Freddie Lee Thomas’ broken body was found on a highway near Sidon in the middle of the night in August 1965.
A 16-year-old African-American who went by the nickname “Sleepy,” Thomas was given a quick autopsy and quicker burial. His death was written off by the county coroner and pathologist as a hit-and-run accident. Leflore County Sheriff George Smith issued a statement saying he hoped to find the vehicle that was responsible. The incident was supposed to vanish, along with Thomas’ body, into an unmarked grave in Greenwood’s Magnolia Cemetery. But at the urging of Liz Fusco, a Cincinnati-born white woman volunteering with the Freedom Schools in Leflore County that summer, 100 Sidon residents wrote letters to President Lyndon Johnson requesting a government investigation. In response, the FBI sent agents to Sidon – at the time a known haven of Ku Klux Klan activity.
The investigation, which took place over the course of a few days during the late summer of 1965, painted a possibly different picture, one that pointed toward a brutal murder.
But like many civil rights slayings, the case went cold. No charges were filed; no arrests were made. Today, at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., Thomas’ name is listed as one of the 74 “forgotten” victims of the civil rights era.
“There were a lot of people who knew what happened, who knew he was murdered, but they were all scared,” said 67-year-old Minnie B. Lipsey, who lived in Sidon then.
Thomas’ death slipped into history, all but forgotten by everyone except the few residents of Sidon who knew the details.
“They were scared about what might happen to their families if they spoke about who did it,” said Lipsey, who today lives in the Rising Sun community. “And I’ll tell you something else. A lot of those people who were alive then, they’d be scared to talk today, too.”
They might still be asked to tell what they know.
Thomas’ death is among the 100-plus slayings that would be re-examined under a bill that is working its way through Congress.
The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, whose lone opponent in the Senate said last month he no longer plans on blocking the bill, appears ready to pass into law. The legislation is named after the black 14-year-old from Chicago who was murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in Money. That murder and the subsequent acquittal of his white killers is credited with galvanizing the civil rights movement.
Under the bill, the Justice Department would get $11.5 million a year to examine past civil rights killings. Another $2 million would be awarded in grants to local and state law enforcement agencies participating in the investigations. The program would last 10 years.
Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, Mo., president of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, is one of the bill’s architects.
“What’s getting ready to happen is, this country is about to begin the greatest manhunt in its history,” Sykes said. “We’ve arrived at a time and place in our country’s history where justice for these crimes is attainable, and that’s what we are striving for.”
The bill has the support of the Bush administration and the Justice Department. It passed the House by a 422-2 margin.
“It’s so important to have that closure,” said Fusco, who today goes by Liz Aaronsohn and is a professor at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Conn. “This is the promise that there will be justice in America. It is never too late. Opening these cold cases, it affirms the lives of the people who were lost.”
Aaronsohn believes that Thomas died at the hands of the KKK.
“It was such a hostile environment for civil rights workers and for black people to live in,” said Aaronsohn, 71. “We all lived in fear because we knew what could happen. Everyone feared the Klan.”
Aaronsohn traveled to Washington with Thomas’ half-brother, Frank Bass, shortly after the slaying to meet with Justice Department officials. She believes the killing was an effort to terrorize blacks who were trying to register to vote.
Others, such as Lipsey, think Thomas could have been the victim of mistaken identity. Local white supremacists, she said, were after a black man who was rumored to be dating a white woman.
Bass’ whereabouts today are unknown.
During the 1965 FBI investigation, an unnamed witness said he saw three white men dump Thomas’ body onto U.S. 49 – two miles outside Sidon, toward Greenwood – in the middle of the night. “I believe he was dead when they chunked him – ain’t never seen a man fall that way,” the witness, who claimed to have watched from a nearby cotton field, said in his statement.
According to Minnie Lipsey, her brother-in-law, Earl Lipsey, told investigators he saw a white teenager washing blood off of a pickup truck the day after Thomas’ body was found. Earl Lipsey was subsequently forced to leave the farm he sharecropped in Sidon, Minnie Lipsey said.
According to FBI records, a witness told investigators that he and a companion had viewed and photographed Thomas’ body at Century Funeral Home in Greenwood. They found, the witness said, a hole in the side of Thomas’ head. The names of the pair are redacted from the documents.
Aaronsohn believes the hole was made by a bullet, although the pathologist who performed the autopsy, Dr. Daniel Trigg, told the FBI that “there were no signs of knife or gunshot wounds or any other blows or injuries about the body,” according to the records.
Charles “Bo” Branch, whose family ran a grocery store in Sidon at the time, said his father, Audley, was also questioned by the FBI. Audley Branch is now deceased.
“Liz Fusco put the FBI on my dad because we had a dog die, and there was blood in the back of our truck from where we moved it,” said Bo Branch, 66.
Branch, who said his memories of the incident are sketchy, declined to discuss the case further.
When contacted for this story, most people did not want to talk about the case or claimed to not remember it. Some questioned the need to open up an investigation more than 40 years after the slaying.
Sykes answers that stance with two words: “Why not?”
“For the family members and friends of the victims, these cases were never closed, so it’s not like we’re opening it back up. They haven’t had a day in their lives where they haven’t thought about what happened.”
Aaronsohn believes there are people still living who were involved in Thomas’ killing. She paraphrases Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in her quest to have the investigation resurrected. “The arch of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
She said she doesn’t believe in the adage of letting sleeping dogs lie.
“Those sleeping dogs feasted on the flesh of people that I cared about.”
