Since Catherine Walker Jones received word last November that the Department of Justice had given up on solving the 1964 racial murder of her father, Clifton Walker, I’ve been raising questions about the FBI’s present-day investigation and its treatment of the Walker family.

Now, on Narratively, I take a deep look at the anatomy of the FBI’s failure to properly investigate the Clifton Walker murder case.

The last person to investigate the Walker case was special agent Bradley Hentschel, at least the third agent on the case since it was reopened. Hentschel was assigned to the case in the spring of 2011, when he was twenty-five years old and had been employed as a special agent for less than a year.

For its part, the FBI contends that decades-old cold cases are among the most difficult an agent can be assigned. As the Department of Justice has noted to Congress: “Subjects die; witnesses die or can no longer be located; memories become clouded; evidence is destroyed or cannot be located; and original investigations lacked the technical and scientific advances relied upon today.”

All true, surely — but it was hard for Hentschel to even get the authorization and resources needed in order to conduct the most basic investigative activities in the field.

“I do not want to close this case,” Hentschel said during a telephone interview in 2011, “but if I can’t develop any further leads…it’s going to be a hard sell to the DOJ, to even my supervisor, that I need to be running around two, two and a half hours away from the office with the gas budget the way that it is and everything else, beating down leads on this case or on any other case where we don’t have any active information coming in.”

Get the full story on Narratively.

The video introducing this post and featured with the Narratively article was edited by Clarence Smith, Jr., aka, BOLD Edition.

Butler is 75 today, and the shooting left him with injuries that have dogged him for a half-century. "I never will forget that morning," Butler told me in a telephone interview from his Riverside, Calif., home. "I was shot four times with shotguns. ... I've got one piece of lung and one lung. I can only stand up for a little while. I have to go sit down. If I don't, I fall."

But there are psychic scars from the attack, too. He said he still looks over his shoulder in fear of random violence 50 years later, and says he doesn't go anywhere, including the bathroom, without a gun. "If I sit out on the stoop, this is right where I can reach and get it. It's been that way for ... years," Butler said. "I'm gonna protect me."

"I hadn't even voted then," Butler told me. "At that time, you wasn't allowed to vote. You didn't do nothing but work."

Read the rest of "Before 'Freedom Summer,' A Wave Of Violence Largely Forgotten" on Code Switch.

The big news, if you've followed my posts over the years about the 1964 Clifton Walker murder case, is that the DOJ has thrown in the towel and closed the case, which was re-opened in 2009. An FBI agent hand-delivered a letter from the DOJ to Clifton Walker's daughter Catherine on November 21, to break the news. More coming soon on this, but in the meantime, check out this excellent report broadcast on Al Jazeera English this past week.

In one of the first posts I wrote over on my new spot, benlog.net, I reflected a bit on how the project I started here on the life and times of my father has so thoroughly morphed into this other work on civil rights cold cases.

By my fourth or fifth time back in Mississippi, it became clear that I was making a choice between the work I’d found there on civil rights cold cases and that unintentional book about my father.

I’m not giving up on the book about Dad, but time and resources for the work are limited—and both projects involve a shrinking window of opportunity to pursue living people with answers that will be lost to history once they die.

So for now, I focus on the project that I do because of him rather than the project that is about him.

Turns out I've had some great, untapped source material for the original project sitting on a shelf in my home office for the last three years—a trove of letters between my parents in the early 50s, while my father was serving in the Army in the Korean War. It's going to take considerable time to scan and transcribe the letters, but I will be carting out stories from that material now and then, as time allows.

Pete Seeger and others, Easter 1961 Anti-Nuclear March on the UN. Photo Credit: Paul Greenberg.

One thing I've learned is that my father's friendship with Pete Seeger goes further back than what I knew about from the early 60s. You can read about it in A Fast One for Pete Seeger, over on Medium.

I moved my main blogging activity over to benlog.net in an effort to simplify the process. Like a lot of folks who've been blogging since early on, I've started to find that the web-based blogging tools, which so radically transformed the nature of media and how we are able to connect with others online, have come to feel cumbersome. The change of venue seems to have worked—in so far as I've been writing a bit more over there. Even so, I was getting a bit frustrated with my new setup and I decided to change things up again. The blog is still benlog.net, but I've made some changes under the hood.

I guess I should also mention that today, December 22, is my father's birthday. He'd be 86 if he were still around. I posted this video over on the new blog in June when I was feeling melancholy about the Supreme Court ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act. Tonight it's just a song for you, Dad.

Hungry Blues isn't going anywhere, but I'm mostly blogging over at the new place for now.

Good news is that since I started the new blog, I've been blogging more:

• After 49 Years, Little Justice
• Abiding Mysteries

This is such an amazing story. Vivian Maier is like the Emily Dickinson of 20th century American photography. A theme of this blog has been what motivates—and what compels—people to commit themselves to a cause or to a practice—whether in art or in politics (or both). Vivian Maier's moving art and mysterious life seem endlessly fascinating in this respect.

I died for Beauty — but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining room —

He questioned softly "Why I failed"?
"For Beauty", I replied —
"And I — for Truth — Themself are One —
We Brethren, are", He said —

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night —
We talked between the Rooms —
Until the Moss had reached our lips —
And covered up — our names —

(Emily Dickinson)

UPDATE: I'm not the first person to make the comparison to Emily Dickinson.

By Paul Greenberg

Let me start by saying the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. was my boss is less important than that he was my friend. In a significant way he was your friend as well. He was a friend of humankind.

I am not going to engage in the usual eulogy or redacting of Dr. King’s career. You have heard it and or read it so much that it has become common and I am afraid a bit banal. What I would like to do in the short time we have together this Shabbes is place the King legacy in a Jewish context.

I don’t intend to raise the question of Black-Jewish relations in part because I think it has been addressed to little avail at length by our community and in part because I think what I will raise speaks to the question in a more meaningful way than the usual discussion that tries to rekindle a better past that I personally don’t think ever existed. I hope you do not find it too vain that I begin with a story out of my own childhood.

I Was a Stranger in a Strange Land

I don’t remember whether I was seven or eight but the scene is vivid in the feeling part of my memory. We were living in Taunton, Massachusetts. Until that day (it must have been summer because I wasn’t in school) I was only vaguely aware of being Jewish. I had heard the family stories, I was somewhat embarrassed by my paternal grandmother’s accent and I loved Bible stories, especially the Exodus tale.

They were starting a baseball game. Sides were being chosen. I stood there expecting to be chosen around fourth or fifth. I was realistic about my ability. I wasn’t the best but I was far from the worst. I made up in determination what I lacked in size. While waiting in pleasant expectation lightning struck.

"Do you want Jewboy? I don’t want him on my side."

It took several seconds for me to realize he was talking about me.

JEWBOY! JEWBOY! JEWBOY!

The word crashed through my being. My insides were raw with pain.

“I am an American,” I screamed in a tearful combination of fear and rage.

"Jewboy!"

"Jew cry baby!"

"Mockie!"

"Christkiller!"

"Scram, Jews can’t play baseball."

I stood my ground and yelled the most meaningful words I could find: "Its a free country!"

I don’t know who threw the fist blow but a general melee ensued. I was badly bruised and I would like to believe several of my tormentors carried home some effects of my frantic and violent surge of energy.

If I Am Not for Myself Who Am I?

Arthur was in my class in public school. He came from a faded line of the town’s Protestant aristocracy. Arthur had a reputation for being wild that led most parents to instruct their children to shun him. Arthur was the nearest to a close friend that I had except for my cousin Marilyn.

News of the altercation traveled fast. Later that same day Arthur came over to exhibit boyish solidarity. He assured me that in any future confrontations he would be a gladiator on my side. He told me that no one could tell a Jew by his looks. He asked me if I thought it was a good idea to change my last name to Green.

I responded with avid indignation. "I am not a quitter!"

Arthur looked at me with new found respect. We sat for some time in quiet togetherness. After Arthur left I felt renewed by his friendship. Three days later he was dead.

"Wasn’t Arthur White a friend of yours," my mother asked?

I felt trapped between loyalty and safety. Admitting Arthur was a friend might bring on the order to stay away from such a wild boy. Denying my friendship would be a major sort of betrayal. I had not caught the nuance of the past tense and I cagily responded, "why?"

Mom matter-of-factly answered, "he was killed while riding his bike this morning. He was over on the Brockton road where he wasn’t supposed to be and he was struck by a car." I ran out side crying tears of rage at Arthur for deserting me.

Several days later I walked to the church where his funeral service was being held. As I approached to enter, I saw all my recent tormentors going in.

Panic overcame me. I ran until my breath was nearly spent and sat down under a tree and cried tears of loneliness and fear. When I was finished crying I made a pledge to myself that I would never again desert a friend.

And now one of Dr. King’s favorite poems as well as one of mine.

Incident

by Countee Cullen

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee.
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

What is the point? Simply put we who are conscious and actively Jewish live within two cultures Jewish and American. Our effort individually and collectively is to find a place of comfort and ease so that we can have both.

Let me say quickly and emphatically right here so that there is no mis-understanding: the Jewish American experience and the Black American experience are not the same nor can we find an easy equation between the two. I am indicating that we share this relationship to America. We want our own identity and we want to participate fully in our country’s bounty and its decision making.

Living in two cultures is not just the pain and degradation that the story and poem highlight. It is also the joy of sharing in the richness of your heritage. Dr. King once said about the African-American experience: “Life is part pain and part joy and lord knows we have had our share of both.”

(Dedicated to Francine Greenberg Reizen on the anniversary of her Bat Mitzvah)

—Speech at Temple Gates of Heaven (excerpt), Schenectady, NY, January 14, 1994, by Paul Greenberg

Things may still be broken here and there on posts and pages—and I'm also in the process of rebooting the site design, as long as I'm starting fresh—so please excuse any messes you may stumble on. If something seems broken on the site, drop me a line, if you're so inclined.

Today, in  Jackson, Mississippi's Clarion-Ledger, I published the first investigative news report about the 1964 racial murder of Clifton Walker:

Four and a half years after the FBI announced it would reopen and investigate more than 100 cases of unsolved civil rights-era killings in the South, the bureau has yet to initiate charges in any of the cases. It has instead closed all but 39 of those cases without recommending prosecution.

"Few, if any, of these cases will be prosecuted," the Department of Justice has acknowledged to Congress.

Despite its most vigorous efforts, the FBI has said, it has not been able to overcome "difficulties inherent in all cold cases: subjects die; witnesses die or can no longer be located; memories become clouded; evidence is destroyed or cannot be located; original investigations lacked the technical or scientific advances relied upon today."

But none of those reasons explains why the FBI has been able to gain little ground in a case that is still open - the slaying of Clifton Walker, a 37-year-old African American who was ambushed by a white mob and brutally gunned down in his car on an unpaved backwoods road outside the southwest Mississippi town of Woodville on Feb. 28, 1964. Walker was married and the father of five children.

For Walker's children, the FBI's own management of the case raises questions

Read the rest at the Clarion-Ledger or at USA Today, which also ran the story.

Also today, fellow Civil Rights Cold Case Project reporter Stanley Nelson interviewed me about the Clifton Walker case for his newspaper, the Concordia Sentinel, in Ferriday Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from southwest Mississippi, where Clifton Walker was murdered. Stanley gave me a nice opportunity to talk more about Clifton Walker and his family.

Clifton Walker was born in Woodville, Miss. in 1927. The youngest of nine children, he was nicknamed "Man" as a child, which stuck through adulthood, as his older siblings tended to look up to him.

Clifton Walker met Ruby Phipps on her way home from Sunday school in 1943. They were married in 1945 and had five children together. The Walker children remember their parents as a strong unit. After they were put to bed, the children would hear their parents talking about life and planning for their needs, how to pay for a car or a washer or what to buy their kids for Christmas.

Clifton Walker served in the U.S. Army in the Korean War. After his discharge, following a knee injury, Walker went to work at International Paper plant in Natchez, where he was a laborer in the wood yard and a member of the black union, St. James Local 747 Pulp, Sulfite and Paper Mill Workers. At the time of his death he made a good wage for a black worker, reportedly $8/hour.

Read the rest at the Concordia Sentinel.

Be sure to watch the trailer posted with the article (as well as here, on hungryblues.net) to see portions of my investigation unfold, meet three of Clifton Walker’s children and visit the crime scene, where he was murdered.

(Cross-posted at the Civil Rights Cold Case Project.)

This Sunday, July 22, the Clarion-Ledger will publish my article about the the 1964 killing of Clifton Walker, a black man from Woodville, Miss.

On February 28, 1964, Clifton Walker was ambushed by a white mob on his drive home from the late shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, Miss. On the last stretch of Walker's drive home on the dark, twisty, unpaved Poor House Road, near Woodville, his attackers stopped his car, gathered around it with shotguns and fired in at close range, blowing Walker's face apart. The FBI and Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol investigated for about nine months in 1964 and in November recommended two suspects for arrest to the DA—who claimed there was insufficient evidence for him to act.

In February 2007, the FBI announced it would be probing about 100 of the unsolved civil rights era cold cases. Since then, the FBI says, it has closed all but 39 them. But the Clifton Walker murder case is still open.

In the Clarion-Ledger this Sunday you can read the first full telling of what is currently known about the case—through federal and state documents, through the voices of Clifton Walker's children and their Mississippi neighbors and through my investigation of the case since 2007. For Clifton Walker's children, the FBI's own management of the case raises questions. Learn why this Sunday.

In the trailer, above, you can watch portions of my investigation unfold, meet three of Clifton Walker's children and visit the crime scene, where he was murdered.

Jesse shot stills with his SLR, and though I brought one, too, I focused on posting in real time via Instagram and Justin.tv. But before I highlight any of that material, I want to direct you to this great 10 minute documentary about Monday night, by Michael Gill.

Gill captured many moments that I also witnessed and shows what it was like there very well. My iPhone video streams are much lower quality and, of course, unedited, but at various times I was broadcasting live to over 3000 viewers, after the police had made most official media leave the scene, so they served a function. One thing not shown in Gill's film was how, after the camp was cleared of protestors, police and sanitation workers disposed of all items remaining---tents, sleeping bags, bedrolls, signs, chairs, supplies---in two sanitation trucks. Here's some footage:

Watch live video from minorjive on Justin.tv

Here's a small slideshow of scenes I captured with the the camer on my phone.

More information about night of October 10 and early morning hours of October 11 at Occupy Boston:

• Boston police move in on protesters on Greenway, scores arrested (Boston Globe)
• BPD Arrest Protesters From ‘Occupy Boston’ (WBUR)
• Mayor Menino Responds To Occupy Boston Arrests (WBUR)
• Statement from the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy (PDF)
• October 10, 2011: We Will Occupy (Occupy Boston)
• Mass Arrests of Occupy Boston Protestors (Occupy Boston)
• Images from the Takedown (Occupy Boston)
• Boston Police Brutally Assault Occupy Boston (Occupy Boston)
• More on Occupy Boston Arrests (Occupy Boston)
• Occupier: What Happened to Me in the Police Raid and Arrest of 141 Peaceful Protestors (Occupy Boston)