LSU students at National Archives
posted Wednesday, November 7th, 2012 @ 8:52 am

Pictured in front of the National Archives and Records Administration building in College Park, Maryland, a few miles north of Washington, D.C., are, front to back, junior Andrea Gallo of Lafayette, junior Kevin Thibodeaux of Lafayette, junior Morgan Searles of Baton Rouge, senior Ben Wallace of Tyler, Texas, and junior Brian Sibille of Lafayette. The five comprise the current LSU Manship School of Mass Communication Unsolved Civil Rights-Era Murders Project team. The group spent Oct. 17-19 meeting with FBI officials and retrieving documents at the archives on cold cases.

LSU teams have been working with the Concordia Sentinel on local cases since the summer of 2009 and have retrieved more than 35,000 pages of documents relating to Ku Klux Klan activities in Louisiana and southern Mississippi since 2010. Many of the files had not been made public prior to the students' FOIA requests.