The White House has just announced new candidates for the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board.
As reported by HuffPost, the Selectees will be the first on this committee.
The Audit Committee was originally set up in 2019 to review numerous unresolved civil rights cases such as lynchings and racial killings.
The American flag flies on a half-staff at the White House in Washington, DC on March 19, 2021. (Photo by Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
The Audit Board’s approval bill states that it will be able to re-examine old unresolved civil rights cases, with “redacted records or records postponed being postponed annually reviewed”. All cases considered could fall between January 1, 1940 and December 31, 1979.
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The four nominees selected by the White House for the Review Board are Professor Dr. Clayborne Carson, Emory University archivist, Gabrielle Dudley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Henry Klibanoff and civil rights attorney Margaret Burnham.
Carson was the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, which many of Dr. kingPublications and speeches. Dudley, who had an MA in Public History and a Masters in Library and Information Science, works at Emorys Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library.
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Klibanoff, who also works at Emory, is the director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project. Burnham is a professor at Northwestern University and founded the school’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which documents unsolved racially motivated murders in the deep south.
The Audit Committee was originally set up in 2019 to review numerous unresolved civil rights cases, particularly since the 1950s and 1960s. It was triggered by a group of New Jersey high school students, Courtroom News reports, which, after learning of the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four black girls, was an early version of the bill that would help hasten the process of so many racial killings that had gone cold decades before.
The formal proposal of the review board was then worked out in 2018 by the then Sens. Doug Jones from Alabama, Ted Cruz from Texas and Kamala Harris from California.
Although the body was signed by the former president Donald Trump the following year the board itself went cold. No board appointments have been made to date, despite Jones making an unsuccessful attempt to write Trump a letter asking him to select members.
In the letter, according to the Alabama Political Reporter in June 2020, Jones wrote to Trump that recommendations for board members had been sent to the White House but nothing had been done. In addition, the $ 1 million budget allocated to the board of directors was unused.
“As our country revisits important civil rights issues,” wrote Jones, “I urge you to appoint the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board as soon as possible and to fulfill the promise of this important piece of legislation.”
In a statement, the White House said it “hopes the Senate will move these nominees quickly”.
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