SU Law initiative fights for justice against discriminatory cold cases
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In 2008, the Department of Justice listed 132 civil cold cases in the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, sparking a cold case initiative at Syracuse University impacting the lives of victims of race-based violence across the country.
Law Professor Paula Johnson founded the Cold Case Justice Initiative at SU’s College of Law in 2007, alongside her colleague Janis McDonald, a professor emerita. The 2008 act declared that the DOJ, FBI and other relevant government entities should “expeditiously” investigate unsolved civil rights era murders before too much time has passed since their occurrence.
The idea for the initiative formed after a trip to Louisiana, Johnson said, where an investigative reporter asked for their help on the case of Frank Morris, a business owner who was pushed into his burning store at gunpoint by alleged members of the Ku Klux Klan. The fire burned nearly all of his body, and Morris died four days later in 1964, the CCJI wrote.
Johnson and McDonald agreed to help the reporter. During the pair’s trips to Louisiana, Mississippi and other southern states, families of victims asked for help on their cases, so McDonald and Johnson obliged.
“We just tried to get information for people, conduct our research, and we tried to give as much information as we could to people who, even at that time, it had been decades since their loved ones were killed or had disappeared, and they hadn’t gotten any sense of what had happened to them,” Johnson said.
Johnson and McDonald quickly started spending their free time working on the cold cases, and Johnson said students soon also became interested.
“Students volunteered from the early days of the program and they started to volunteer to work on the cases, and (the program) grew, too,” Johnson said. “We said we can create a whole course around these issues because so little of it is known.”
Now, CCJI includes a seminar class where students are assigned cases and split into three groups: researching cold cases, investigative work and memorialization of victims, Johnson said.
Third year law student Jackie Napier has worked extensively on the investigative side of the initiative.
“CCJI isn’t structured around a single semester’s outcome. It’s built as an ongoing relationship with the families that we’ve worked with and students who have come before us and will come after us,” Napier said. “I think that few academic projects that I’ve had the chance to work on have that sort of continuity in mind.”
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Law student Glory Stanton said the CCJI program was a “selling point” of SU when she was applying for law school.
“It’s very multidisciplinary, and even though it’s housed in the College of Law, what I’ve found is that it’s really beneficial regardless of the field you’re coming from,” Stanton said. “Your input is needed, and it matters because it’s a fresh set of eyes and you’re likely able to bring something to the table of the investigation that wasn’t looked at before.”
Students who previously took the class, as well as those that are still part of the initiative, are currently examining cases like Johnnie Mae Chappell.
Chappell was a mother of 10 who was shot from a passing car while waiting at a bus stop in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1964. She’s survived by her youngest son, Shelton Chappell, who’s worked with CCJI to get justice for his mother, Johnson said.
Napier said she’s worked closely with Shelton and interviewed other members of the Chappell family.
“He told us that just being heard and having the opportunity to speak about his mother and her case, and the impact that this tragic event had on his life and the lives of those who loved her reinforced for him that his mother’s case mattered,” Napier said. “And that all these years (later), people still care.”
The CCJI has also investigated Wharlest Jackson’s case at length.
He was killed by a bomb taped under his truck while driving home from work in 1967. Jackson worked in a rubber and tire company in Natchez, Mississippi, where he was the first Black man to work a skilled job at the plant. While there were other Black workers, they held positions such as “clean-up crews” or other “menial” and “dangerous” jobs, Johnson said.
Jackson was also a Korean War veteran and treasurer of the local NAACP chapter, where he worked on voter registration drives, Johnson said.
“He was killed in such a horrific manner it’s almost hard to fathom that there would be this kind of inhumanity to another human being, especially on the basis of who they are and just some idea about race and racial hierarchy and white supremacy,” Johnson said.
No one was ever convicted in Jackson’s case, so Johnson made a Freedom of Information Act request at the National Archives to help the family get answers. She and other students from SU and other universities spent days going through and taking photos of the files.
The case is still one that students currently work on in CCJI classes. Students have worked extensively on memorializing Jackson’s life, specifically focusing on creating a museum of sorts through his house.
Sophia Burns, a third year law student and research assistant for Johnson, also worked on Jackson’s memorial and said the opportunity allowed her to focus on justice in many different forms beyond the traditional criminal justice system.
“There’s so much more that goes into remembering someone and memorializing the home as it was a home, versus a house,” Burns said. “So we’re talking about things like what was his favorite music, what was the house like when they were in it… and just rewriting the story to what it should’ve been the whole time.”
Devin McDuffie, a third year law student, was assigned to the memorial for Jackson and wanted to honor his impact on his community.
“We wanted to try to figure out a way not just to honor Wharlest Jackson Sr.’s memory, but try to honor the city itself,” McDuffie said. “He was a huge staple piece of that city, so wanting to make sure that his legacy is not just honored through his family, but in the entire community as well.”
Racially motivated killings and lynchings are commonly believed to have only happened in the South, but while walking through a museum by the Equal Justice Intiative commemorating victims of these crimes, Johnson said there was “scarcely any place in the United States where lynching on the basis of race did not occur.”
The CCJI has worked on these cases for decades and continues to investigate them as new students join the initiative.
“These are not really things of the past, even though that’s what’s happening here at CCJI,” Stanton said. “Those patterns are continuing to persist today and it’s important because those people mattered.”
