National Archives digitize cold cases of Black American murders

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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December 7, 2024

By Russell Contreras, Axios

Simeon, 12, and Maurice Wright, 16, cousins of Emmett Till, sit in their home after being questioned after his disappearance. Moses Wright, 64, great uncle of the murdered boy, holds some of Emmett’s clothing to show that he was a “large boy for his age.” (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

An Axios review of a new National Archives portal found just three digitized unsolved cases of lynchings, racial violence and murders of Black Americans, spawning several decades.

The big picture: The Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection portal is the federal agency’s latest attempt to index civil rights violations and provide a subject guide, part of an aim spelled out by law to bring justice to the victims in those cases.

Why it matters: After Reconstruction, the federal government — and many states — rarely prosecuted allegations of civil rights violations and racial violence until the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

The lack of action built decades of distrust, and families seldom saw justice for victims.
The new portal starts with victims in three cases.

They include:

Hattie Debardelaben, a 46-year-old farmer, who was killed in 1945 by Deputy Clyde White and federal officers in Alabama during a warrantless search of her home for illegal whiskey;

Keep reading to learn more of the names of lynching victims discovered by Axios.

ABHM also honors victims of lynching.

More Black history and news articles.

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