The 1945 murder of Hattie DeBardelaben, an Alabama farmer with eight children who was beaten to death after four law enforcement officers initiated a warrantless search of her home for illegal whiskey, had gone unresolved for nearly 80 years. Northeastern students with the Civil Rights & Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), in concert with faculty and staff researchers, helped to piece together the details surrounding the fatal beating from primary source documents beginning in 2012. For more than two decades, the CRRJ has helped shed light on the civil rights abuses during the Jim Crow era.
A set of records detailing the events leading to the 46-year-old mother and grandmother’s death were the first to be released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) under a new law. The 2019 law, called the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act, establishes a digital collection of civil rights cold case records. The records are a part of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive, which maintains documents pertaining to anti-Black killings during the Jim Crow era. About 1,000 such cases live in the archives.
