Filmmaker, FBI team up on civil rights cases

By SHELIA BYRD

The shows will air on TV One and History this summer.

JACKSON, Miss. — As a black teenager growing up in Louisiana, Keith Beauchamp’s interracial relationship prompted his parents to tell him the grisly tale of Emmett Till, a Mississippi boy who was murdered for whistling at a white woman.

The story was seared into Beauchamp’s mind, and when he moved to New York to begin his career as a filmmaker, the slaying was his first major project.

Beauchamp’s 2005 documentary on Till, in large part, led the federal government to reopen the 1955 murder case. Last year, a grand jury declined to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham, the object of the whistle, on a manslaughter charge. The two men who brutally beat the teen and dumped his body in a river died years ago.

Still, Beauchamp’s documentary expertise and his ability to persuade people to talk about buried secrets of the civil rights era have earned him a rare collaboration with the FBI.

Now, Beauchamp is filming a series of documentaries based on civil rights killings for the cable channel History as well as TV One. Any new evidence Beauchamp uncovers is shared with the FBI for its Cold Case Unit that focuses on crimes that have gone unpunished from that era.

In turn, the FBI is arranging interviews for Beauchamp with veteran agents who covered the cases and other contacts, said agency spokesman Ernie Porter.

“In the sense that we would go hand-in-hand conducting joint investigations, no. He’s not law enforcement,” said Porter. “What we are doing is cooperating with him.”

Beauchamp believes he’s able to coax more from potential witnesses because he doesn’t carry the stigma often associated with law enforcement officers. Images of billyclub-wielding policemen breaking up rallies and protests are still etched in many memories.

“For the first time in history, they are allowing a filmmaker to assist them in setting up a justice-seeking atmosphere that will allow eyewitnesses who may have information to feel comfortable coming forward,” Beauchamp said of the FBI.

The hourlong shows are scheduled to begin airing this summer on TV One and History.

The filmmaker also knows what it’s like to fear police. He says in 1989 he was beaten by an undercover police officer for dancing with a white friend in Baton Rouge. After that, the Till story “became an educational tool in my family” said Beauchamp, whose parents were teachers.

Beauchamp said the FBI has shared with him their five priority cases. Since then, he’s spent a lot of time in the South, staging re-enactments and interviewing witnesses on film.

On a recent trip to Mississippi, Beauchamp interviewed Sen. David Jordan, D-Greenwood, at the state Capitol. Jordan was questioned about the 1955 murders of the Rev. George Wesley Lee and Lamar Smith. The men were killed months apart, but for the same reason: They were trying to register blacks to vote.

In a darkened committee room, Jordan peered down a camera lens and discussed how his father, Cleveland Jordan, a black sharecropper who was a civil rights activist, attended Lee’s funeral. Jordan said the preacher had been shot in the face. His killing occurred the same year as Till’s.

“I said then I would not leave Mississippi. I’m going to stay here and fight these conditions,” said Jordan, who was a teenager when the murders occurred.

Beauchamp filmed a re-enactment of Smith’s murder in Raymond, a small, rural town just outside of Jackson. A white man shot Smith to death on a courthouse lawn in front of a crowd of spectators in 1955. Three people were arrested, but no one was ever indicted in the case.