Students found the long-forgotten grave of a Georgia man killed for voting in 1948

Holding hands, five Emory University students stood silently in the muddy cemetery, their cheeks wet with rain and tears. It was a moment no one could have imagined when they signed up for the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Case Project class. That moment was launched by an act of bravery nearly 70 years ago, and now it has been fully realized through research, determination, and what more than one person has called a "miracle."

Under a gray Georgia sky, Dorothy Nixon Williams placed her hand on a rough concrete headstone inscribed "Father," bent down to touch the concrete slab beneath it, then burst into tears in her son's arms.

"Father." Her father, Isaiah Nixon, an African American who dared to vote in the 1948 Democratic primary in Montgomery County, Georgia, just the second after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the all-white primary unconstitutional. Her father, shot and killed by two white men that night on her front porch when she was just six years old.

Her father, whose grave was lost in a rural cemetery after Williams, her mother and five siblings fled to Jacksonville, Fla. shortly after his death.

Her father, whose grave was found by those same Emory students.

The gathering was not a funeral, but their professor, Hank Klibanoff, gave a eulogy of sorts as Williams, her husband and son, students and a few local residents - mostly relatives of those who voted that fateful day - stood together in a neatly tucked-away cemetery surrounded by pine trees.

"I don't know anyone who hasn't been touched by the story of Isaiah Nixon, and that's because Isaiah Nixon matters," Klibanoff said. "His life matters, his death matters, his disappearance from history matters. But what matters even more is that he has reappeared, and I think that's just a miracle in so many ways."

He read a passage from the biblical book of Isaiah: "By oppression and judgment he has been taken away, and who of his clan has protested? For he is cut off from the land of the living, for the transgression of my people he is punished..." - and some in the group murmured.

"At that time in our history, voting was an act of protest," Klibanoff said. "It was a right that was taken away from him, and he paid the price for voting, and that's something that I think we all intend to never let happen again."

Williams' son gave brief remarks, after which his mother, now 73, addressed the students: "Your faces will always be in my memory," she said.

"When you first called me, I still had a lot of anger in me, and I think I told you everything I had, but after talking to your group, some of that anger went away," Williams continues. "And now I want to let you know that the anger is completely gone, and thank you all for that. I can just resolve it. It's settled. ...

"I can't say anything else, but all I can think of is thank you, thank you, thank you."

A long road to opening and closing

The road to discovering Williams' grave and closure began long before Klibanoff and the students boarded a rented van on Jan. 22 and left Atlanta at dawn to drive about 180 miles to Old Salem Cemetery.

In fall 2011, Emory launched the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project, directed and taught by Klibanoff, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory, and Brett Gadsden, associate professor of African American Studies. This undergraduate course is cross-listed in History, Journalism, African American Studies, and American Studies, and will soon be listed in Creative Writing, illustrating the interdisciplinary approach of professors and students to the cases they study.

Each semester, students study one case in depth, examining primary evidence ranging from FBI records and court transcripts to personal archives and contemporary media testimony. Unlike other similar projects, their goal is not necessarily to "solve" the cases-in many cases the killers are well known-but to better understand the context in which racially motivated murders went unpunished in the Jim Crow South.

Isaiah Nixon was shot on September 8, 1948, and died two days later in a hospital in neighboring Lawrence County. The white brothers who killed him, Jim A. Johnson and Johnny Johnson, were arrested and charged with murder and accessory to murder, respectively, according to the Cold Cases Project.

The duo claimed they went to Nixon's house to hire him for a job and then shot him in self-defense, although the white sheriff claimed they killed him for voting. The case drew attention from the NAACP, the FBI, and the national press, but Jim Johnson was easily acquitted by an all-white jury and the charges against his brother were dropped.

Klibanoff said he and Gadsden chose the Nixon case as the focus of the course in fall 2015 based on its importance and the many topics it touched on, including the history of all-white primaries and all-white juries in Georgia, the fight for voting rights, NAACP involvement and more.

"It has enough angles that it could be taken up by a whole class of students," he said.

Klibanoff was given access to 235 pages of previously unpublished FBI files and Nixon's death certificate, and the students plunged into their work. They built a convoluted chronology of events and tried to make sense of the relationships between the key figures in the case.

Lucy Baker, a sophomore from San Francisco, took trips to the archives at the University of Georgia in Athens and the Georgia Archives in Morrow in her spare time in search of clues. Her research revealed that Nixon's assassins and the sheriff elected at the time of his death were third cousins.

Then came the biggest revelation of all.

An unexpected find

Baker and her classmates Ellie Studdard, a junior from Atlanta, and Emily Gaines, a senior from New York, felt the urge to see the places they had studied so extensively. In November, they decided to take a road trip to the area where Isaiah Nixon lived and died.

One day after class, they told Klibanov about their idea. "Can I come with you?" - They asked. "I'll drive."

The sun shone during the first trip. The students visited the tiny public library in Mount Vernon and then the Montgomery County courthouse. There they met James Harris, whose father also voted in the 1948 primary, even though the sheriff-elect told him to stay home and his family never knew whether to consider it a warning or a threat.

Harris cares for Old Salem Cemetery, located south of Mount Vernon near Uvalde, Georgia, where Nixon was thought to be buried but his grave could not be found. Another group studying the case, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University School of Law, helped install a concrete bench there in his honor, although it did not have his name on it. Harris offered to show the students the cemetery and his father's resting place.

But as Klibanoff and other students walked with Harris through the cemetery, Studdard separated herself from the group. She had grown up in cemeteries with her father, making inscriptions on the headstones of family graves, and began walking up and down each row.

She reached the end of the row where the grass gave way to fallen leaves, pine needles, bushes and trees. Then she noticed the concrete showing through, similar to the slabs that marked other graves from the 1930s and 1940s, with names written on them with a finger or stick before the cement dried up so long ago.

Looking closer, she saw part of a word beginning with "I." She quickly brushed off the dirt and leaves. The beginning of the word "September," the month Isaiah Nixon died, appeared. Her heart racing, she brushed off more leaves and dirt, wanting to be sure.

She hurried over to the group with grubby hands, bringing a part of the story they didn't expect, literally, to be revealed.

"I found it."

"It was like a miracle."

The group hurried back to the concrete slab at the edge of the cemetery and did their best to clean the grave. The inscription on it, though cracked, was now clear: Isaiah Nixon, with birth and death dates of April 3, 1920, and September 10, 1948. Adjoining the once-hidden slab was a headstone with a single word: "Father."

They grabbed a smartphone and contacted Dorothy Williams, who still lived in Jacksonville but had flown to Emory in the fall to visit their class. They showed her the grave via video link. She later invited them to come to Old Salem Cemetery in January to be with her when she saw it for the first time since attending his funeral 67 years ago.

So on Jan. 22, when most Emory students were either asleep or anxiously awaiting word on whether the university would close early due to the expected snowfall, Studdard, Baker, Gaines and two other classmates - Emily Lee, a junior from Charleston, and Sarah Husain, a senior from Chicago - met up with Klibanoff in the dark morning rain for the more than three-hour drive back to the cemetery.

Their goal was to get to the cemetery early so they could be there for the arrival of Williams and her family from Florida. But when the dirt road to the cemetery was washed out, their first meeting was on the side of the road at the old Uvalde Police Department, and they waited to see if there was another road.

After climbing out of the van, Studdard approached Williams, who was sitting in the back seat of his vehicle, and quickly enclosed her in an embrace.

"Oh, Ellie, you did what no one else could," Williams told her. "That name, 'Ellie,' is going through my head, and all I hear is 'I found it.'"

Shortly before Harris returned and led the caravan down another dirt road to the cemetery, Williams recounted in an interview how she felt when she received that first phone call.

"I was just stunned. I was in awe. It was disbelief, even though I actually knew they were telling the truth," she said. "It was amazing. It was like a miracle.

Ellie just walked in there, found this grave and yelled: "I found it," I just gasped. It's just unbelievable."

"The quintessential college course."

Friday's trip was a mixture of sadness and joy as Isaiah Nixon's family and the students who found his grave talked about the case and just enjoyed socializing over catfish, fried chicken and barbecue at the diner across the street from the county courthouse. Before parting ways, everyone hugged and took pictures as the sun finally peeked out.

On the drive to Atlanta, students reflected on the day and what they had experienced in their Cold Case classes.

They reminisced about the practical skills they had honed - perseverance, research using primary sources, the importance of note-taking, the ability to rewrite and intensively edit their final papers - and thought about how the course would impact their future.

"It was the quintessential college course. I've never taken anything like it," said Gaines, who is majoring in history and sociology. "I think we all gained those skills through this course, both working together in class and researching outside of class - I've never left the library to do research and didn't know how to do it. It's a really valuable asset for me as I prepare to leave college."

Studdard, an American Studies and Biology student, recounted how the night before she was too excited to sleep and how she cried as she hugged Williams at the cemetery.

"She was so grateful, and it's not really something I did, it's something we all did," she said. "I think it was really nice for her to see someone else take an interest in it, and I'm really glad she let us take on such a big part of the job and give it a personality."

Lee said the class helped solidify her desire to pursue a career in journalism after she completes her degree in creative writing and environmental studies.

"This course definitely solidified my interest in learning, writing and bringing people's stories to life, especially stories that weren't common enough, especially if they are so important," she said.

For Baker, who studies biology and history, meeting Williams was "even more important for us to get to the truth and be accurate because we're dealing with someone's life." This is not just a history book.

"It made a difference for someone, and that's always a nice feeling at the end of the day - to feel like you helped someone heal, and I don't think I've ever been able to say that before," she said. "I want to be a doctor, so doing it in a different way, doing it spiritually instead of physically - it's very satisfying."

Husain, who is studying political science and French, put the case into a broader historical context.

"Isaiah Nixon represented so many people, which is why bringing attention to his story is so important," she said. "But there's a broader issue - all these murders that happened in the 1940s and since then, and that continue today, so to contribute to that bigger picture was just incredible."

"Of course, what the students discovered is very important," Klibanoff explains. "But equally important is what they learned."