The Justice Department’s Conservative Bend Has Meant More Politics, Less Justice

Give Chip Burris his props for trying to light a fire at the Justice Department -- one that may heat up a passion for resolving cases of racist atrocities cooled by time and indifference.

Burris is assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division. He recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he was so shocked by the 1946 slayings of George and Mae Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcom, two black couples who were dragged from their cars by a racist mob in rural Georgia and shot more than 60 times, that he ordered the bureau’s field offices to search the files for more such unsolved cases.

Burris says that there may be about 35 to 50 cases of other racial killings, mostly in the South, that have never been solved. So Congress is now weighing whether to create a cold case unit at the department that would reopen cases from the civil rights era.

Yet Burris admits that most of the cases probably won’t be brought to closure. Too many witnesses and suspects are now dead or close to it. For example, in the case of the 1951 Christmas Day firebomb slayings of Florida NAACP field secretary Harry Moore and his wife, Harriette, the four white men who were ultimately charged in the slaying as the result of one suspect’s deathbed confession had already died and gone to hell by the time the case was closed.

Not only that, much of the evidence is gone. In the case of the most sadistic lynchings, key identifying body parts such as fingers can’t be found because mobs took them as souvenirs.

Still, Burris says, the cases need to be reopened because justice can’t forget. And he’s right. But while it’s important for the department to not forget past injustices, it’s even more important for it to not contribute to an atmosphere that once put black people far beyond the protection of any laws.

But right now, at least when it comes to civil rights, it appears that this administration has been on a steady march toward doing exactly that.

When George W. Bush came to the White House in 2000, one of his first acts was to appoint John Ashcroft, a neo-Confederate sympathizer, as his attorney general. Here is a guy who praised a group with members who defend slavery and other justifications for keeping black people in their places, yet Bush saw fit to make him the nation’s top cop.

How chilling.

Ashcroft, of course, has since left. But his legacy remains. Now 42 percent of the department’s lawyers hired since 2003 are grounded more in conservatism than in civil rights.

Two years before that, 77 percent of the newly hired lawyers had civil rights backgrounds, according to the Boston Globe.

What’s more is that the department’s voting rights, employment litigation and appellate sections employ at least 11 lawyers who were members of the Federalist Society -- an ultraconservative legal society that has never liked the 1954 Brown school desegregation decision, and one that passionately touts the rightness of state’s rights.

Problem is, there was a time when state’s rights were all wrong -- when states like Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama believed that it was their right to kill black people like the Dorseys, the Malcoms and the Moores when they got too uppity. Had the country waited for the racist governments in those states to come to Jesus, a whole lot more black people would have gone to Jesus by then.

Then last year, higher-ranking department officials overruled veteran staff lawyers who recommended that Georgia’s voter identification law -- a law that could disproportionately hurt voters who may not be able to obtain photo IDs but ignores fraud in absentee voting -- be rejected because it would discriminate against black voters. Keep in mind that this law that had already been rejected by a U.S. District Court judge who likened it to a Jim Crow era poll tax and a three-judge appellate panel.

It’s hard not to see some backsliding in all of that.

Of course, I can’t blame Burris for that. He’s just trying to get the ball rolling on solving some unsolved murders. That’s good -- if for no reason other than to get closure for the families of the victims and to further force this country come to terms with its own terrorist past.

Yet and still, this Justice Department shouldn’t be allowed to glean a disproportionate amount of credit for opening past cases of racial slayings that are, in all likelihood, never going to be solved as it continues on a march to erode civil rights today.

And as it continues to snuff out black people’s voices with those who are bent on twisting the law -- instead of a rope -- around their necks.