KEY POINTS:
When the mutilated bodies of Henry Dee and Charles Moore were dragged from the waters of the Mississippi in 1964, they were tied to the engine block of a Jeep. The Ku Klux Klansmen who killed the black teenagers had intended their bodies never to be found.
In
the 50s and 60s, black men, women and children were often killed with impunity by southern whites who believed they would get away with murder. But they were wrong in the case of Dee and Moore, both 19.
Next month, James Seale, 71, will go on trial in Mississippi for their murders. He is unlikely to be the last elderly white man to face such a trial for crimes some might deem old history and others would call horrifically delayed justice.
In a move to come to terms with the past, the FBI is re-examining almost 100 unsolved murder cases from the civil rights era. It will look at slayings and lynchings that happened across the American South before 1968, when the region was in turmoil as blacks campaigned for the right to vote.
Up to a dozen of the 100 suspected racial killings have been given priority, and a special team, in partnership with civil rights groups, has been set up to look at hunting and prosecuting suspects. The aim is to ignite a fire under these long dormant "cold cases".
"There are murder cases from the civil rights era that cry out for justice, cases that cry out for further investigation," said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which fights civil rights cases and has handed many of its files to the FBI.
The brutality of the crimes is shocking. Men, women and children were murdered in cold blood and broad daylight. They were shot, stabbed, bombed or beaten to death. Bodies were mutilated and hidden.
Often, murders were never investigated by local police forces which were either complicit in the crimes or wanted to ignore them. Sometimes when suspects were charged, juries of fellow whites simply acquitted them, no matter what the evidence.
In one notorious case, a civil rights activist, the Reverend George Lee, was found dead in his crashed car in the Mississippi town of Belzoni. The sheriff ruled the death a traffic accident and declared that the shotgun pellets picked out of Lee's head were dental fillings.
Now the FBI is determined to look back at such cases, some more than five decades old. It is hoping advances in DNA technology and a renewed willingness of witnesses to come forward will allow it to bring prosecutions.
"In too many instances the truth has been hidden for too long. Many individuals have quite literally got away with murder," said Robert Mueller, the FBI director who has set up the cold case initiative.
For some, the question is: why now? Previously, individual cases have been reinvestigated only after the concerted efforts of a victim's relatives and journalists. Only now is the Department of Justice taking a firm lead. The initiative was announced by Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney-General and close confidant of President George Bush. "The Justice Department is committed to investigating and prosecuting civil rights era homicides for as long as it takes," Gonzales said.
Part of the reason for the sudden interest of the Justice Department is that convictions in some of the most notorious civil rights cases have already been secured. They include the 2001 jailings of two men involved in blowing up a church in Birmingham, Alabama, and killing four black schoolgirls. Then, in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was convicted for killing three civil rights workers, whose deaths in 1964 shocked America and inspired the film Mississippi Burning.
Now comes the trial of Seale. His alleged victims, Dee and Moore, were looking for work in rural Mississippi when Klansmen targeted them, wrongly thinking they were radicals on a political mission. According to the new prosecution, Seale drove them to an isolated forest in his truck with other Klansmen.
While Seale held a shotgun, the pair were tied to a tree and beaten with sticks. Then, while they were still alive, Seale taped up their mouths and hands and drove them 100 miles to Louisiana, where they were tied to the engine block with chains and thrown into the Mississippi. At the time both Seale and another Klansman, Charles Edwards, were arrested and then released.
According to records of the time, interrogators told Seale: "We know you did it. You know you did. The Lord above knows you did it." Seale allegedly replied: "Yes. But I'm not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it."
The authorities did not - then. But it might be easier now. Edwards - who confessed at the time to being involved in beating the victims - has accepted immunity in return for testifying against Seale.
That gives hope to others involved in the "10 to 12" cases the FBI is re-investigating and giving priority. One looks set to be the killing of two black couples at Moore's Ford, Georgia, in 1946. The couples were set on by a white mob and gunned down with hundreds of bullets after being dragged from their car.
Another case that could be on the FBI list is the 1965 killing of Oneal Moore, the first black sheriff in Washington parish, Louisiana. He was shot in his patrol car after a truck full of white men drove by and opened fire.
A third killing could be the murder of World War II veteran Maceo Snipes, gunned down in 1946 for daring to register to vote in Georgia.
But despite the horrific nature of many of the killings, there are some clear problems. Many of the witnesses will be dead. Most of the evidence will be old or lost. In many cases, where there were investigations at the time, much of the documentation will have been thrown out or destroyed.
Even the FBI confesses it can't do as much as it would like. "We know that, no matter how much work we devote to an investigation, we may not always get the result we are hoping for," Mueller said.
Then there is another problem: the killers themselves may be dead. In Florida it was announced that the four Klansmen behind a bombing assassination of a local civil rights leader had been identified, but all four had died.
Despite the problems, many people say the reinvestigations are vital to force Americans to face a bloody chapter of their recent history. "These are more than just individual murder cases. They are a symbol. They show racial violence was a deep, central trauma in American life," said Seth Moglen, professor at Lehigh University and an expert in African-American issues.
It was just 50 years ago that many black Americans could not vote. Many older black Americans alive now were born into an age where their lives were at risk for the colour of their skin and a judicial system in the South often felt free to ignore their murder.
"The killings of civil rights workers were simply the tip of an iceberg that had been going on for generation after generation to maintain white dominance," said Moglen.
The initiative, coming as Senator Barack Obama is bidding to make history as America's first black President, could become a reminder that modern America has come a long way.
A legacy of hatred
There are many unsolved racial murders from the civil rights era. Among the most notorious are:
Isadore Banks
Banks was a farmer in Arkansas and his property was supposedly envied by local white people. His body was found chained to a tree in 1954. He had been burnt to death. His property was then rented to white farmers.
James Brazier
In 1958 Brazier was beaten to death in front of his family by two police officers in Georgia. The local sheriff later told a newspaper: "There's nothing like fear to keep niggers in line."
Andrew Anderson
In 1963 Anderson was accused by a white woman in Arkansas of molesting her daughter. He was killed by a group of white people in a bean field. His death was ruled a justifiable homicide by local authorities.
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Jackson was shot dead in Alabama in 1965 by police after state troopers began attacking a crowd of black protesters. The killing was not investigated. But now a former policeman, James Fowler, has confessed he was the shooter. He says it was self-defence.
Oneal Moore
Moore was a black sheriff's deputy in Louisiana in 1965. He was shot in his patrol car by white men in a passing truck. His partner, another black deputy, was blinded in one eye.
- Observer
