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Dear Friends of CRRJ,
Seventy years after Emmett Till's murder, the gun used in the lynching was placed on display at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, and the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board released thousands of federal files on the case. These developments bring into sharper focus what has driven CRRJ's work since 2007: the imperative to uncover, document, and make visible the full scope of racial violence across the United States, and to hold perpetrators – and enablers through inaction – accountable. Our work is defined by impossibilities: we ask how to repair the irreparable, calculate the incalculable, restore the unrestorable. Even as we live in the midst of an injustice not yet resolved, wounds still unhealed, and struggles still ongoing, we walk into the silences to give voice to those who perished, often at the hands of the state. Even as so many of our country’s top leaders reject all claims for redistribution and repair and demonize the work of those who study the past, we continue to delve into old files where old guns, still smoking, are waiting to be found.
This summer, CRRJ launched Version 2 of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, adding 290 victims and expanding our geographic reach beyond the eleven former Confederate states. Our summer interns presented their research on the Till case, racialized rape executions, and several cases for posthumous exoneration from CRRJ’s Archive. We convened national scholars and archivists at Gathering the Red Record to advance the vision of a comprehensive, interoperable database of anti-Black violence. And we presented our work in Washington to members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Even as we face a national landscape marked by retrenchment in civil rights and racial justice, this work continues. We share it here with gratitude for your support.
| | CRRJ Director and founder, Professor Margaret Burnham | | | |  |
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August 28 2025, 70 years after the lynching of Emmett Till the gun believed to have been used in the 14-year-old’s murder — an Ithaca .45 caliber pistol — was placed on permanent public display at the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.
Earlier in the month, the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board released roughly 6, 500 pages of federal records concerning the lynching, including correspondence from the public and documents from government officials detailing the initial refusal of the Department of Justice to intervene in the case.
The last significant relic of the case to be venerated was the Sumner Courthouse in Mississippi, which was added to the state register of historic places in 1990. It was nominated as “a rare surviving example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture” and celebrated for its arches and “pyramidal-roofed towers.” Nothing in the nomination would suggest that this was the place where 45 years prior reporters from around the world packed the courtroom as 14-year-old Emmett Till’s killers walked free.
| | Above: (top) Emmett Till.(center) The barn of J.W. Milam, located in Drew, MS. where Till was killed. | | If one of those journalists were to step foot in the Sumner Courthouse in 1990, they might not recognize the place. In the courtroom, the purple walls would be completely unfamiliar. The chairs would have been replaced with pews. If they were one of the reporters who hung their head out of the window for a respite from the 90-degree courtroom, they might notice that the paned windows were replaced with solid glass. Though the room had been packed wall to wall then, they might yet feel that the space had shrunk, and they would be right – by 800 feet to be exact. And if the reporter suspected that these changes had been made to erase the story of Emmett Till and the complicity of the county in the acquittal of his murderers, many locals would agree. | | Updates at CRRJ and in the Field | |
CRRJ Summer 2025 Interns Present Cases: Emmett Till, Rape Executions and Posthumous Exoneration | |
This summer, several interns joined the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) to support projects and expand our research. They presented their investigations, conducted during the summer semester at Northeastern Law, during a series of lunch time learning sessions, before CRRJ staff, students and associates.
Talia Lanckton ’26, delivered their research on July 30, examining the impact of Emmett Till’s murder in 1955, his killers’ acquittal, and his mother’s brave choice to display his body at an open casket funeral in Chicago.
Molly Delahunty, a third year Philosophy and Women’s Studies student at Vassar College, shared her summer’s research on August 6. Her presentation, The Role of White Womanhood in Rape Executions, Anti-Lynching Activism, and the Prevention of Lynching, detailed Delahunty’s in-depth report on the State’s use of the death penalty for rape.
The last of these summer sessions was hosted by Sindhu Iyengar ’27 and Maya Quirk ’26, on August 20. They spent the summer working on a number of CRRJ projects, but presented their research into two cases and the possibility of posthumous exoneration in each.
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Six New Cases From Expanded Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, Victims' Stories Public for First Time | |
This summer, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) launched Version 2 of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) one of the most complete digital databases of racially motivated killings of Black people in the Jim Crow South.
This expansion introduces 290 new victims and more than 5,000 new documents to the Archive, collected through CRRJ’s investigative processes and student clinic. Version 2 also extends the Archive’s geographic scope beyond the 11 former Confederate states, now featuring cases from 14 additional cities and states, including Maryland, Washington D.C., Kentucky and West Virginia.
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New Season of Civil Wrongs Podcast Centers on Tennessee Killing Investigated by CRRJ | |
NPR’s Civil Wrongs podcast released its sixth season on Monday, October 13, diving deep into the 1939 case of Phillip Hatley, a World War I veteran killed by Memphis police officers in his own home.
Elena Kuran ’25, a student from the 2024 Spring Clinic, conducted the comprehensive investigation into Hatley’s killing during the program, uncovering crucial details about the case that had remained obscured for decades. A project of the Institute for Public Service Reporting in collaboration with WKNO-FM, Civil Wrongs examines the present-day effects of historical cases of racial terror in Memphis and the Mid-South, bringing long-buried stories of injustice to light and exploring their lasting impact on communities today.
| | | | CRRJ Meet With Congressional Black Caucus in D.C. | On September 26, Dr. Deborah Jackson, former Managing Director of Northeastern Law's Center for Law, Equity and Race (CLEAR) Professor Margaret Burnham, CRRJ Founder and Director, and Raymond Wilkes, CRRJ Senior Attorney, travelled to Washington D.C. to meet with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley and her team on the Congressional Black Caucus. At the event, Burnham and colleagues presented CRRJ's Federal Reparations Project and discussed further advancements in this work. | | Former CRRJ Staff Returns to Deliver Master's Thesis | |
On October 7, Lauren Hawkes, CRRJ's former Program Manager, returned to Boston to meet with her former colleagues and present her master's thesis. Hawkes has spent the last two years studying at the University of Amsterdam, participating in their master's program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Her presentation was titled The Afterlives of Lethal Racial Violence: African American Women who Stood on the Frontlines of the U.S. Jim Crow South. Much of her research is based on cases of lethal racial violence contained in the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive.
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Spotlight on: Meg Gould, Elizabeth Zitrin Justice Fellow, 2025 | Meg Gould, a Columbia Law graduate born and raised in Memphis Tennessee, joined the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project this summer as an Elizabeth Zitrin Justice Fellow. During her two-year tenure, Gould expects to advance CRRJ’s Posthumous Exonerations project, and return to classroom and clinical teaching in spring 2026. | | | |
CRRJ Travels to Memphis for Memorial Honoring Lives Taken by Memphis Police Department | |
CRRJ joined a citywide memorial in Memphis honoring lives taken by the Memphis Police Department, cases dating from the Jim Crow era to the present.
Following the leadership of the families and communities directly impacted by this violence, CRRJ’s Research Associate, Lydia Beal, travelled to Memphis to support efforts to honor those lost, recover buried histories, and call for accountability.
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Gathering the Red Record: Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive Updates, National Anti-Black Violence Database Discussed | |
CRRJ hosted a first-of-its-kind, two-day conference, July 24-25, at Northeastern University's Snell Library, to unveil updates to the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, and discuss pathways to creating an interoperable archive of anti-Black violence in partnership with similar archival and historical projects from across the country for a two-day conference titled Gathering the Red Record: Linking Racial Violence Archives.
The gathering addressed the need for a comprehensive national database of historical racial violence and announced the public release of the latest Archive updates.
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The Pre-Clinic Pioneer: Tayo Belle '10 and her CRRJ Story | |
When Tayo Belle ’10 approached Professor Margaret Burnham in the hallway during her first year at Northeastern Law, she was hoping for any opportunity to work with the renowned civil rights attorney. She never expected Burnham’s immediate response: “How do you feel about going to Mississippi?”
The path to that life-changing conversation began with a grandmother’s intuition. Before Belle even started law school, her grandmother — herself a civil rights activist — had read a profile about Professor Margaret Burnham in Oprah Magazine. True to form, she cut out the clipping and mailed it to her granddaughter with a note: “This is a woman I think you should try to somehow get to know.”
For Belle, whose family had been in Boston for generations after fleeing the Confederate South, Burnham’s question filled her with “utter dread and terror,” she said in a recent interview with the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ). But because it was Margaret Burnham asking, and because she had promised to work with her “in any way, shape, or form,” Belle said yes to what would become a career-defining experience.
| | | | Launched in 2007 by University Distinguished Professor Margaret Burnham, the center of CRRJ’s work is the investigation of racially motivated homicides in the Jim Crow South, and the creation of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, which contains more than 1,000 cases. In 2022, CRRJ became a program of the Law School's Center for Law, Equity and Race. | | We rely on donors like you to continue our work. Donations are used for litigation expenses, field research and restorative justice projects. With your help, we can continue training tomorrow’s civil rights lawyers, filling in the gaps in U.S. history and informing our national dialogue on racial redress and criminal justice. | | | | |
