On December 3, the fall 2024 cohort of Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive undergraduate student researchers showcased their semester-long investigations to CRRJ staff and faculty.
The culmination of their groundbreaking research, five students presented their contributions to the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, reflected on the significance of their research, and provided insights into the broader historical and social context surrounding the cases that they investigated.
“It has been a real privilege to work with you all this semester,” said Lydia Beal, CRRJ’s Research Associate who spent the past semester leading this student group in their investigations.
The students in this year’s cohort were Aseye Potakey ’25 studying public health; Lauren Cassarino ’26 earning a bachelor’s degree in history, culture, and law; Avery Emison ’26 also studying history, culture, and law; Alana Fields ’25 studying politics, philosophy, and economics; and second-year Northeastern Law student Elizabeth Fretz ’26 who provided rigorous data verification support in the cases her peers were researching.
“Our undergraduates bring unique insights from their respective fields, including politics, philosophy, economics, history, culture studies, law, and public health,” said Beal. “Together, their contributions ensure these cases are visible and accessible through the archive.”
Since the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive’s launch in October 2022, CRRJ has continued to research and document instances of anti-Black killings from 1930 to 1954. This year, the archive team, including CRRJ’s Project Archivist Joy Zanghi and historian Dr. Jay Driskell, began expanding the archive’s geographic scope to include cases from Maryland, Missouri, West Virginia, Kentucky, Delaware, D.C., and Indiana. The undergraduate students’ work will form the central docket of cases in this expansion, and in the next version of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive.
“The Fall 2024 student research cohort provided significant help in advancing the next version of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive,” said Zanghi.
Their work to supplement the case files in incidents that required additional investigation means that cases from border states, such as Indiana and Kentucky, will be featured on the BNDA for the first time.”
Potakey presented on the case of James Percell Jr., a WWII veteran and father of nine children who was shot and killed by a police officer in 1954 in Horse Cave, Kentucky. Patrolmen were raiding Percell’s home, searching for beer and whiskey, when they encountered the 33-year-old in the yard as they were leaving the property. Following an altercation, an officer shot Percell, allegedly in self-defense. Percell was suspected to have been targeted because of his attempt to establish a local NAACP chapter.
“The research I conducted this semester was truly insightful,” said Potakey. “This was my first internship experience focused on civil rights and restorative justice, and as I worked through several cases, I found myself connecting the issues to my background as a public health major, especially as themes related to the selective criminalization of substance use emerged…
…This experience has influenced my future studies by solidifying my interest in highlighting the injustices within the criminal justice system.
Cassarino shared her findings in the 1957 case of Guy Sanner, a 57-year-old WWII veteran who was severely beaten following an altercation with a bus driver and died after spending weeks in jail suffering from his injuries and denied medical care. Sanner’s case highlights several themes shared by other cases already housed in the archive, said CRRJ Director Margaret Burnham, who was present at the event, including transportation violence, the treatment of African American prisoners in jail, and the denial of medical treatment.
Read more about Hill’s death on the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive
About the Archive
The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive houses case files and documents for more than 1,000 cases of racial homicides in the Jim Crow South. Co-founded by Melissa Nobles, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Margaret Burnham, CRRJ director and professor of law at Northeastern, these uncovered stories highlight how violence affected lives, defined legal rights and shaped politics between 1930 and 1954.
Cassarino also spoke to the difficulties she encountered in her research, with discrepancies in the spelling of Sanner’s name and inconsistent reports of how much time he spent in jail before his death. These anomalies made it difficult for her to track media mentions of the case, or to find the case in other records. After reviewing several files with different spellings of his name, Cassarino determined the spelling on his draft card and the spelling his family and community members used for his last name to be the most accurate.
Emerson gave a presentation on the infamous case of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abraham Smith on August 7, 1930.
The lynching postcard widely disseminated after the killings inspired the lyrics to the poem that became Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit. The photo it featured of the two men’s bodies is considered to be one of the most widely recognized photographs of a lynching.
Both men, 19-year-old laborers, were arrested in connection with the killing of a white man in Marion, Indiana. A mob of 10-15,000 men descended on the jail where the teenagers were being held and aided by the sheriff, who would later be revealed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan, took Shipp and Smith from their cells. After beating the men to death and hanging Shipp from a window in the jail, the mob hanged both bodies from a nearby tree where they remained overnight, while no efforts were made to recover them.
While this case is well-documented and its legacy enduring — its brutality having led generations of poets and artists to grapple with lynching — it will be included in the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive for the first time next year as a result in the archive’s geographic expansion.
Fields ended proceedings with her presentation on the killing of Leroy Cunningham in her hometown of Louisville Kentucky, on July 27, 1930. Cunningham, an 18-year-old laborer, was at home when police officers arrived ostensibly in search of illegal alcohol. Fearing for his life Cunningham fled, leading officers to employ tear gas, before shooting Cunningham to death in an act of alleged self-defense.
Fields made several insightful connections and distinctions between Cunningham’s case in 1930 and that of Breonna Taylor in 2020. Both victims were killed in their homes at the hands of the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD). But, as Burnham noted, Taylor’s family have “had access to forms of justice that were not available to Cunningham’s family” regarding the conviction a former LMPD officer for violating the civil rights of Breonna Taylor in November 2024.
The inclusion of these cases, and the 300 others, from states outside the South in the Archive, is critical in fully addressing the United States’ violent history and correcting the historical record of racial harms across our nation.
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