The glacial pace of Justice

The FBI has never called them. Worse, Sonny Boyd has said that when he called an FBI resident agent in Louisiana offering to tell what he knows, the agent said that unless Boyd knew specifically who killed Frank Morris, he wasn't interested. That agent has been replaced. But his successor has been given little time to probe civil rights murders over the past year.

Too many families whose relatives were killed by the Klan have waited too long. Perpetrators, witnesses and powerful narratives of history are dying every day. "I've waited 44 years for this phone call," the daughter of Clifton Walker, gunned down in Woodville, Miss., in early 1964, blurted out when someone called in March 2008 for information about her dad's murder.

The caller was Civil Rights Cold Case reporter Ben Greenberg. Two years later, the Walker family still hopes to hear from the FBI.

Hank Klibanoff, a journalism professor at Emory University, is managing editor of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project and co-author of "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation," which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in history.