Town hall meeting to discuss Civil Rights-era unsolved murders
For documentarian Keith Beauchamp, the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till was not an open-and-close case. It can’t be until Till’s killer is found.
The Syracuse University Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies will sponsor a town hall meeting, with Beauchamp and a panel discussion with FBI and Justice Department officials Tuesday, on unsolved murders from the Civil Rights Era. The event will be held in the first-floor auditorium of The Warehouse at 7 p.m.
The meeting, which is open to the public, will begin with the screening of a documentary by Beauchamp, an Emmy-nominated director and SU artist-in-residence.
The 40-minute documentary, ‘Murder in Black and White,’ will discuss the 1946 Moore’s Ford lynching case in Monroe, Ga. At Moore’s Ford, a gang of white men brutally murdered four black couples using rifles, shotguns and pistols.
After ‘Murder in Black and White,’ a question-and-answer session will follow with a three-member panel, including Deputy Director for Cold Case Initiative at the Justice Department Page Fitzgerald, FBI Civil Rights Division Chief Cynthia Deitle and Beauchamp.
The question-and-answer session is aimed at bringing increased public awareness to these unsolved crimes, said Amos Kiewe, a communication and rhetorical studies professor at SU.
‘We hope to let people know that theses cases are not closed,’ he said.
The public is encouraged to attend these meetings to provide any information they have on the unsolved crimes, Kiewe said.
Tuesday’s panel has held similar town hall format gatherings in several southern locations. The meeting will be the first presentation in the Northeast.
‘We hope we’ll be able to reach some of these families who have left the south and who are now living in places like Syracuse, N.Y.,’ Beauchamp said.
SU put together Tuesday’s event because Kiewe is currently teaching a course at SU focused on unsolved Civil Rights murders. Students analyze 15 to 18 cases per semester and compile public testimonies and memories with their gathered research, Kiewe said.
Students are assigned to individual cases and report back to the course with their findings, said Jaclyn Bissell, a student in Kiewe’s class and a senior in the College of Visual and Performing Arts.
‘It’s the acknowledgement that an injustice happened. It’s shining a light in the dark corner,’ Bissel said.
The course objective hails largely from the work of filmmaker, Beauchamp and his previous documentary surrounding the murder of Till, whose murder helped spark the Civil Rights movement, Kiewe said.
The Till documentary caused the Justice Department to begin reassessing the state of such unsolved hate crimes from the era, Beauchamp said.
While the Justice Department rarely works well with private individuals, Beauchamp has been in coordination with the FBI for many years. He said he believes these unsolved cases will only be resolved with the help of the public.
Published on October 5, 2009 at 12:00 pm
