No justice after 55 years in racial killing

DALLAS -- It was just a "playful night of gunfire," a top investigator for the Texas Rangers said.

The nine bullets fired by two white men into a rural East Texas cafe -- leaving a black teenager dead -- had nothing to do with race, most insisted.

History no longer agrees.

On that night 55 years ago, three of those bullets struck and killed John Earl Reese, a 16-year-old high school student, as he danced in the Gregg County cafe.

Two white men later said they had just been trying to "scare the Negroes" when they fired into the building. They knew the cafe, on State Highway 149 south of Longview, was a popular hangout for blacks.

Reese, hit in the head and neck, died later at a Longview hospital. His two teenage cousins were shot in the arm.

Decades later, the Dallas office of the FBI has placed Reese's death on a list of 108 "unsolved or inadequately solved racially motivated homicides from the civil rights era."

What happened the night of Oct. 22, 1955, is the subject of a "cold-case initiative," launched by the federal agency in 2006 but revealed only in November.

That's when the FBI appealed for help in identifying the victims' next of kin in 33 of those civil rights cases dating to between 1950 and 1970.

"We were trying to find a local relative to tell them that we were looking at the Reese case," said Mark White, a spokesman for the agency's local office.

After nearly three years of digging, the FBI said it was ready to reveal the results of the initial investigations, none of which have led to a trial.

"In half of the 108 cases, we know who did it and they are deceased," said Chris Allen, a national FBI spokesman. "Nothing else can be done."

It is not clear exactly what the FBI has learned about the Reese case. The men convicted in the killing -- who never spent a day in jail -- have died, as have many of the other people involved.

Investigators located Reese's cousin, one of the three people shot that night in 1955, only two months ago. Joyce Nelson Crockett is Reese's closest surviving relative. (Her sister, Johnnie Nelson Arthur, who also was wounded that day, died in 1976.)

Crockett, a 67-year-old retiree who lives in Tatum, a Rusk County community 10 miles from where the shooting occurred, has doubts that anything good can come from reopening her cousin's case.

"What can they do about it if everybody's dead?" she said. "Somebody's going to say they're sorry?"

The FBI contacted her in early December to prepare her for a letter from the Justice Department. She was told only that it would be hand-delivered by an FBI agent.

The Reese case supposedly was solved in 1956 when Joe Reagan Simpson, 22, and Perry Dean Ross, 21, admitted the shooting.

Ross was found guilty of murder without malice after a jury trial in April 1957. Simpson pleaded guilty to the same charge a few months later.

Both men were given five-year jail sentences that were immediately suspended. The fact that neither had a criminal record was used to justify the lightest possible sentence.

But it was a disturbing outcome for the teen's family and the Rusk County community of Mayflower, where Reese lived. The area had been terrorized by several middle-of-the-night shootings during 1955.

On the night of Reese's killing, Ross and Simpson also sped through the rural black community. Ross fired a rifle at two nearby houses and an empty school bus used by black children.

Simpson and Ross would later acknowledge three such drive-by shootings in Mayflower, although they were never charged in the incidents.

"They said they didn't mean to kill anybody," Crockett recalled. "They got away with it."
The lack of punishment kept Reese's murder case alive for civil rights activists.

In the 1980s, the shooting was unearthed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and claimed as one of the earliest murders in the civil rights era. In 1989, when the Civil Rights Memorial opened in Montgomery, Ala., Reese's name was on the list of "martyrs."
The FBI isn't the only group looking into the unresolved civil rights cases. Several law schools have dispatched students to identify possible judicial and law enforcement lapses in the long-dormant cases, including Reese's.

"His case was treated very lightly by the state," said Margaret Burnham, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. She also founded the school's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project.

Like other cold cases from the civil rights era, Reese's illustrates "the massive breakdown in law enforcement," she said. "There were trials that were not fair, and justice was not achieved."