Cracking Open Cold Cases

December 25, 1961 was a day of celebration for Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette. Not only was it Christmas, it was their 25th wedding anniversary. But the festivities turned tragic that night, when a bomb hidden under their house in Brevard County, Florida, exploded, killing the Moores. 

Members of the Ku Klux Klan (K.K.K.) were suspected of carrying out the attack as retaliation for Harry’s work fighting for equal rights for African Americans. As the founder of the Brevard County branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Harry had helped register African Americans to vote, fought for equal pay for black teachers, and worked to expose lynchings of African Americans in the South. 

But no one was ever charged with the murder, and the case remains unsolved to this day. 

That killing is one of 128 unsolved murders from the civil rights era that have been reinvestigated in recent years by the Justice Department. But most of the suspects in these killings are now dead and can’t be prosecuted—as are many of the witnesses—leading the F.B.I. to mark most of these cold cases “closed.” That makes it difficult for the victims’ relatives to gain access to the case files and find out what happened.  

Now that may change—thanks to a group of dedicated high school students and their teacher. The A.P. government and politics classes at Hightstown High School in New Jersey recently drafted and lobbied for a bill that requires the files of civil rights-era cold cases to be collected and released to the public. The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act passed both chambers of Congress last December, and President Trump signed it into law the following month. It’s believed to be the first time a high school class has drafted and gotten a federal law passed.

The act could help anyone who still wants to try to solve these murders get information about how the F.B.I. investigated these cases, what was uncovered, and why nobody was prosecuted. Even if it likely won’t lead to prosecutions, because most of the people involved in these murders are now dead, the students hope that releasing the case files will bring about a different kind of justice: closure for the victims’ families.

“There are still so many families that want information about what happened to their relatives,” says Oslene Johnson, 19, who was part of the first group of students who worked on drafting the bill. “As heinous as most of it is, these people deserve that information.”

The students’ efforts to get the act passed began out of frustration in 2015. Their teacher, Stuart Wexler, was teaching them about the civil rights movement. They learned that hundreds of black people were lynched in the Jim Crow South, and many of these cases were never solved—some weren’t even investigated. Often, family members were afraid to report them for fear of retaliation from white supremacist groups, such as the K.K.K. When cases did go to court, the trials were frequently rigged to ensure an all-white jury, which would usually find a white defendant not guilty.

“A veil was lifted [in class] about how many cases and stories we were never taught about,” says Johnson.

Wexler, who has written books about domestic terrorism, then told his students about the difficulties people still have today in trying to research many of these murders. “They ultimately decided they were going to draft a bill,” he says. 

The students based the bill on the 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which forced the government to release most of the F.B.I.’s and C.I.A.’s files on Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. The students then lobbied for their bill, taking multiple trips to Washington, D.C., where they spoke to members of Congress and their staffs. 

“All these lessons you learn about in your textbook about how the political and legislative process works,” Johnson says, “we were living them in real time.” She adds that the most surprising thing she learned about the legislative process is that “it’s so much slower than the news cycle makes it out to be.”

It took the students three years to get the bill drafted and passed. After each class of students graduated, the next class took up the cause, lobbying Congress and trying to attract media attention for the bill. Some students, like Johnson, stayed involved even after going to college.

Their big breaks came in 2017, when Representative Bobby Rush, a Democrat of Illinois, introduced the bill in the House of Representatives and Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat of Alabama, introduced it in the Senate. The bill received bipartisan support and was co-sponsored by Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas. It passed the House, 376 to 6, and the Senate unanimously in 2018. 

“The country is really divided in this era,” says Vikram Srinath, 18, who worked on the act as a junior and senior before graduating in June. “To have an act that passes with so much support from both parties is something that’s really rare.”

The bill then went to the president’s desk. But time was running out. Congress was about to adjourn, and unsigned legislation dies in the transition from one session to the next. President Trump had only 10 days to sign the bill or it would be lost to what’s called a “pocket veto.” To get Trump’s attention, some Hightstown teachers allowed their students to tweet at him during class, as well as at newscasters he watches and anyone else who might have his ear. “It was crazy to see the entire school get behind our cause,” Srinath says. 

Trump signed the bill on January 8, just hours before the deadline. The students’ job isn’t finished, though. The president still must appoint a committee to review and release the files, and it’s estimated that running the program would cost about $10 million. The task of lobbying the government for these funds now rests with the current class of students.

Johnson is optimistic that they’ll get it done. It’s important for all of us, she says, to be able to see the records in these cold cases. 

“We really need to be able to address our past, as ugly as it is, because if we don’t do that, we’re only impeding our ability to positively move forward and heal as a nation,” she says. “You can’t heal from something you refuse to look at.” •

_{Photo credits for header image: State Archives’ Florida Photographic Collection (House); The Afro American (Headline); HANDOUT/The Washington Post via Getty Images (Harriette and Harry T. Moore)}