Un(re)solved

In 1955, a boy from Chicago was murdered in rural Mississippi. Who his killers were was an open secret — but none were found guilty of the crime. More than 50 years later, spurred by the work of activists and reporters, a bill named for the boy would wind up in the halls of Congress. It was aimed at bringing justice to unsolved killings from the civil rights era. Around the same time, the Department of Justice and the FBI ...

As part of its Cold Case Initiative, the DOJ compiled a list of cases to look into. As of 2008, Mississippi — where Emmett Till was murdered — had the largest number of cases. James meets Walter Henry, a Black FBI agent who worked in a field office there and was tasked with investigating many of these crimes. One name from the list, a Black serviceman who was killed by a white police officer in 1962 following an altercatio...

There has been just one successful prosecution since the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act was signed into law in 2008. In Alabama, a district attorney investigated and charged a state trooper in the 1965 killing of a man during a civil rights march. But whether this case was a success is complicated. James digs into that case, and follows the money to try to understand whether funds the Till Act was supposed to ...

Fifty-five years before the death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, the killing of another Black woman, Alberta O. Jones, sent shock and grief through that city’s Black community.

In 1965, Jones, a trailblazing attorney in Louisville, was found dead, floating in the Ohio River — the victim of a murder that’s still unsolved today. Thirty-four-year-old Jones was the city’s first female prosecutor, and a cha...