Arts & Culture

Unsolved Civil Rights era murders to be topic of town hall meeting at SU Oct. 6

Thursday, September 17, 2009, By Erica Blust

Key officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Department of Justice and an Emmy Award-nominated filmmaker will meet with Syracuse University students, civic leaders and local residents at a town hall meeting to ask for help in solving cold cases from the Civil Rights era.

The meeting, which is free and open to the public, will take place Tuesday, Oct. 6, at 7 p.m. in the first-floor auditorium at The Warehouse, 350 W. Fayette St. Sponsored by the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies in SU’s College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA), the event will feature a documentary screening followed by a question-and-answer session.

Panelists for the meeting will include Cynthia Deitle, chief of the FBI’s Civil Rights Unit; Page Fitzgerald, attorney and deputy chief of the Department of Justice’s Cold Case Unit; and Keith Beauchamp, an award-winning filmmaker, activist and SU artist-in-residence. The meeting will be moderated by Amos Kiewe, professor of communication and rhetorical studies at VPA.

“I’m truly excited about this upcoming town hall meeting,” says Beauchamp. “It gives us all a chance to become a part of the solution and help families get closure and justice in these cases—not to mention start the process of racial healing, which our communities and country so desperately need.”

Beauchamp is the executive producer and director of “Murder in Black & White” (2008), a four-part documentary series designed to examine and help solve Civil Rights murders from the 1940s and 1950s while aging, long-silent witnesses and perpetrators might still be alive. The series was the first produced under the FBI’s collaboration with Beauchamp and its Civil Rights Cold Case Initiative. Information that was gathered during the filmmaking process was shared with federal authorities to help with their ongoing investigations.

Beauchamp is also the filmmaker behind the award-winning documentary “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” which was credited for the reopening of the Emmett Till case in 2004.

For more information, contact Kiewe at 443-5132 or akiewe@syr.edu.