After 45 years a Civil Rights Hero waits for Justice

A great miscarriage of justice has kept most Americas from learning about a Civil Rights pioneer who worked with President John F. Kennedy. But there is finally a way for citizens to not only right that wrong, but bring closure to the most tragic chapter of American presidential history.

After an outstanding career in law enforcement, Abraham Bolden was appointed by JFK to be the first African American presidential Secret Service agent, where he served with distinction. He was part of the Secret Service effort that prevented JFK's assassination in Chicago, three weeks before Dallas. But Bolden was framed by the Mafia and arrested on the very day he went to Washington to tell the Warren Commission staff about the Chicago attempt against JFK.

Bolden was sentenced to six years in prison, despite glaring problems with his prosecution. His arrest resulted from accusations by two criminals Bolden had sent to prison. In Bolden's first trial, an apparently biased judge told the jury that Bolden was guilty, even before they began their deliberations. Though granted a new trial because of that, the same problematic judge was assigned to oversee Bolden's second trial, which resulted in his conviction. Later, the main witness against Bolden admitted committing perjury against him. A key member of the prosecution even took the fifth when asked about the perjury. Yet Bolden's appeals were denied, and he had to serve hard time in prison, and today is considered a convicted felon.

After the release of four million pages of JFK assassination files in the 1990s, it became clear that Bolden -- and the official secrecy surrounding the Chicago attempt against JFK -- were due to National Security concerns about Cuba, that were unknown to Bolden, the press, Congress, and the public not just in 1963, but for the next four decades.

Four million pages of files were released after Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Act unanimously in 1992. They document the massive amount of information that had been withheld from at least five Congressional investigations -- including in 1975 and 1976, when Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were top officials for then-President Gerald Ford. Even worse, the Final Report of the Review Board created by JFK Act shows that files covering the time period of the Chicago attempt to kill JFK were destroyed by the Secret Service in 1995. A report by the government oversight group OMB Watch says that "well over one million CIA records" related to JFK's assassination remain unreleased, perhaps until the mandatory release date of 2017 -- thought in a court filing last year, the CIA claimed the right to withhold file even after that date.

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