursued a case in Franklin County, Mississippi, from 1964 when two young black men named Henry Dee and Charles Moore, both 19, were kidnapped and lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. Two Klansmen were arrested and "promptly released" within days in November 1964, Burnham said.

Burnham traveled to Mississippi to watch the trial, which resulted in a life sentence on federal kidnapping charges for one of the men, James Seal. He had been living in a trailer in Mississippi.

During the trial, Burnham got to know the families of the two victims, and in 2008, together with Mississippi attorney Robert McDuff, filed a lawsuit against Franklin County.

"Our allegation was that Franklin County could have but didn't prevent the kidnapping of these two young men," Burnham said. "We settled the case favorably to the families, and never took it to trial."

There were attorneys' fees awarded as part of the settlement, which Burnham put directly into the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. She declined to say how much she received, noting the records of the settlement are sealed.

Northeastern University School of Law in Boston professor Margaret Burnham, founder of the Restorative Justice Project, discusses the research into racially motivated killings in the Jim Crow South.

Killed for voting

Cases in which perpetrators can be prosecuted are relatively rare, especially given the amount of time that has passed in many cases. But there always is the opportunity to put together a restorative project, Burnham said.

"These projects could be quite simple, family gatherings like the Nixon case, where the family gathers with community members and finally comes back to the town they'd been chased out of: Alston, Georgia," she said.

The Nixon case involves Isaiah Nixon, who was killed Sept. 8, 1948, after voting in Georgia's Democratic primary election. Nixon, says the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project website, was killed "for daring to exercise his constitutional right to vote."

"That evening Nixon was confronted at his home by two white men, identified as brothers Jim A. Johnson and Johnny Johnson," the website recounts. "He was asked to step down from his porch, and when Nixon refused, he was shot three times by J.A. Johnson. The shooting took place in front of Nixon's wife and young children. Nixon was transported to a hospital in Dublin where he died of his injuries forty-eight hours later."

The Johnson brothers were found not guilty at trial, claiming self-defense. Nixon's wife, Sallie, fled town after the murder, moving into a two-bedroom house in Jacksonville, Fla., with Isaiah Nixon's mother and another family. The Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper at the time, launched a successful campaign to build a new home for the Nixon family. Sallie Nixon never returned to Georgia, even though she had relatives who remained there.

Burnham said four or five years after the project's Isaiah Nixon investigation, students in the clinic were able to hold an event in Alston in which they brought Nixon family members back to the community and located Isaiah Nixon's unmarked grave. They erected a headstone and a bench. The students worked with Unesco's Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project on the event.

Another restorative project in Longview, Texas, was even more successful, involving the mayor of the city, a plaque explaining the event and the naming of a road after the victim, 16-year-old John Earl Reese. Reese was killed in a drive-by shooting at a local cafe soon after Emmitt Till was lynched on Aug. 28, 1955.

"In not every case can we have a reunion and a marker; in not every case can we change a death certificate to indicate it's not self-defense and justifiable homicide, but in fact it's murder; but those are things we've been able to do in some cases," associate director Rose Zoltek-Jick said. "In every case, what we regard as restorative justice is not letting this case remain nameless and forgotten and bringing it back to history. That's part of what we're restoring."

Forget my number

Sometimes, student investigators hit a brick wall. Family members don't want to be reminded of a painful legacy. Town officials decline to re-open a long-forgotten wound.

"We rarely get family members who say to us, 'Forget my number,' but it happens," Burnham said.

Thomas Ray of Clifton, New Jersey, took the call from Northeastern University law student Quinn Rallins last year concerning Ray's grandfather, William Lockwood, a farmer in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Rallins, 29, is in his second year at Northeastern, where he is a research assistant for Margaret Burnham on the Restorative Justice Project. He grew up on Chicago's south side, earned his undergraduate degree from Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, and then spent 18 months at Oxford University in England studying public policy before he entered Northeastern's law school.

Rallins investigated William Lockwood's 1946 case.

Lockwood's son, Elijah, had just come back from serving in the war in May 1946 when he got into an argument with Sheriff William Kirby's son, Ed, at the local feed store. The argument was about whether Elijah Lockwood had the right to pursue a job at a hospital rather than joining his father in the cotton fields.

"They get into an argument, so much so that the sheriff's son believes Elijah is getting out of line and goes to get his gun," Rallins said.

Elijah Lockwood had a gun, too. Rallins said black war veterans returned home with "a new sense of citizenship, a new sense of rights," and with guns to protect themselves.

Elijah Lockwood and Ed Kirby exchanged gunfire, but neither man was hit. Sheriff Kirby arrested Elijah Lockwood, which brought his father, William, out of the cotton fields to challenge the sheriff, and the arrest.

"According to the record, the sheriff asked him to refer to him as 'Sir,' and William refused to give him that level of respect," Rallins said. "The sheriff shoots him, he starts stumbling down the road, takes a few steps and falls to the road. He's bleeding, essentially dead."

Rallins said the bleeding William Lockwood was put into a car with his son and taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. His son was taken to jail, later convicted of attempted murder on the sheriff's son and sentenced to seven years in prison.

The U.S. attorney at the time, Edward Burns Parker, declined to prosecute the sheriff.

"Even though the Department of Justice said there was enough evidence to prosecute, the U.S. attorney refused," Rallins said. "It's part of the narrative of African-American distrust for the federal government bringing prosecutions against police officers or sheriffs. There was no reason why this guy couldn't have been brought to trial, or at least a grand jury."

Professor Margaret Burnham, founder of the Restorative Justice Project, and law student Samantha Lednicky of Shelburne discuss their research into cold cases at the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston.

A good, gentle man

Thomas Ray said his mother had told him, growing up, the outlines of what happened to his grandfather. But he said he was glad to sit down with Rallins and his wife for dinner in New Jersey last October to discuss his grandfather's case.

"At that time, the police department was like God on the planet," Ray said. "They could treat black people any way they wanted, kill them whenever they wanted to, whatever the case might be."

We see the same thing today, Ray said, "just not quite as blatant."

Ray, 64, was born in Tuskegee, after his grandfather had been murdered. His family made the move to New Jersey in 1966 when it became clear they could no longer make a living off the farm.

"We weren't able to raise enough crops," Ray said. "My grandmother and aunts and uncles on my mother's side were already in New York and I had a sister already here in New Jersey."

Ray said he takes some solace in the fact that he never knew his grandfather.

"Of course you want to know your grandparents, you want them to have been in your life, but when they're never in your life, it doesn't affect you as bad as if they had been in your life and were taken away," Ray said. "I heard he was a very good, gentle man."

Despite the grim subject matter, Vermont student Samantha Lednicky said her work for the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project was among the most rewarding experiences she had in law school. In many ways, it also was one of her most meaningful experiences.

"Basically there's no record that these were racial killings," Lednicky said. "Our project is about what we can do now, almost 70 years later, for either the family of the victim or the black community there."

After she graduates in May, Lednicky plans to sit for the Vermont bar. She hopes to practice criminal-defense law in her home state. But she will carry her experience at the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project with her.

"What it pointed out for me was the weaknesses and failures of our justice system, especially in the past," Lednicky said. "The clinic opened my eyes to what some of the failures are, and how I as a practitioner can continue to strengthen that system."

Contact Dan D'Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DanDambrosioVT.