Articles by Jerry Mitchell

The FBI continues to investigate former Alabama trooper James Bonard Fowler for yet another killing, the Montgomery Advertiser is reporting.

Franklin County officials have settled a landmark lawsuit brought against it by the families of two black teens killed by Klansmen in 1964.

In 1989, according to Clarion-Ledger reports, secret files showed that at the same time the state was prosecuting Byron De La Beckwith in 1964 for Evers’ murder, another arm of the state was secretly assisting Beckwith’s defense, trying to get him acquitted. That other arm was the state’s segregationist spy agency, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which was headed by the governor.

U.S. Sen. John Kerry plans to introduce legislation next week that would pave the way for the release of thousands of FBI documents on the life and death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The bill calls for creating a Martin Luther King Records Collection at the National Archives that would include all government records related to King. The bill also would create a five-member independent review board that would identify and make public all documents from agencies including the FBI - just as a review board in 1992 made public documents related to the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination. Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of The Civil Rights Cold Case Project, believes Kerry's idea should be expanded to include the release of documents involving not only King's assassination, but also other racial slayings from the civil rights era.