Civil Rights Division Emmett Till Act (Cold Case Closing Memoranda)

The following is a Report issued pursuant to a Review and Evaluation undertaken pursuant to the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.

Dr. Elsie Jean Cowsert was a white physician attempting to aid in the desegregation of the local hospital, the Mobile Infirmary, where she worked. As part of her desegregation efforts, she covertly provided information to officials from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare concerning the Mobile Infirmary’s efforts to prevent patient desegregation in its facilities. On January 29, 1967, Dr. Cowsert was found shot to death in front of her home in Mobile, Alabama. She was shot in the chest at close range and broken glass from a side window was found in her pocket. Local newspaper articles and her death certificate indicate that local law enforcement ruled her death to have been self-inflicted and accidental.

The Department has examined the abduction and murder of Mack Charles Parker pursuant to its authority under the Emmett Till Acts.  As set forth more fully below, the statute of limitations has run on all federal civil rights charges.  The government has carefully examined whether the case could be prosecuted as a federal kidnapping case and has concluded that insurmountable legal and factual hurdles exist to such a prosecution.  Moreover, because key witnesses are deceased and because there is very little evidence linking the surviving subject to the crime, no prosecution on state charges would be viable.  The case is thus being closed without referral to state authorities.

On August 5, 1965, at about 10:30 a.m., the body of 34-year-old Alberta Jones was found floating in the Ohio River near Fontaine Ferry Park, in Louisville, Kentucky. Jones, a prominent Black attorney, whose private clients included Muhammad Ali, was the first female prosecutor in Louisville. Jones was also the Executive Director of the Independent Voters Association, Inc. (I.V.A.), a nonpartisan organization dedicated to enfranchising Black voters and providing them information on political candidates. Given Jones’s high profile as a Black woman prosecutor and her involvement in civil rights activities, there was, at the time of her death, speculation that she was killed because of her race, because of those activities, or both, and that speculation remains today. For this reason, her death was referred to the Cold Case Unit in the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division, pursuant to the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016 (the Till Act).

On January 26, 1969, Edwin Pratt, a Black man who served as the director of the Seattle Urban League, was shot and killed when he opened the door to his home to investigate a noise outside.  Witnesses reported seeing two men in Pratt’s driveway just before the fatal shot was fired, and they further reported that the men escaped in a getaway car.  In the immediate aftermath of the murder, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) worked with the King County Sheriff’s Office (“KCSO”) and Seattle Police Department (“SPD”) to investigate the matter.  The FBI reopened the case in 1994, and the Department of Justice (“the Department”) opened the case again in 2019.  Although these investigations resulted in a list of likely suspects, the identities of Pratt’s murderers and the motive behind the crime have never been confirmed with certainty.

     In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black youth visiting family in Mississippi, was murdered by white men after the wife of one of the men claimed that Till had propositioned her. Till, who was from Chicago, Illinois, visited relatives near Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955. On August 24 of that year, he entered Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market and had an interaction with Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the store’s owner. Accounts differ as to precisely what happened during that encounter. Black witnesses who had accompanied Till to the store reported—both near the time of the incident and more recently—that Till’s behavior was limited to whistling at Bryant as she left the store. Bryant, however, alleged that Till was physically aggressive towards her and that he propositioned her. What is clear from all accounts is that Bryant suffered no physical harm and that Till’s conduct was likely perceived by many in the white community to violate their unwritten code, prevalent in the Jim Crow South, that Black men were forbidden from initiating interactions with white women. Four days later, Till was forcibly abducted from his relatives’ home by at least two men. His brutally beaten body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. Because there did not appear to be a basis for federal jurisdiction given the limited scope of the civil rights statutes in effect in 1955, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not investigate Till’s murder at that time. Mississippi state authorities, however, arrested two men: Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, John William (J.W.) Milam. They were indicted for murder and tried by a local, all-white jury, which quickly acquitted them. Following their acquittal, the men admitted to a journalist that they murdered Till in part because of his earlier actions toward Carolyn Bryant. Both Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam are now deceased.

On January 16, 1965, Reverend Clyde Briggs, a veteran, church leader, and civil rights advocate, was admitted to the Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) in Jackson, Mississippi for several underlying medical conditions. Briggs’ condition deteriorated over the course of his hospitalization and he was pronounced dead on January 18, 1965 following an emergency tracheostomy.

On November 6, 1978, the body of Anthony Adams, a 25-year-old African-American gay man, was discovered in his apartment in Salt Lake City, Utah.  After failing to hear from him for several days, two friends went to Adams’ apartment and discovered his body, naked and stabbed numerous times.  His apartment was in disarray and cash was missing from his wallet.

On November 7, 1965, Eddie Cook, a 53-year-old sanitation worker and father of three, was shot in the chest by a shotgun blast near his home in the midtown section of Detroit, Michigan.  The shot was fired from a car filled with four or five white youths.  At the time, the police believed that the shot was in retaliation for an unrelated incident earlier that day.  Despite a thorough, contemporaneous investigation, the Detroit Police Department did not identify who fired the shot that killed Mr. Cook, or any of the passengers of the car.  

Jo Etha Collier, an African-American young woman and recent high school graduate, was fatally shot by XXXXX in Drew, Mississippi, on the evening of May 25, 1971.  XXXXX and two other men – XXXX (XXXX) and XXXX (XXX XXX) – were driving past Ms. Collier when she was shot and killed.  The state arrested the three men and charged them with murder.  XXXXX was tried before a jury in October 1971, convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.  The state later dropped the charges against XXXX and XXXX.  For the reasons stated more fully below, this matter should be closed without prosecution or referral.  The statute of limitations has long run on any federal civil rights crime and Ms. Collier’s death does not implicate any other federal crimes.  Referral to the state for prosecution is inappropriate because the Double Jeopardy clause of the United States Constitution would bar a subsequent state prosecution of XXXXX, and because the state previously determined that XXXX and XXXX could not be held legally responsible for the shooting. 

On December 5, 1965, Lee Edward Culbreath, a 14-year-old African-American boy, was killed in Portland, Arkansas, by Ed Vail, who shot at Culbreath from a truck driven by his brother, James.   

     On June 20, 1940, Elbert Williams and Thomas Davis, both African-American men who were members of the NAACP in Brownsville, Tennessee, were abducted from their homes by Sheriff Samuel “Tip” Hunter, taken to the local jail, and questioned about the NAACP’s activities.  Thomas Davis was released from jail into a waiting mob, but escaped unharmed.  Williams’s body was discovered three days later, on June 23, 1940, in the Hatchie River.  Just a few days before Williams and Thomas Davis were abducted, Thomas’s brother Elisha Davis had been abducted from his home by Sheriff Hunter, Police Officer Charles Reed, and a mob of white men.  Elisha Davis was taken to a nearby river where he was questioned about the NAACP’s activities and told he would be killed unless he left town, which he did immediately.  Another African-American man, Jack Adams, was brought to the river at the same time that Elisha Davis was threatened, but Adams was released unharmed.  The men subject to abduction were all either founding members, or suspected members, of the recently-formed NAACP chapter in Brownsville.  Chapter members had begun voter-registration efforts in the African-American community just a few months before the abductions began.