This week the United States Justice Department closed its investigation into the death of Emmett Till. Despite finding no new evidence to bring new charges in the 14-year-old’s 1955 lynching, the FBI’s Cold Case Initiative continues to investigate other cold-case crimes with racial bias implications from the civil rights movement era.
The Justice Department Cold Case Initiative was founded by the FBI in 2006. The mission of this department is to “identify and investigate racially-motivated murders committed decades ago.” The program was influential in getting the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act (“Emmett Till Act”) passed and signed into law on Oct. 8, 2008.
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Through partnerships with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the National Urban League this department has been able to identify over the years unsolved race-related cold cases where the victims might have had their civil rights criminally violated.
The Justice Department reported to Congress in July that 20 cold cases from the ’60s and ’70s where American citizens’ civil rights were violated continue to be investigated by the DOJ. Some 13 of the 20 cases are police-involved killings of Black people in Southern states.
One such case was a 1970 demonstration in Augusta, Georgia, that exploded after a 16-year-old boy named Charles Oatman was killed while in the custody of the county jail. The uprising lasted for two days and included thousands of Black residents protesting in a 7-mile radius. During this act of civil unrest, six Black men were shot by local police, but no one paid a criminal penalty for those deaths.
An all-white jury acquitted the two white officers who were charged with the police-involved shootings that wounded five protestors and resulted in the death of John Stokes. The DOJ could determine that the victims’ federal civil rights were violated in those shootings.
