Crimes of the Civil Rights Era

Today's the day of the conference. Margaret Burnham, who is one of the conveners, has a great op-ed in today's Boston Globe.

A quiet campaign against the old shibboleth that justice delayed is justice denied is being waged in communities across the country, particularly in the South. An arrest in January of a 71-year-old man in connection with a 1964 race killing follows a now familiar pattern, in which family members who lost their loved ones to racist violence decades ago press interminably for criminal prosecution and other forms of redress.

The Mississippi Klansmen who killed Henry Dee and Charles Eddie Moore 43 years ago were confident they would never have to answer for the torture and murder of these two African-American 19-year-olds --- until four months ago, when a US grand jury indicted one of them in the abductions and slayings.

The killers had picked up the two youths, who were hitchhiking near a federal forest, then tortured them and dropped their bodies in the Mississippi River, where they were found two months later during the massive hunt for the murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. A cover-up investigation cleared the accused in the Dee-Moore killings, but Charles Moore's brother, Thomas Moore, would not let the case die. His efforts bore fruit last January; the case is a priority of the FBI's new program to solve these old hate crimes....

Here's a small teaser from the talk I'll be giving at the conference this afternoon:

Since my first casual perusals in fall 2005 of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission documents about Klan activity in southwest Mississippi, I have thought there must be more to the story of Henry Dee and Charles Moore than what was being told by the US Attorney's office and by the available published accounts. For the past year or so, I have been working closely with Freedom Movement Attorney John Dorsey Due, Jr., who did some important work in southwest Mississippi during the months just prior to Summer Project of 1964. Some of our questions about the case finally took me to Mississippi last week, to do archival research and conduct interviews.

In this talk, I will compare the indictment of James Ford Seale and historical sources, to show inconsistencies that might help us better understand the role of Klan violence in the racist systems of Mississippi.

I can't share the rest with you yet, but I will be addressing some of the issues that Burnham raises in her op-ed:

These murder cases reflect the most heinous of the hundreds of crimes committed against Americans during the civil rights movement. By one scholar's account, more than 20,000 people were wrongfully arrested in the struggle to break the back of segregation. State and local law enforcement colluded with the perpetrators of anti-civil rights violence, who consequently enjoyed full immunity. When the offenders were brought to court, typically --- as in the Dee-Moore murders --- they were undercharged and released after sham proceedings.

The fresh prosecutions are only one facet of a multi pronged movement to restore justice to the victims of the mid-century breakdown in law enforcement that was designed to crush civil rights protest....

Taken together, these developments signal a countrywide endeavor to understand how law enforcement can be misused and manipulated in times of political turmoil.

There's a link on the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice web site for a live webcast of the conference proceedings. I don't think the researchers' round table will be broadcast, but there are a lot of other exciting things going on.