Emmett Till’s Casket Donated to Smithsonian
The casket that once held the body of Emmett Till, the teen lynched for whistling at a White woman in Money, Miss., in 1955,  will be exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens in Washington in 2015. The then-14-year-old Emmett had been visiting relatives in Mississippi from Chicago when he was dragged from his home in the middle of the night, beaten, shot and thrown into the river. His lynching was a major catalyst for the modern Civil Rights Movement. Till’s bloated, mutilated body was exhumed from Chicago’s Burr Oak Cemetery in 2005 when the FBI investigated potential accomplices in the killing. He was reburied in a new casket, and the original was found rusting in a shed at Burr Oak recently during investigation of an alleged grave-reselling scandal, The Associated Press reports.

Stimulus Checks Sent to 3,900 Inmates
The federal government sent about 3,900 economic stimulus payments of $250 each this spring to people who were in no position to use the money to help stimulate the economy: prison inmates, The Associated Press reports. The checks were part of the massive economic recovery package approved by Congress and President Barack Obama in February. About 52 million Social Security recipients, railroad retirees and those receiving Supplemental Security Income were eligible for the one-time checks. Prison inmates are generally ineligible for federal benefits. However, 2,200 of the inmates who received checks got to keep them because, under the law, they were eligible, said Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration. They were eligible because they weren’t incarcerated in any one of the three months before the recovery package was enacted. “The law specified that any beneficiary eligible for a Social Security benefit during one of those months was eligible for the recovery payment,” Lassiter told AP. The other 1,700 checks? That was a mistake.
Checks were sent to those inmates because government records didn’t accurately show they were in prison, Lassiter said. He said most of those checks were returned by the prisons. “We are currently reviewing each of those cases to determine whether or not the recovery payment was due,” Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said in a statement issued Wednesday evening. “Where we determine payment was not due, we will take aggressive action to recover each of these erroneous payments.” The Boston Herald first reported that the checks were sent to inmates. The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is performing an audit to make sure no checks went to ineligible recipients, spokesman George E. Penn said. The audit, which had already been planned, will examine whether checks incorrectly went to inmates, dead people, fugitive felons or people living outside the U.S., Penn said. The $787 billion economic recovery package included $2 million for the inspector general to oversee the provisions handled by the Social Security Administration. The audit is part of those efforts, Penn said. There is no timetable for its conclusion. The federal government processed $13 billion in stimulus payments. About $425,000 was incorrectly sent to inmates.

The key suspect in perhaps the greatest unsolved murder of the modern Civil Rights Era – the lynching of three voter-registration workers in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964 – was buried Saturday, but federal authorities say the case will not be buried with him. Billy Wayne Posey, the man believed to have helped the Ku Klux Klan beat and shoot to death James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, died Thursday. Posey, 73, was buried in Philadelphia, the town at the heart of the infamous “Mississippi Burning” case. However, as U.S. Justice Department spokesman Alejandro Miyar said Friday, the death does not “alter our cold-case investigation.” The FBI is assisting state investigators who are considering additional state charges, according to The Clarion-Ledger newspaper. In the summer of 1964, word that the civil rights trio had gone missing sparked a widespread hunt for their bodies. Hundreds of FBI agents combed through fields and swamps throughout Mississippi, eventually discovering the grisly remains at the bottom of an earthen dam. Three years later, 18 men went on trial for conspiring to violate the civil rights of the three victims. Seven men were convicted, one of them a former sheriff’s deputy of Neshoba County, Cecil Price. Before he died in 2001, he said he had told Posey in 1964 that he had detained the three civil rights workers on a traffic charge and asked Posey to get in contact with Edgar Ray Killen, who helped plan the lynchings. He also told investigators that there were “a lot of persons involved in the murders that did not go to jail.” Killen, a Klansman, was convicted on three counts of manslaughter in 2005. He is serving 60 years in prison.

The brother of a Black man who was kidnapped, tied up and tossed into a Mississippi River backwater nearly a half-century ago said he is elated that an appeals court refused to free the former Klansman accused in the crime. “As I’ve said before, there was no doubt that [James Ford] Seale was guilty … so I’m glad that the 5th Circuit took a second shot at it with the whole panel,” said Thomas Moore, the 65-year-old brother of Charles Moore. Read the rest.

Defense attorneys for two White men accused of a modern-day lynching in the tiny, racially vexed town of Paris, Texas, say that the case against their clients is weak and that the jury will acquit at trial in July. The two 28-year-old defendants, Shannon Keith Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley, are charged with using Finley’s pickup truck to run over and drag to death 24-year-old Brandon McClelland on a rural road last September. Black leaders have said that the crime was racially motivated. But is the case against the men beginning to fizzle? Read more.

Should Students Pay for Class Prez’s Tux?
The executive branch of the Florida A&M University’s Student Government Association will be audited after claims of misuse of funds, which included a $714 tuxedo for SGA President Andrew Collins. Former student Senator Brittany Aikens made the claims during the Feb. 25 Student Government Association Senate meeting and requested an audit. “Every administration that crosses SGA doors stand for accountability and transparency,” said Aikens, 19, a sophomore actuarial science student from Port of Spain, Trinidad. “They should have no problem submitting the necessary documents to justify every purchase.” Aikens discovered the purchase of the suit after she asked to review SGA financial documents following the school’s announcement that the Athletic Department had a $4.2 million deficit. “When I heard the news, I wanted to make sure we were using funds wisely across the board,” Aikens said. “It’s our duty to hold our elected officials accountable.” Here’s more.

Bring Lynching Back, Says Black Lawmaker
If one Republican mayoral candidate has his way, lynching may make a legal comeback in Mississippi. George Lambus is canvassing mostly White neighborhoods in Jackson, Miss., with campaign fliers that blast Democratic city leaders and call for “a noose and stout tree limb” to combat crime. The flier reads: “Incompetent [N]egro Democrats at City Hall, [N]egroes without civic pride, [N]egro criminals and corrupt [N]egro police officers have just about driven this city into the ground. Any [N]egro Democrat running for mayor who tells you that he or she can reduce crime and bring jobs to Jackson is a damn lie. They only want to be mayor for the salary. Job creation is contingent upon the economy improving, and crime can only be alleviated by a noose and a stout tree limb. I will provide the noose, and when the economy improves, I will get the jobs here.” Read on.

A western North Carolina jury has awarded $50,000 to a 29-year-old North Carolina man, who was forced to endure racism on his construction job from hostile Whites who even placed a rope around his neck one day. Michael A. Kitchen told the jury that his abuse at the Pisgah Forest-based Farrell Log Structures lasted right up to the summer night when he ran from a job site after his co-workers threatened to lynch him, according to Kitchen’s lawyers. “I was shocked that it happened,” Kitchens said last week as he played to the jury recordings he made of the slurs. “Now even looking back, I am still shocked that it happened. I still have nightmares about it.” He said that some members of his construction crew shot nails at Kitchen from a rooftop while he walked below, forcing him to run away. One witness told the jury that Kitchen’s co-workers often threw pieces of wood, shingles and even chicken bones at him during his dinner break. On his recordings, Kitchen can be heard begging them to stop. “As they had the rope around him, they were hitting him with boards and stones,” Roth said. “It was this big game.” In his closing argument, Philip J. Roth, who represented Kitchen, told the jury that they had an obligation to make an example of Roth, taking a line from President Obama about ending “old hatreds. That is the whole point of this case. People don’t believe this stuff still goes on.”

Hundreds protest “lynching” in Texas.  Protesters upset about the dragging death of another Black in east Texas rallied outside the Lamar County courthouse Monday to take a stand on a ruling they considered unjust. In September, a 24-year-old Black man in racially tense Paris, Texas, was hit by a pickup truck driven by two White men and dragged until his body tore to pieces. The gruesome death of Brandon McClelland triggered grim flashbacks of the notorious James Byrd case a couple years ago. Read the rest here.

Oregon university lynches an Obama image. George Fox University in Oregon may be a Christian school, but you’d never know it by the way some of its students behave. On campus Tuesday, somebody lynched a life-sized cardboard dummy of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. George Fox University President Robin Baker said that a custodian found the six-foot cutout of Obama swinging from a tree on campus and removed it – sending a chilling historic flashback through the minds of its African-American students. Between the late-19^th century and mid-20^th century, Blacks were routinely lynched throughout the South and Midwest, often for nothing other than having darker skin. Sometimes successful African Americans were lynched by Whites who were merely jealous of their accomplishments. Obama, a Harvard graduate, Grammy winner, best-selling author and millionaire is the first Black person to land a major-party presidential nomination. The image of Obama was accompanied by a note: “Act Six reject.” A minority scholarship program at the university is called “Act Six.” Baker told The Associated Press that he met with the students in Act Six who are on full scholarship, noting that he had another meeting scheduled for the entire student body this week.

Republicans said they will not support it until an energy bill has been passed

The move to seek justice for Civil Rights Era lynching victims came to a screeching halt Monday as Republican members of the U.S. Senate said they will not support any legislation until they can get a vote on an energy bill. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act would give the U.S. Justice Department $10 million per year to prosecute those responsible for killing Blacks and supporters of civil rights initiatives. In addition, the bill called for $3.5 to aid local law-enforcement agencies involved in the investigations. The bill was among about three dozen pieces of legislation aimed at helping mentally ill people, homeless youths, stroke victims and child-porn prosecutors. Leading the charge against the measure was Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, who consistently fights new spending measures. He was joined by 39 colleagues. The 52 votes in favor were eight short of the number needed to force a final vote on the bill bundle. Democrats argue that the Republicans want to keep the money on hand for the war in Iraq. “History will tell whether this is a setback or a setup for ultimate victory of the Till bill,” Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, president of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign and drafter of the bill, told The Clarion Ledger newspaper in Mississippi. “Every justice-seeking American should be calling and e-mailing their U.S. senators, strongly urging the passage of the bill.” The “Till bill” is named after Emmett Till, the Black teen from Chicago who was kidnapped and brutally beaten before being shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1955. Why do you think the bill didn’t pass?

Two Black sharecropper couples died in a notoriously gruesome race murder

Federal and state investigators and lawmakers are hoping that, after 62 years, they can bring to justice the dozen or so men who riddled four Black sharecroppers with bullets and cut the unborn baby from one of the victims in the last recorded mass lynching in America. It was July 26, 1945 when a mob, armed with shotguns, rifles and machine guns, took the foursome to the Moore’s Ford Bridge and shot them hundreds of times. One of the men had been accused of killing a White man two weeks earlier. A Klansman bootlegger bailed the suspect out of jail, and drove him, his wife, her brother and her brother’s wife to the bridge, where they were massacred. This week, officials from the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation retrieved boxes of evidence from a home in a rural Georgia community of Walton County. “The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn’t ignore with respect to this case,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead told CNN. For the past several years, Tyrone Brooks, a member of the Georgia state House, has been pressing for justice in this 1946 case. “We just hope and pray they can bring some of these suspects to the bar of justice before they die, because they’re all getting up in age,” said Brooks, the president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials. At the national level, Rep. John Lewis, who represents Georgia in the U.S. House, sponsored a bill that provides $10 million a year over the next decade to investigate lynch cases from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although a lone Oklahoma senator, Tom Coburn, has been blocking the legislation – he almost never supports measures that require federal dollars – but his recently indicated that he might be willing to allow the legislation to go through.