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Northeastern students with the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project, in concert with faculty and staff researchers, helped to piece together the details surrounding the fatal beating from primary source documents.
The 1945 murder of Hattie DeBardelaben, an Alabama farmer with eight children who was beaten to death after four law enforcement officers initiated a warrantless search of her home for illegal whiskey, had gone unresolved for nearly 80 years.
Northeastern students with the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), in concert with faculty and staff researchers, helped to piece together the details surrounding the fatal beating from primary source documents beginning in 2012. For more than two decades, the CRRJ has helped shed light on the civil rights abuses during the Jim Crow era.
A set of records detailing the events leading to the 46-year-old mother and grandmother’s death were the first to be released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) under a new law. The 2019 law, called the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act, establishes a digital collection of civil rights cold case records.
The records are a part of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, which maintains documents pertaining to anti-Black killings during the Jim Crow era. About 1,000 such cases live in the archives.
Now, those documents will have even broader reach, as part of NARA’s new federal archive. “This marks an important moment in the movement to learn about — and learn from — the atrocities of the Jim Crow era,” says Margaret Burnham, who directs the CRRJ. “Rendering federal records widely available will make it possible to teach from this material, fully integrate this history in our national narrative, and better assist the families and communities that bear the weight of these past harms.”
Burnham sits on the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board.
Lydia Beal, a researcher with CRRJ, says they are intimately familiar with the details of the DeBardelaben case. Beal says students broke ground on the case more than a decade ago after obtaining some starting documents.
Those starting documents, Beal says, typically range in nature: they could be records from the Department of Justice, or organizations such as the NAACP; they could be correspondences from past attorneys general, or between family members and private investigators, FBI reports, death certificates or news clippings.
“From there, the students are able to gather some of the facts of that case and begin to fill out a primary record, which involves gathering all of the necessary law enforcement files that they can find,” Beal tells Northeastern Global News.
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Sometimes there is very little information available about a given case. But once underway, occasionally students discover — as happened here — that the efforts of one individual can go a long way in shedding light on events from so long ago.
“In this case specifically, it was interesting in the sense that there was pretty extensive coverage from a Black journalist with The Birmingham World,” Beal says.
That journalist was Emory Jackson, who was editor of The Birmingham World from 1941 to 1975, and who is described as “a tireless voice and activist for voting rights in Jefferson County, Alabama.” After receiving an affidavit from DeBardelaben’s husband regarding the March 23, 1945, killing, Jackson tried to get the information in front of NAACP Special Counsel Thurgood Marshall, who would become the Supreme Court’s first Black justice.
After FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was instructed to investigate the killing, a state grand jury was convened. The officers involved, now deceased, ultimately went unpunished, documents show.
But the facts are now widely available to anyone who wishes to access them, a measure of justice in a situation where accountability is otherwise not possible.
“These cases had never formally been investigated, documented, memorialized or redressed,” Beal says. Rendering them visible and publicly accessible is a significant victory.
“By exposing the connections between patterns of racial terror and repression, silence, and misinformation, our research fills critical gaps in the historical record and provides the evidence necessary for a national reckoning with this now known history,” Beal says.
As students unearth new historical information about cases, Beal’s role is split between coordinating with descendants and others directly affected and working with the library staff to build out and develop the archive. The archive provides a better understanding of these cases and the history behind them, “rendering [them] completely visible and accessible in an open-source format,” Beal says.
The archive is the “most comprehensive open-sourced, digitally available record of anti-Black violence” in the Jim Crow South “anywhere,” Beal says.
“The throughline is a need to increase public awareness around their family’s history and make sure that the names of their ancestors and legacies are being preserved in a way that restores their humanity,” Beal says.