The cold cases of the Jim Crow era IN March 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt received a letter from a desperate mother. Her son, who was black, had been killed two years earlier, his body pulled from a river near Pickens, Miss. “I am sending a contract in regards to the lynching of my son Willie Jack Heggard,” wrote Jane Heggard. “I have […]
A lynching’s long shadow Earlier in the year, a Northeastern University law student named Kyleen Burke emailed Washington’s cousin Tyrone Higginbottom, who then put her in touch with the rest of the family. She told them that she had done extensive research on their grandfather’s life and death as part of Northeastern’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which […]