Young sleuths for old crimes: students investigating civil rights-era murders piece together the victims' stories--and help families heal.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: NATIONAL

Searching the grounds of a small cemetery in Georgia last fall, Ellie Studdard did a double take after spotting a small corner of concrete, mostly hidden by mud, with the letters ISA still visible. As her heart began racing, she cleared away the dirt and branches and unearthed a piece of history long obscured.

Studdard, a junior at Emory University in Atlanta, had found the lost grave of Isaiah Nixon, a 28-year-old black man who was shot to death by a white man in Alston, Georgia, in 1948. She had come to the cemetery in the nearby city of Uvalda with some classmates and a professor as part of a class on civil rights-era cold cases.

"I was in so much shock once I confirmed to myself that it said Isaiah Nixon," Studdard says. "It was totally incredible beyond anything."

The location of Nixon's grave had been lost to his family for decades, and finding it was the most tangible accomplishment in the Emory students' quest to uncover the details of his murder.

The Emory class, called the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Case Project, began in 2011. It's one of a handful of initiatives at various schools, including Syracuse University and Northeastern University, to investigate civil rights-era cases that remain unresolved. The Emory class is the only one for undergraduates.

The case of Isaiah Nixon is one of hundreds of racially motivated killings that took place across the South in the Jim Crow era. 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. When charges were filed, it was common for all-white juries to acquit those charged, as in the Nixon case.

Decades later, many of these cases remain unresolved.

In 2006, the F.B.I. began a cold case initiative 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. His case was heavily covered in the press and brought attention to the civil rights movement.)

From the outset, the government faced formidable challenges: limited federal jurisdiction, the statute of limitations...