Marion, Arkansas (CNN) -- A traditional three-shot volley salute and the solemn sound of taps echoed across the black cemetery in the Delta flatlands of Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tennessee.
The military honors were followed by the jubilant singing of "Amazing Grace." The service had been five decades in the making.
Everyone was here to honor Isadore Banks, an African-American veteran of World War I who was chained to a tree in June 1954, doused in gasoline and burned beyond recognition.
The slaying -- a year before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to whites on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama -- remains one of the nation's oldest unsolved civil rights cases.
"This has been a long time coming," said Marcelina Williams, a granddaughter who worked with the Army to arrange Monday's ceremony after she found her grandfather's military records. "Bless our country with freedom and righteousness."
A pillar in the African-American community, Banks helped bring electricity to the town of Marion in the 1920s and became one of the wealthiest black landowners in a region with a long history of racial violence.
His killing had a profound effect. Many blacks left and never came back. For those who remained, the message was clear: If you were black and acquired wealth, you knew your place.
Blacks from all around would come to the killing site -- to look at the oak sapling, to pray and to never forget. It seems most everyone in Crittenden County's black community had a hunch who was responsible.
To this day, some elders still name names. Yet they say no investigators ever interviewed them.
The questions linger: Why was no one ever charged? What happened to his hundreds of acres of land? Why did the FBI destroy his case file?
http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/06/isadore.banks.cold.case/index.html?hpt=C2May we never forget and keep asking why.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
