The Civil Rights Restorative Justice Project is an initiative by the Northeastern University School of Law to document every racially motivated killing in the American South between 1930 and 1970, The project aims to serve as a resource for scholars, policymakers, and organizers involved in various initiatives seeking justice for crimes of the civil rights era. CRRJ focuses on research, particularly concerning cold cases, and supports policy initiatives on anti-civil rights violence, such as various remediation efforts including criminal and civil prosecutions, truth and reconciliation proceedings, and legislative remedies.
In 2008 the Project represented Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins, family of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, in their civil suit against Franklin County, Mississippi, charging that its law enforcement had been complicit in the Ku Klux Klan kidnappings and deaths of their relatives on May 2, 1964. In the 2007 Mississippi Cold Case, James Ford Seale was convicted in federal court for these deaths. The county settled with Moore and Collins in June 2010 for an undisclosed amount.
In December 2014, the Project successfully helped to vacate the conviction of George Stinney, who was the youngest person in United States history to have been executed.
In 2016 CRRJP's Tara Dunn and Ariel Goeun Lee Kong uncovered the full account of the notorious custodial killing in the Harris County jail in the city of Hamilton, Georgia on May 23, 1947 of a prosperous 42-year-old African-American farmer - Henry "Peg" Gilbert. Hamilton Police Chief William H. Buchanan claimed he shot Gilbert in self-defense. "When morticians examined the dead man, they found that bones all over Gilbert’s body had been crushed. His skull was shattered, one of his legs was broken, and he suffered five gunshot wounds."