According to
a recent article in The Guardian by Jon Swaine:
US authorities are investigating whether some of those responsible for one of the American south’s most notorious mass lynchings are still alive, in an attempt to finally bring prosecutions over the brutal unsolved killings.
FBI agents have questioned a man in Georgia about the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching of 1946, the man told the Guardian. The man was among several in their 80s and 90s named in connection with the incident on a list given to the US Department of Justice by civil rights activists.
Beyond the hard evidence that suspects in the Moore's Ford Bridge lynching of four African Americans—among those attacked was a World War II veteran and a pregnant woman—appear to be still living, the sheer chronology of it all predicts that perpetrators of racial violence from the 1940s-1960s, in many cases, will still be alive. While time may slightly ease the sting of historical racial violence in America, it does not lessen the need for justice in cold cases of lynching. Just as every single man and woman who contributed to the horrors of the Holocaust are tracked down to every corner of the earth, the same must be done for those who so brazenly and publicly terrorized African Americans with little consequence.
Not only are these cases worth fighting for because the lives and legacy of old victims still matter, but the very pursuit of justice in these cases communicates to future perpetrators of racial violence that their acts will not be tolerated in America.