The genesis of CRRJ and its first-of-its-kind digital archive took place in 2007 when Burnham convened a national meeting focused on investi- gating crimes of the civil rights era, anticipating that a new federal law — the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act — would spur the FBI and US Department of Justice to investigate civil rights cold cases. When official efforts weren’t immediately forthcoming, Burnham and Melissa Nobles, then a political science professor and now chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began to investigate the cases themselves.

“We realized there was this period of history that had gone untouched, and that the families [of victims] deserved an accounting,” says Burnham, who officially founded CRRJ later that year to foster investigations, research and restorative justice. “They deserved to be heard, and they deserved to have the documents that told part of their stories returned to them.”

Burnham recognized that the materials also offered opportu- nities for teaching both skills and substantive law. “Fairly soon after the initial conference in 2007, I designed a course centering on the case investigations,” she explains.

That course soon turned into the groundbreaking Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic, also under Burnham’s direction. Her vision for the clinic was grounded in a remarkable career that began with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and included serving as a partner in a civil rights firm that focused on international human rights, an appointment to the Boston Municipal Court bench (she was the first African American woman to serve on that bench) and an invitation from President Nelson Mandela to serve on an international human rights commission that was a precursor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Burnham’s experience and deep connections to individuals and organizations across the South positioned her both as a mentor and guiding light in teaching law students how to investigate complex and often horrifying material while letting compassion guide their steps when interacting with family members and communities impacted by violence.

I think I am joined by the hundreds of people who worked on this project in hoping it will deepen our understanding of the function and impact of anti-Black violence in our country’s history…

— Professor Margaret Burnham, Founder and Director of CRRJ

The work was hard. To find cases initially, Burnham and Nobles searched the archives of African American newspapers for terms such as “lifeless body,” “dumped in a river” and “lynched.” But the results were significant. As the clinic developed, Burnham taught students how to use such articles, along with government records, letters to the NAACP and genealogical databases to identify victims and sometimes their surviving descendants. Their goal was to collect data, correct often blatantly false records and provide some measure of restorative justice for the descendants of the victims. Over the years, CRRJ’s work expanded across the university to include students from other colleges and even high schools involved in researching cold cases.

“Professor Burnham lights a fire in her students to get us to think broadly about justice. She gives all of us the gift of permission and encouragement to think beyond the confines of legal precedents to meet the true needs and desires of our clients,” says Kaylie Simon ’11, a public defender in Contra Costa,
California, who participated as a student in the clinic, has served on CRRJ’s advisory board since 2011 and even took a year off from her current job in 2017-2018 to serve as a CRRJ project director. “CRRJ taught me that you always go to the scene where an incident took place to fully understand what happened, and that you need to know the life histories of everyone involved to fully understand the crime charged. I use all of these skills daily.”

While restorative justice is typically CRRJ’s goal, there have been significant triumphs in court. In 2008, Burnham headed a team of outside counsel and law students in a landmark case that settled a federal lawsuit accusing Franklin County, Mississippi, law enforcement officials of assisting Klansmen in the kidnapping, torture and murder of two 19-year-olds, Henry Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. This case and many of CRRJ’s investigations have been widely covered in the national press, including a recent, Emmy-award-winning PBS FRONTLINE documentary series, “Un(re)solved.”

But prosecution in almost all of CRRJ’s cases isn’t possible as the perpetrators are deceased. Instead, students have worked with family members to secure apologies from government officials, correct death certificates that described murders as accidents, install memorials, hold commemorative events and even facilitate dialogue with the descendants of perpetrators.

Sarah Ratsimbazafy ’23, who participated in the clinic last summer, researched the 1949 killing of an African American named Emma Johniken who went mostly unnamed for decades — even after her killer became the subject of a movie and a podcast. “You can easily find this killer, and yet Emma’s story goes unknown,” Ratsimbazafy says. “I wanted to make sure her story was told.”

Noah Lapidus ’20, now a research manager with Ancestry, became involved with CRRJ as an undergraduate at Northeastern and then attended the law school to continue working with the project. With Burnham as his mentor, Lapidus identified hundreds of descendants of lynching victims and even previously unnamed victims, such as Ollie Hunter, who was killed by a white store manager after she apparently picked up a can of oil. He also researched the case of Leonard Butler, an African American miner and union leader who was killed by police officers working for the mining company. Lapidus identified one of Butler’s living children and spoke to her on the phone twice. Within a year of their conversations, the woman died.

“She told me every single detail about her father’s life,” Lapidus remembers. “About being a child of someone who was framed for raping a little girl when in actuality he was the hero of their community. There was no event, no street renaming, but the end result was the most important result in my opinion: a discussion with a descendant. That is the most restorative justice.”

Eventually, the CRRJ team knew the documents it was finding and the truths that were being revealed needed to be more accessible to families, scholars and the public so that larger trends — economic harm, legacies of racial violence or its impact on the movement of African Americans from southern states to northern ones — could be examined. Burnham says Nobles was the “intellectual inspiration” for creating a digital archive of the materials, bringing a political scientist’s lens to the task of creating a repository with national reach.

“With the archive, we have an opportunity for public justice and a broader conception of what public justice means, particu- larly when prosecution is not an option,” says Professor Rose Zoltek-Jick, associate director of CRRJ. “The archive presents a path to help families destroyed by the death of loved ones to be seen and for communities to acknowledge their histories and to find a path toward restorative justice, reconciliation and healing.”

She told me every single detail about her father’s life. About being a child of someone who was framed for raping
a little girl when in actuality he was the hero of their community.

—Noah Lapidus ’20, Research Manager with Ancestry

Often, that path is rocky. Sheila Moss-Brown says learning about the lynching of her grandfather, Henry “Peg” Gilbert, from CRRJ was a “mixed bag” for her family. On the one hand, it was traumatic for her mother to learn the details about the death of her father, a farmer and church deacon, at the hands of a Georgia police chief in 1947. On the other hand, Moss-Brown says she has “a stronger sense of who I am” because of what she learned about “the amazing man” her grandfather was. The archive, she adds, will make that possible for more people.

“We feel blessed that we were able to know what happened to my grandfather,” she explains. “There are so many families out there that are broken and don’t really know why. The archive will give them an opportunity to at least research and find out if there is a loved one within their family who experienced lynching during the Jim Crow era. From a healing standpoint, that’s going to be huge.”

Taking thousands of records from individual investigations and making them searchable as a collection was a “massive job,” says Gina Nortonsmith, who was hired as CRRJ’s archivist in 2020. To fund the creation of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive in a partnership with Northeastern’s Library’s Archives and Special Collections, Burnham wrote grant applications and secured support from the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which also selected Burnham for its prestigious fellowship program. The team also brought in historian Jay Driskell to investigate the related holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress.

Nortonsmith and her library colleagues met regularly with CRRJ team members to identify the kinds of information that could be used to search for cases, including the location of the incident, occupation of the victim and the perpetrator, and whether there was a trial or a conviction. Then, library staff organized and catalogued the records and — perhaps most importantly — ran all those documents through a character recog- nition program that makes them searchable by text. “We made the information much more discoverable,” Nortonsmith says. “The archive allows users to investigate patterns about the victims and the circumstances of their killings.”

Driskell says the archive fills a void in history. “The victim’s voice is silenced by the killers,” he says. “All we have left are echoes of that murder, and the only way we can ever get close to recapturing that voice is through the archive.”

In addition to official records and documents, the archive includes case narratives written by CRRJ students based on their interviews with public officials and family members. One of the archive’s first official users was Aidan Milliff, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University who researches political violence. He had first learned about the work of CRRJ while earning his PhD in political science at MIT, where Nobles was then dean of the department. He called the new archive an “incredible resource.” “It’s sometimes hard to get all the primary evidence you want about things that happened a long time ago,” Milliff says. “It’s also hard, once you have all this primary evidence, to understand the narrative that ties it all together. The combin- ation between the original sources and the student narratives makes the archive a really great resource.”

Burnham has also interpreted the material in the archive in a new book, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners. Published in September by W.W. Norton & Company, the book explores arguments for reparations, apologies and truth proceedings that could allow the American public to confront the legacy of Jim Crow. (See related article, Burnham Exposes Jim Crow’s Legacy)

At an event celebrating the archive’s launch last fall, dozens of CRRJ graduates and collaborators crowded into Northeastern’s Alumni Center to hear about the project’s past and potential impacts. Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun spoke about the significance of the archive. “We all realized very early on that this project doesn’t belong to the law school,” he said. “This project doesn’t belong to the uni- versity. It belongs to society as a whole and indeed the world.”

The arhive presents a path to help families destroyed by the death of loved ones to be seen…

—Professor Rose Zoltek-Jick, Associate Director of CRRJ

While the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive currently includes more than 20,000 pieces of evidence from 1,000 incidents that took place between 1930 and 1954, eventually, it will include all the cases investigated by CRRJ, from 1930 to 1970. “This archive is not a closed file drawer,” says Burnham. “We hope it will invite further scholarship and academic discourse, and, importantly, provide communities with the resources they need to create memory, acknowledge trauma and support demands for a more just future.”