COLD CASE HISTORY
Hightstown students create legacy with President Trump signing bill they drafted
HIGHTSTOWN >> The architects behind a bill President Donald Trump signed into law this week said it started off as a “crowd-sourced document.”
That crowd-sourced document, probably rewritten thousands of times over, became national law Tuesday, when the Republican president signed the Civil Rights Cold Case Collection Act, paving the way for the release of previously unreleased and heavily redacted FBI documents on hate crimes from the civil rights era.
More than 80 students from civics teacher Stuart Wexler’s honors government class at Hightstown High School had a hand in conceiving, crafting and lobbying lawmakers to back the bill, which received strong bipartisan support in the House and Senate.
Wexler tapped a wellknown scholar Walter Oleszek, a professor at American University, who was in “awe” when he researched and concluded this was the first time a high school class accomplished such a remarkable feat.
Wexler said his students faced “really long odds” knowing the majority of bills don’t make it out of committee.
“We sure as heck didn’t have gobs of money. We didn’t have high-priced lobbyists on our side. We weren’t a wellheeled interest group,” Wexler said.
“Hundreds of millions of students have gone through the American school system in the United States,” continued Wexler, surrounded by past and present students who made it happen. “Eighty of them from Hightstown, only 80, have ever written a bill, a federal bill, that became a federal law.”
Students recounted the lengthy process of getting the bill, modeled after the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, to the president’s desk.
It required extensive research, writing and rewriting, trips to Selma, Alabama, to meet with victims’ families and to Washington D.C. to meet with lawmakers and their aides.
The students waged a voracious media campaign to gain momentum for their gamechanging efforts, drawing the attention of U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Illinois, and U.S. Sen. Doug Jones.
Last year, Jones, who successfully prosecuted the 1963 Birmingham church bombers Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton in the 2000s, introduced the bill in the Senate.
Even in the final hours before the president signed the bill, Wexler’s band was still lobbying people on social media.
“This was not a bill that was guaranteed to pass,” he said. His students fanned out across the school asking classmates and teachers to “tweet at the president to sign S. 3191.”
It worked.
“What they did is real life,” principal Dennis Vinson said, who starts off each year by holding town hall meetings with students and asking them what they want their high school legacy to be.
“What will you have done to make our school and our community a better place? This is a perfect example of three years of hard work of not only making Hightstown a better place,” he said. “You definitely made your your country a better place.”
As signed into law, the bill is basically an extension of the Freedom of Information Act. It creates a five-person review panel, whose members are appointed by the president, that decides whether civil rights cold-case files should be unredacted, declassified and disclosed to the public.
The students learned about the difficulties getting information about those cases when they completed FOIA requests. Many of them went unanswered or if they received responses at all, the documents were heavily redacted, leaving victims’ families with no resolution.
Students hope the law may aid families, historians and journalists seek answers in unsolved cases.
“There’s a lot of noise in D.C.,” said Jay Vaingankar, a Hightstown graduate and current student at the University of Pennsylvania who helped work on the bill. “It was tough competing with other news on the national stage but I always knew we had the cause on our side. Martin Luther King always said the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.”
Trump, who has been criticized throughout his presidency for making disparaging statements about minorities, feigned lukewarm approval of the bill in a statement composed by White House attorneys drowned in legalese.
Trump signed the bill despite citing “constitutional concerns” about how the review panel would function since it can compel the FBI and other federal agencies to hand over the cold-case files. He made it clear he would use his executive privilege to block the release of certain records if he felt it appropriate.
“The Administration considers civil rights cold case records to be a matter of public importance,” the POTUS said. “I have, therefore, signed this Act without generally endorsing the establishment of independent agencies to review and facilitate the declassification and release of government records.”
Ali Husaini, 18, who graduated from Hightstown last year, felt the bill was “narrowly tailored” to try to allay the concerns voiced by the president.
Calling his classmates “world-changers,” he said he is anxious to see how the bill is implemented, noting the battle doesn’t stop since it has been adopted.
“Politics is a consistent process of pushing,” he said. “There’s still a lot more persistence that has to occur to make sure it’s executed.”
Oslene Johnson, a 2017 Hightstown graduate, said she and her classmates found inspiration for the bill after watching documentaries on the plight of civil rights pioneers, some of them wellknown and others virtually unheard of. Johnson said as an AfricanAmerican student she identified with what the civil rights movement and, more recently, the Black Lives Matter movement was trying to accomplish. “The racial violence might have been a bit more obvious at the time, but racial violence is something that is still happening, and more largely, the negative reaction to people fighting for justice is something that got to me,” she said. She felt that the law will help “heal wounds of the past,” especially in a Trump era defined by racial discord. “We started this effort when President Obama was in office, and sure, everyone would say, ‘That’s an easy sign.’ I genuinely think when you have your community rally around a common cause, it can change the minds of people you never even thought would entertain such an idea.” Added Vaingankar: “We knew we could get through some of the partisan rancor. It’s no question this president has dog-whistled a lot towards certain racial groups, and we continue to see that today. But we’re really grateful that in spite of all that noise, it was very clear … this is the story of America. And if you love America, you are a part of making this a country for everyone. Where everyone feels like they belong and they matter. Having that message be taken to the White House in spite of everything we’ve heard from the Oval Office the past couple of years … I think was compelling enough to make the president sign it.”