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On March 10 and 11, 2020, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project hosted the convening “Remembrance and Repair: Police Violence in the Jim Crow Era” at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. In 2017, CRRJ convened a gathering on historical racial violence, lynching, and other forms of domestic terror at the BCRI. Since then, CRRJ has […]
On November 15, 2019, New Iberia, Louisiana commemorated the 75th Anniversary of the 1944 expulsion of eight community leaders from the city. The group, which included four medical doctors, two teachers, and two insurance agents, had in June 1944 launched a new NAACP chapter. Their first case came when a community member complained that he had […]
On November 9, 2019, the family and descendants of Royal Cyril Brooks, in partnership with CRRJ, unveiled an historical marker in his honor. The State of Louisiana approved the marker for installation near where 44-year-old Royal Brooks was unjustly killed by a Gretna police officer on February 27, 1948. Roy Leo Brooks Jr. and Ira […]
On October 25-26, 2019,CRRJ Associate Director Professor Rose Zoltek-Jick and Program Coordinator Lauren Hawkes attended a U.S. Local Racial Redress convening hosted by the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University in New York City. Participants included descendants of those killed by racially motivated violence, representatives from communities affected by historical racial […]
On Wednesday, October 16, 2019, Katherine Franke, a NUSL alumna and Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University, participated in NUSL’s Faculty Book Forum Series. She discussed her recently published book, Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition, with Professor Margaret Burnham. The book explores the case for reparations, focusing on the […]
CRRJ Workshop Series – Spring 2019 Venue: 360 Dockser Hall, Northeastern University School of Law Wednesdays: March 27, May 1, June 26, and July 24, 4:00 – 5:30 pm Bringing together researchers, students, and invited guests in the fields of civil rights and historical injustices, the workshop series is designed to discuss new research projects […]
On February 5, 2019, Professor Burnham served as a commissioner at the Elaine Massacre of 1919 Remembrance event at the Elaine Legacy Center in Arkansas. Professor Burnham joined victims’ descendants, community residents, and conferees from across the country. The event opened a space for family members to share what happened to their ancestors during the […]
On Saturday, November 17, 2018, in Culpeper, Virginia, the lives of three men, Charles “Allie” Thompson (d. 1918), William Grayson (d. 1850), and William Thompson (d. 1877), were remembered. The men were all lynched in Culpeper County. The Remembrance and Reflection event at the Culpeper Baptist Church marked the centennial of Allie Thompson’s lynching. The […]
On Friday, January 25, 2019, Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun hosted A Tribute to the Dream: A Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The event featured the premiere of a documentary on a CRRJ case, produced by Northeastern filmmakers Adam Fischer and Benjamin Bertsch, titled A Murder in […]
In December 2018, CRRJ participated in the five-day international conference Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation: The Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. “The conference aims to deepen understanding of the transgenerational repercussions of traumatic pasts in a range of cultural contexts, to explore how different disciplines represent this transgenerational phenomenon, and […]
On October 27, 2018, CRRJ Visiting Scholar Diane Harriford and Kyleen Burke (NUSL ’18) participated in a commemoration honoring Elwood Higginbottom in Oxford, Mississippi. Elwood Higginbottom was the seventh and last known lynching victim in Lafayette County, Mississippi. Held at the Second Baptist Church, the audience included the Higginbottom family, Lafayette County public officials and community members, and […]
On January 8, 2019, President Trump signed the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018. This marks the first occasion that a group of high school students have successfully engineered a bill through Congress. Stuart Wexler, a teacher at Hightstown High School in New Jersey, engaged students in his Government and Politics class […]
On October 20, 2018 CRRJ sponsored the conference Past Harms, Present Remedies: Law Enforcement and Families Affected by Police Violence in Conversation at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. Designed to consider how to include historical justice in conversations about current policing, the conference was the first of its kind in the country. The […]
Henry Williams, Johnny Williams, Ennis Bell, Theodore Wesley Samuels, Prentiss McCann, and Rayfield Davis all died at the height of the segregation era in Mobile. On August 15, 1942, Private Henry Williams was traveling to base at Brookley Air Force when he asked the driver, Grover Chandler, to keep to the schedule in order for […]
On April 28, 2018, Restorative Justice Project Director Kaylie Simon, Esq. and the Kimbrough Scholars from Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School joined the family of Royal Brooks at the Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church to honor the life and legacy of Royal Brooks. Brooks was shot by Patrolman Alvin Bladsacker after being removed from a […]