Sherrod’s father still needs justice

Last Friday, the FBI agreed to review documents associated with the 1965 killing of Hosie Miller, whose daughter, Shirley Sherrod, talked so movingly about his death in the now infamous video that led to Sherrod’s resignation from the Department of Agriculture.

The resurrection of the cold case from Georgia’s Baker County raises fresh questions about what should be done about civil rights-era cases that were mishandled.

Under a program launched in 2005, the Justice Department and FBI have pursued civil rights-era cold cases. Last week the department sent to Congress an annual report with a list of 122 cases in which investigations were initiated.

As Miller’s alleged assailant is now dead, there may be little federal prosecutors can do, but the FBI investigation will advance the Justice Department’s stated commitment to rectify miscarriages of justice.

Miller was allegedly shot to death by a white neighbor, Cal Hall, in a dispute over cattle. Witnesses claimed the shooter acted without provocation. Hall, dead since 1976, survived a grand jury investigation and a civil suit brought by the famous civil rights attorney C.B. King.

The Baker County jurors, mostly white in this majority black county, refused to hold Hall responsible either criminally or civilly.

Does that mean no further investigation can or should be undertaken 45 years later? It may be too late to prosecute Hall, but the history of Baker shows the courts were closed to Miller in 1965 — and that calls for remedy today.

Baker, population about 5,000 in the mid-20th century, was impenetrable, so entrenched was white supremacy.

By 1945, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the famous criminal case of Screws v. United States, which came out of Baker, the county had been home to six “official” lynchings of black men — seven, if you count the Screws killing, which some recent commentators on the Sherrod events have declined to do, because no noose was involved in that death.

It was, in fact, the noose that took the lives of three black men in June 1903, 18-year-old Charles Wilson in May 1910 and two men in June 1933. And by any reasonable rendering, Robert Hall, killed by Sheriff Claude Screws in 1943, should be on that lynching list. Screws and two deputies arrested Hall for a petty crime. The lawmen handcuffed Hall, beat him with a metal blackjack until he lost consciousness, tied him to a car, dragged him around the county and then deposited him on the jail floor at the courthouse.

When he died, federal investigators pursued a criminal trial, and the facts were so outrageous that even an all-white jury convicted Screws. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction on appeal.

When the Albany movement was launched against Sheriff Laurie Pritchett and his ilk, civil rights workers were fearful of working in “Bad Baker.” At that time in the 1960s, the sheriff was a huge and horrific man, Warren Johnson, who called himself “Gator” because he made alligator sounds to “scare” blacks.

Gator had been Screws’ deputy at the time of the Hall murder, and when he took charge after Screws in 1957, he made Bull Connor seem like the friend of black residents. Once, he physically threw civil rights workers out of the courthouse.

On another occasion, he claimed that he had to shoot, three times, a man he had in his custody for public drunkenness. The man, described by former U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman as “fragile,” was convicted by a Baker County jury in 1963 (two years before Sherrod’s father’s case) and sent to prison for assaulting the larger-than-life sheriff.

As brave as they were to ask for it, Miller’s relatives were looking for pie in the sky when they insisted on Baker County conducting an independent investigation into his death.

But pressing questions remain unanswered. Were others involved in protecting Hall from prosecution? What role did Gator Johnson play? Could the FBI itself have done more to vindicate the death at the time?

It’s not enough to say “those were bad times” and forget it. If we can do anything to fix it, we should, and a thorough investigation of the killing is a first step in that direction.