When Keith Beauchamp saw the photograph of Emmett Till’s brutally beaten face, run ran on the cover of a 1964 Jet Magazine, he became a civil rights activist.

Till, a black boy from Chicago, Ill., was murdered in Mississippi in 1955. His mother insisted on an open casket to show the world the brutality in his death.

Today, Beauchamp is still an activist, but Till’s murder has yet to be solved. Beauchamp said he is committing his energy to solving Till’s and other murders of the time.

Beauchamp, an Emmy-nominated film maker and artist-in-residence at Syracuse University, led a town hall-style meeting on unsolved Civil Rights era murders Tuesday at The Warehouse.

Beauchamp was joined by Amos Kiewe, an SU communications and rhetorical studies professor, Paige Fitzgerald, the deputy chief for the Cold Case Unit of Civil Right Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, and Cynthia Deitle, FBU Investigation Civil Rights Unit Chief.

The filmmaker stressed to the audience that these murders from the past need to be solved. The only way to do that is through communication and collaboration between the public and the FBI, Beauchamp said.

Beauchamp screened an episode from his television documentary miniseries ‘Murder in Black and White.’ The 40-minute video is narrated by Al Sharpton and focuses on the case of Willy Edwards. Edwards was a 25-year-old truck driver from Alabama who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1957, and the case has remained unsolved. The documentary included commentary from Edward’s wife, sister and daughters.

Beauchamp stressed the power of film in addressing the topic of Civil Rights era cases.

‘Film making to me is a powerful medium. I feel it is a new way of activism,’ Beauchamp said.

Kiewe said he feels an obligation to the families who lost loved ones in similar murders of the time. He said he wanted to better inform the public of these unsolved cases, and invite them to provide any tips or clues they may have.

‘We owe this to posterity, and we owe this to memory,’ Kiewe said.

Beauchamp said the process of solving the murders always includes speaking with family members, but that family cooperation is not always a given. He is respectful of that.

‘I won’t touch it unless I have the blessing of the family,’ he said.

Audience members posed questions after the documentary regarding the expedition of murder files, the determination of specific cases, and the limitations of federal jurisdiction.

The FBI currently does not have many of the files for these cases in their possession, making investigation admittedly difficult. The public is only given an edited version of files, which sometimes are missing information, Deitle said.

Despite these difficulties, Deitle said there’s been consistent open communication between the FBI and Beauchamp in which both parties freely propose cases for investigation.

Civil rights are the second highest priority in the FBI, Fitzgerald said.

Hana Ostapchuk, a freshman child and family studies major, was one of only a handful of students that attended the lecture.

‘The meeting really illustrated the depths behind the cases, and what the public can do to assist in getting them solved,’ she said.

Kapete01@syr.edu

Published on October 6, 2009 at 12:00 pm