Race against time: dozens of racially motivated murders took place in the South during the 1950s and 1960s. Time is running out to solve them.

• Author: Dewan, Shaila
• Position: NATIONAL

In the summer of 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till took a trip down to Money, Mississippi, to visit relatives. On August 28, two white men forcibly entered his uncle's home at 2:30 a.m. and abducted Emmett at gunpoint, for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Three days later, Emmett's body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River.

Though the men were brought to trial that year and clearly identified by witnesses, an all-white jury in a deeply segregated South acquitted them of murder, and the men walked free--a scenario all too common at the time.

Emmett Till's murder--which became an enduring symbol of racial violence and injustice for the emerging civil fights movement-was just one of scores of racially motivated killings that took place during the 1950s and '60s, especially in the South.

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Many were barely noted, much less investigated, even in the face of damning evidence. Relatives of victims were often afraid to come forward, lacking faith in the judicial system and fearing retribution from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which waged a campaign of racial terror across the South and was itself responsible for many of the murders. Five decades later, many of these cases remain unsolved, and now, the window of opportunity to bring anyone to justice is fast closing, as aging suspects and witnesses die off one by one.

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"The families of the victims are still living with the horrors of the murders," says Ben Greenberg, an investigative reporter with the Cold Case Project, an organization of writers and filmmakers dedicated to bringing these cases to justice. "They need closure."

'Freedom Summer'

At the urging of families of the victims, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department in 2007 announced the Civil Rights-Era Cold Case Initiative, which put them in charge of reopening and investigating cold case murders. Previously, these prosecutions--about 20 since 1994--were driven largely by the persistence of surviving family members and the painstaking work of journalists and documentary filmmakers, rather than police efforts.

Among their successes was the 2005 conviction of Edgar Ray Killen, one of the Klansmen responsible for the deaths of James Chancy, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwemer--activists in "Freedom Summer" in 1964, when hundreds of mostly young, white, out-of-state volunteers worked alongside black Mississippians to register black voters. (The...