Justice denied: fifty years after a string of racially motivated killings in the South, it looks like most cases will remain unsolved.

• Author: Barry, Dan
• Position: NATIONAL

In the spring of 1965, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received a letter from northeastern Louisiana pleading for justice in the killing of a well-respected black merchant.

One morning a few months earlier, Frank Morris had seen two white men in front of his shoe-repair shop in Ferriday, Louisiana. One had pointed a shotgun at him, the other held a canister of gas. A match was lit, a fire began, and Morris died four days later of burns without naming the men, perhaps fearing retribution against his family.

The letter to the F.B.I. expressed grave concern that the crime would go unpunished because, it said, the local police were probably complicit. "Your office is our only hope, so don't fail us," the letter read. It was signed: "Yours truly, The Colored People of Concordia Parish." *

The case of Frank Morris is one of dozens of racially motivated killings that took place across the South in the 1950s and '60s. At the time, many of these crimes were barely noted, much less investigated. Relatives of victims were often afraid to come forward, lacking faith in the judicial system and fearing retaliation from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which waged a campaign of racial terror across the South and was responsible for many of the murders.

Little Hope of Resolution

Five decades later, many of these cases remain unsolved, despite hopes raised several years ago with the reopening of civil rights criminal cases from that era.

"The reality is that justice in a few cases is going to have to serve as a proxy for justice in them all," says Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in Montgomery, Alabama.

In 2006, the F.B.I. began a cold-case initiative described as a comprehensive effort to investigate racially motivated murders from the civil rights era. That effort became a mandate two years later when Congress passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. (Till was a 14-year-old black boy who was tortured and killed in Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly flirting with a white woman.)

From the outset, the government faced formidable challenges: limited federal jurisdiction in some cases, the statute of limitations in others, and, of course, the passage of time. Suspects and witnesses die. Evidence is lost. Memories fade. In addition, the law authorized tens of millions of dollars for the project, but just $2.8 million has come through.

So far, the initiative has resulted in just one successful federal prosecution: In...