Civil Rights Era Cold Cases
Killings connected to the civil rights movement and to racial terror in the United States, many of them left unprosecuted for decades. Some were reopened under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act and ended in convictions forty years or more after the crime. ColdCaseIndex lists 21 cases on this theme, of which 4 are recorded as unsolved.
- Unsolved 4 (19%)
- Solved or convicted 8 (38%)
- Closed without conviction 9 (43%)
By type
By state or country
All 21 cases
Ahmaud Arbery
Ahmaud Arbery, 25, was chased by three men in pickup trucks and fatally shot in the Satilla Shores neighborhood near Brunswick, Georgia, on February 23, 2020.
Breonna Taylor
Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was shot and killed by Louisville police executing a search warrant at her apartment on March 13, 2020; no drugs were found, and her boyfriend fired one shot believing…
Philando Castile
Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. His girlfriend broadcast the aftermath live on Facebook. Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of manslaughter in 2017.
Freddie Gray
Freddie Gray died of spinal cord injuries sustained while in Baltimore police custody. Six officers were charged but all were acquitted or had charges dropped. His death sparked the 2015 Baltimore uprising.
Sandra Bland
Sandra Bland, 28, was found dead in her Waller County, Texas, jail cell on July 13, 2015, three days after her arrest during a traffic stop. Her death was ruled a suicide by hanging, a finding her family has disputed.
Walter Scott
Walter Scott, 50, was shot in the back and killed while running from North Charleston police officer Michael Slager after a traffic stop on April 4, 2015.
Eric Garner
Eric Garner died after being placed in a chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo during an arrest in Staten Island. His final words 'I can't breathe' became a rallying cry. A Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo.
Laquan McDonald
Seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke on October 20, 2014. Dashboard camera footage was withheld for 13 months until a court ordered its release.
Michael Brown
Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014. A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson. The U.S.
Tamir Rice
Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann within two seconds of arriving at a park where Tamir was playing with a toy gun. A grand jury declined to indict the officers.
Alonzo Brooks
Alonzo Brooks, a 23-year-old man, disappeared after a party at a rural farmhouse near La Cygne, Kansas, in April 2004; his body was found weeks later in a nearby creek.
James Byrd Jr.
James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old Black man, was chained by the ankles to a pickup truck and dragged about three miles to his death near Jasper, Texas, on June 7, 1998.
Wharlest Jackson
Wharlest Jackson, treasurer of the Natchez NAACP and a 12-year employee of the Armstrong Rubber and Tire Company, was killed on February 27, 1967, when a bomb planted under his pickup truck exploded as he drove home from work.
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, a church deacon and voting rights activist, was shot by Alabama state trooper James Bonard Fowler in Marion on February 18, 1965, and died eight days later.
Frank Morris
Frank Morris, a Black shoe-shop owner in Ferriday, Louisiana, was fatally burned in the early hours of December 10, 1964, when two white men set fire to his store and, according to FBI records, one of them blocked his escape…
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman & Michael Schwerner
Civil rights workers James Chaney, 21, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, were killed by Ku Klux Klan members in Neshoba County, Mississippi, on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were found 44 days later.
16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Victims
A dynamite bomb planted by Ku Klux Klan members killed Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Denise McNair, 11, at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963.
Medgar Evers
Medgar Evers, 37, the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, was shot in the back outside his Jackson home shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, and died within the hour.
Emmett Till
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago, was abducted and brutally murdered near Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Roy Bryant and J.W.
Betty June Binnicker & Mary Emma Thames
Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 8, were found killed in Alcolu, South Carolina, on March 23, 1944. George Stinney Jr., a 14-year-old Black boy, was convicted in a one-day trial and executed on June 16, 1944.
Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old Black sharecropper, was abducted and raped by six white men while walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, on September 3, 1944. Two all-white grand juries declined to indict anyone.