Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic
The CRRJ Clinic, headquartered at Northeastern Law, offers opportunities for graduate students in law, journalism, media studies, and public history.
The clinic’s mission is to help communities in the US engage with historical injustices to deepen the inquiry into structural racism and inequality. We work with families who have lost relatives to lynching and other forms of racial violence during the Jim Crow era.
In collaboration with practicing lawyers, professional archivists and historians, students track down materials from government repositories, newspaper archives, and court proceedings; create more thorough and accurate public records of these events; conduct interviews; and, where feasible, visit the region where the events took place.
Applying tools and insights from the fields of restorative justice, transitional justice, and reparative justice, law students work closely with families and local communities to memorialize these past events and to draw connections to systemic racism and current inequalities in the US.
The Clinic offers pro bono support, including research and design expertise, to government and community-driven projects, such as truth commissions and reparations initiatives, that are meant to address past racial harms. We engage varied strategies to help communities analyze the past to focus attention on present-day remedies for racial inequality.
This six-credit course, open to Northeastern law students and graduate students, includes: One seminar a week, covering the legal, historical, and theoretical material that supports and orients the work of the student’s research endeavors. The…
All students must complete a final essay, focused on cases they have researched or historical themes they have identified over the course of the semester, and these will be presented at Grand Rounds…
Typically, each clinic student receives a docket of about five cases. They pursue each case until either further research is not possible, or the semester ends.
Cases are typically sourced from a combination of newspaper records, the records of civil rights advocacy groups, federal records from the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the War Department.CRRJ’s staff…
Many of the cases, researched by student clinics, are documented and preserved in the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA).
In 2007, CRRJ held a conference titled Crimes of the Civil Rights Era, an event that brought veterans of the 1960s-era civil rights movement together with scholars, lawyers, and journalists.
After this gathering, MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles, and Margaret Burnham, began independently collecting material on cases of anti-Black homicide that were outside of the scope of the Emmett Till Act. As they searched newspapers for contemporary reports on these older cold cases, it became clear that there were hundreds of incidents that had never been investigated.
What started as a rather scattered effort to investigate these incidents and work with the affected families eventually became a well-defined project to collect data on racially motivated killings of Black people in the Jim Crow South, leading, ultimately, to the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive.
The Archive currently houses case files and documents for more than 1,000 cases of racial homicides in the Jim Crow South. These uncovered stories highlight how violence affected lives, defined legal rights and shaped politics between 1930 and 1954.
Booker T. Spicely
Pvt. Booker T. Spicely, 34, was a U.S. Army private on active duty, killed in Durham County, North Carolina.
On July 8, 1944, Spicely, originally from Philadelphia and serving at Camp Butner, boarded a bus. When a group of white passengers boarded, the bus driver, Herman Lee Council, ordered Spicely to sit further back. Jim Crow seating segregation was still enforced in North Carolina at the time.
Spicely initially protested, but eventually moved to the rear of the vehicle.
When Spicely got off the bus, Council shot him twice, alleging that Spicely had started an argument and advanced on him.
Military police brought Spicely to Watts Hospital, where on account of his race he was refused care; he later died at Duke Hospital.
Council was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. The Duke Power Company, Council’s employer and the bus route operator, paid his $2,500 bail. Council was permitted to drive his bus until the trial.
At trial, an all-white jury acquitted him after only 28 minutes of deliberation. The power company continued to employ Council, but switched his route.
In 2014, Shaneka Louise Davis ‘14, was participating in CRRJ’s Restorative Justice Clinic when she was assigned to investigate Spicely’s case, and subsequently wrote an essay about the killing.
Hattie DeBardelaben
Hattie DeBardelaben, a 46-year-old farmer and grandmother, was killed March 23, 1945, by Deputy Clyde White, and federal officers in Autauga County, Alabama.
During a warrantless search of her home for illegal whiskey, the officers beat and arrested DeBardelaben and her son.
On the way to the Prattville County jail, DeBardelaben succumbed to her injuries and died.
On April 11, 1945, an FBI investigation into DeBardelaben’s death was opened, and in October of that same year, a state grand jury convened to investigate the killing. The grand jury declined to indict White, who was later arrested for shooting a Black man in the back, alleging that he had resisted arrest. White was acquitted and, in 1954, was elected Autauga County sheriff.
The 1945 killing of Hattie DeBardelaben, first investigated by CRRJ more than a decade ago, was one of the cases in the first set of records released in 2025 by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) under the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act.
CRRJ at Southern University
Since 2014 CRRJ has collaborated with faculty at Southern University Law Center, Baton Rouge, to offer a clinic to law students and select undergraduates on civil rights law and practice, and historical redress. Students at Southern focus on historical racial violence in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Arkansas.
CRRJ at Kentucky University
During the spring and summer of 2023, D’lorah Hughes, H. Wendell Cherry Associate Clinical Professor of Law, and historian Dr. Austin Zinkle, with support from CRRJ, designed UK Law’s clinical course.
Based on the model established by CRRJ in Boston, the CRRJ-KY clinic had its inaugural run in the fall of 2023, with five intrepid law students signing on to undertake approximately twenty case investigations, located in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Cases for CRRJ-KY, funded in-part by the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies (CIBS), were assembled with the assistance of Dr. Jay Driskell, CRRJ’s lead historian. The circumstances surrounding each incident of anti-Black violence vary, including police killings, labor-related retaliation, backlash against alleged bootlegging, and politically-motivated lynchings.
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