American Decades
The Kefauver Committee and Organized Crime
Crime Buster from Tennessee.
The Kefauver committee, which has been called "probably the most important probe of organized crime" in U.S. history, revealed to Americans the activities of criminal operations earning millions of dollars yearly and of the corrupt public officials who allowed such operations to flourish. It was formed as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, but it came to be called the Kefauver committee after Sen. Estes Kefauver. The energetic Tennessee Democrat, looking to make a name for himself in his first term in the Senate, sponsored the resolution which created the committee and was its chairman. In order for the resolution to pass, Kefauver had to overcome stiff opposition from elder senators who distrusted their junior colleague's ambitions.
Murder in Kansas City.
The murder of two gangsters on 6 April 1950 in a Democratic clubhouse in Kansas...
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1950's Law and Justice
- Overview
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Topics in the News
- The Brink's Robbery
- Brown V. Board of Education Topeka, Kansas
- The Emmett Till Case
- The First Amendment in the 1950s
- J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI
- Juvenile Delinquency
- The Kefauver Committee and Organized Crime
- The McClellan Committee and Labor Racketeering
- Prison Life in the 1950s
- Red Monday
- The Supreme Court of the 1950s
- The Ten Most Wanted
- Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company V. Sawyer
- Headline Makers
- People in the News
- Deaths
- Publications
- Important Events in Law and Justice, 1950–1959
