Over the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend some attention turned to US Senator John Kerry’s (D-MA) renewed effort to open the FBI records of Dr. King. Civil Rights Cold Case reporter Jerry Mitchell reported:
U.S. Sen. John Kerry plans to introduce legislation next week that would pave the way for the release of thousands of FBI documents on the life and death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Kerry, D-Mass., said the bill, which failed in 2006, can pass this year in honor of King. “I want the world to know what he stood for,” Kerry said. “And I want his personal history preserved and examined by releasing all of his records.”
The bill calls for creating a Martin Luther King Records Collection at the National Archives that would include all government records related to King. The bill also would create a five-member independent review board that would identify and make public all documents from agencies including the FBI — just as a review board in 1992 made public documents related to the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination.
Mitchell spoke with Kerry and other prominent supporters of the legislation, including US Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and pulitzer prize winning King biographer Taylor Branch. MItchell also spoke with others from the Civil Rights Cold Case Project, who believe Kerry should expand the focus of his important initiative.
Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Cold Case Truth and Justice Project, believe[s] Kerry’s idea should be expanded to include the release of documents involving not only King’s assassination, but also other racial slayings from the civil rights era….
Klibanoff met last summer with Attorney General Eric Holder and suggested creating an independent review board to make public “all files, documents and other historic materials related to the racial terror and hate crimes that occurred in the South during the modern civil rights era.”
In an Oct. 27 letter, Holder responded that the Justice Department was discussing the best ways to make “the most responsible public disclosure possible.”…
Ben Greenberg of Boston, whose father served as a special assistant to King in 1962 and 1963, praised Kerry’s legislation. “The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. was a trauma that our country will not recover from unless we can clear the air about what really happened,” he said.
Greenberg, who has spent recent years investigating a number of unsolved killings from the era, including the 1964 killing of Clifton Walker near Woodville, said documents on many other racial slayings from the 1950s and 1960s should be made public, too.
“The effects of these murders linger throughout the South,” he said.
Some FBI documents continue to conceal the name of suspects in these killings, he said. “The people named in the documents, the family members and the perpetrators are dying every day. It is time for the truth to be told and for justice to be done. We need the information while there is still time to use it.”…
Recently the FBI asked for the public’s help in solving 33 killings from the civil rights era — a third of them in Mississippi.
Journalist John Fleming, whose work for The Anniston Star led to an arrest in the 1965 killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma, Ala., questioned how the FBI can ask for the public’s help in solving killings but fail to make public the names of crucial witnesses who could shed light on these cases.
Since I first posted about The Civil Rights Cold Case Project, we’ve added the trailer for the documentary mini-series that we are currently developing in partnership with WNET.org and Paperny Films. I’m on there with the Clifton Walker Case a few times, starting at around 00:45.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 19, 2009 at 8:45 pm
The Civil Rights Cold Case Project brings together the power of investigative reporting, narrative writing, documentary filmmaking and interactive multimedia production to reveal the long-neglected truths behind scores of race-motivated murders, and to facilitate reconciliation and healing.
Our reporters are reopening and investigating several cold cases—producing important evidence that prosecutors have used to build criminal cases against killers and conspirators who have walked free for more than 40 years.
The photo from the home page slideshow, above, is one I took on Poor House Road, in the area where Clifton Walker was murdered on February 28, 1964.
45th Annual Mississippi Civil Rights Martyrs Memorial Service & Conference March for Justice in Philadelphia, MS, June 21, 2009. Marchers carry crosses with names of Civil Rights Era murder victims. (Brian Livingston/Meridian Star)
July 4, 1964 was the last time Julia Dobbins saw her brother, JoEd Edwards. Eight days later, he went missing. Rumors were that the Klan took away the 21-year-old Black man and murdered him. His mother died in 1990 never having learned what truly happened to her son.
July 4, 1964 was the thirteenth day James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were missing. One month later, on August 4, 1964, the three civil rights workers’ bodies were found buried in an earthen dam on the property of a wealthy local businessman, Olen Burrage.
July 4, 1964 was the sixty-third day Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two 19-year-old Black men, were missing. Eight days later, on July 12, partial remains of Charles Moore were found in the Mississippi River, near Vicksburg, MS and eastern Louisiana. The following day, partial remains of Henry Dee were also found in the river.
July 4, 1964 was the 127th day since fourteen-year-old Catherine Walker ran past the adults at the crime scene on Poor House Road in Woodville, MS to her father Clifton Walker’s car. Forever etched in her memory are the shattered windows, bullet holes in the door and her father’s blood still visible on the seat and car floor. Catherine’s mother Ruby died in 1992 never knowing who murdered her thirty-seven-year-old husband.
In 2005, after forty-one years, Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen, was convicted on three counts of manslaughter for his part in the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. In June 2007, after forty-three years, James Ford Seale was convicted on federal kidnapping charges for his part in the murders of Dee and Moore. No one has ever been charged with the murders of JoEd Edwards and Clifton Walker.
Numerous others were involved both in the Chaney, Schwerner Goodman and Dee-Moore murders. By 2007, all other known suspects in the Dee-Moore murders were dead, save one, named Charles Marcus Edwards, who testified against and helped convict James Ford Seale. In 2005 at least nine people were living who were arrested and/or indicted in the 1960s in connection with the murders of civil rights workers. Two weeks ago, just following the forty-fifth anniversary of the Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman murders, Jerry Mitchell reported that more might be prosecuted.
“This case is being actively reviewed by the Civil Rights Division and the FBI,” Alejandro Miyar, a spokesman for the division, told The Clarion-Ledger. “Our goal in investigating this case is to lend our assistance to authorities in Mississippi so that they may make a determination whether sufficient evidence exists for a state prosecution.”
Five suspects are still alive in the case, including reputed Klansman Billy Wayne Posey, who told Mississippi investigators there were “a lot of persons involved in the murders that did not go to jail.”
In February 2007, the FBI announced that it had approximately 100 Civil Rights Era cold cases that it was looking into. Each case seems inevitably to lead to others, including many not on the official lists. When, for example, Canadian documentary filmmaker David Ridgen set out to produce a film about the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, he soon found himself investigating the murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
As I watched Summer in Mississippi [a 1965 CBC documentary], sequences flew by of the hundreds of frantic searchers from the US National Guard, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and local authorities who’d been ordered to scour the entire state and surroundings for the missing civil rights workers, beating bushes, flying helicopters, dragging swamps and rivers. The whole country was on edge. Would their bodies be found?
Then, a curious silence descends in the 1964 documentary when cigar-smoking white men in shirt-sleeves fish decomposing body parts out of the Mississippi River with sticks and bare hands. We see ribs and a femur, knotted loops of wire or twine, and a transparent, body-size bag being emptied out of the fetid water. The lazy, ever-present Southern droning of katydids is silenced by the penetrating voice of the late, great CBC narrator John Drainie: “It was the wrong body. The discovery of a Negro male was noted and forgotten. The search was not for him. The search was for two white boys and their Negro friend.”
I stopped the film and wrote down five words and a question, “wrong body”, “Negro male”, “forgotten”, and then simply, “who?”
Ridgen located Charles Moore’s brother, Thomas, who agreed to work with Ridgen and be the main subject in Ridgen’s documentary film about their investigation of the murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. Ridgen and Moore’s work together led to the conviction of James Ford Seale. Their work also led to the other living conspirator in the murder, Charles Marcus Edwards, making an unprompted public apology in the courtroom to the families of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. Edwards apologized again in private, and both Thomas Moore and Henry Dee’s sister, Thelma Collins, accepted the apology.
When I first met Thomas Moore and David Ridgen in March 2007, they mentioned another murder they had learned about. During their investigation, they were told by a retired Natchez police chief that there was another murder from 1964 in Southwest Mississippi that could be solved: the murder of a Black man named Clifton Walker.
A few months later, I was in Woodville to meet with a local NAACP official about another case I was researching. As I walked back to my rental car following the interview, a Black woman in her early 70s approached me.
“You a reporter?” she asked.
She wanted to tell me about Clifton Walker and about a number of other murders of Blacks said to have taken place in her tiny southwest Mississippi town.
The following day, by odd coincidence, I got a hold of Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents on the Walker murder. A few months later, a Freedom of Information Act request yielded FBI documents on the case. In the Clifton Walker FBI file, there is passing mention of seven more murder victims. None of these seven names are on the current FBI lists of victims.
Other reporters who investigate Civil Rights Era cold cases have similar experiences.
Jerry Mitchell, who pioneered investigative journalism on this subject over twenty years ago, said in an email:
Working on an unpunished killing from the civil rights era inevitably leads to the discovery of more. I remember while working on the James Ford Seale case, I ran across a story in microfilm that showed that Seale had actually killed yet another African American, running over the elderly man in his truck in 1966, just a day after the man had voted for the first time. Seale was never prosecuted.
Four days later, Morris took his last breath in Room 101 at the Concordia Parish Hospital. He suffered a long, agonizing death with third degree burns over 100 percent of his body. A Baptist minister said he never saw a man so severely burned as Morris, who was blinded by the flames.
Nelson’s reporting has helped bring about the recent announcement that the case may go before the Concordia Parish Grand Jury. Nelson hadn’t looked into cold cases from the 50s and 60s before the Morris murder caught his attention, but inevitably others emerged. In an email to me, Nelson explained how he learned about JoEd Edwards.
I first heard about JoeEd in the lone article about the Frank Morris case written by John Herbers for the New York Times in December 1964. I called Herbers and he could vaguely remember mentioning JoeEd’s name in the story but did remember that a porter from a Vidalia motel had been missing a few months prior to the Morris arson. I started asking around in the black community and found a number of people familiar with JoeEd’s case. And the story took off from there and continues to take me in new directions—even this week.
Thompson said DeLaughter beat his three companions with a white fire hose throughout the night. Thompson said the young men screamed so loudly that their voices reminded him of “pigs squealing.”
There is much, much more of this, of course, and from other years and in other states. In 2005, for example, John Fleming, editor at large of the Anniston Star, discovered that James Bonard Fowler, the Alabama State Trooper who allegedly shot Jimmie Lee Jackson on February 18, 1965, is still alive and well and unrepentant. Jimmie Lee Jackson was the Black protester in Marion, Alabama whose murder sparked the Selma to Montgomery March. Several days after he was shot and beaten, Jackson died of an infection in the Good Samaritan Hospital in Selma. Fleming interviewed Fowler, who, in 2005, admitted to the shooting. Fowler claimed self-defense and was confident he would not be prosecuted. In 2007, however, Fowler was indicted on state murder charges; the trial is currently on hold over procedural issues.
Fleming has recently uncovered new information about the racial murder of Willie Brewster in Anniston, AL and is working on many of the Alabama and Georgia cases on the FBI’s list; he has also heard of many others that have not been cataloged. Fleming cited two cases he has not yet looked into deeply, in an email to me:
a case in Perry County [where Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed] of a shopkeeper who shot a teenager in the back for back talking him and a Green County case of a man who had his tongue cut out and [was] left to die.
Fleming also learned of at least one other incident involving Fowler:
I discovered that he had shot another man in 1966, a drunk driver who he got into a fight with after he was arrested. It was ruled self defense at the time.
Nelson said to me:
There’s no question that one case leads to another. Individuals who had some information on JoeEd told me about cases of black men who were beaten. This led to some other arsons of black and white businesses and homes and so on. It’s hard to keep count, but the magnitude of these crimes is overwhelming and the leads never seem to end.
At one of the 45th anniversary memorials to Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner two weeks ago, Michael Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender, said:
she hopes federal authorities will lend their assistance not only to [the Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman] case but also to any other case where enough evidence exists to pursue prosecution. “The clock is ticking,” she said. “Time is running out.”
***
Correction
I erroneously stated that “Nelson has reconstructed what were likely Edwards’ last hours—being brutally beaten with a firehose, allegedly by then Concordia Parish Sheriff Frank DeLaughter, inside the Ferriday jail.” That sentence has been replaced with the current passage, above, detailing allegations of Carl Ray Thompson concerning DeLaughter.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 3, 2009 at 2:24 am
Jerry Mitchell reports that US District Judge Tom Lee will allow a lawsuit to go forward that could break new ground on holding Mississippi government accountable for the murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. The lawsuit has been filed against Franklin County, MS, by Moore’s brother Thomas and Dee’s sister Thelma Collins. The two men were 19-years-old when they were murdered by Klansmen in 1964.
It is the first such lawsuit filed to clear the hurdle of the statute of limitations since unpunished killings from the civil rights era since cases began to be reopened in 1989.
“This is a landmark case — an extremely significant case,” said Jackson lawyer Dennis Sweet, a lawyer for the families of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, who were abducted and beaten by Klansmen on May 2, 1964, before being drowned in an old portion of the Mississippi River.
Reputed Klansman James Ford Seale is serving three life sentences for kidnapping and conspiracy in the case. His lawyers are appealing that conviction.
Lawyers defending Franklin County called the killings “abhorrent” but insisted the Klan was solely responsible: “There is no genuine evidence which exists linking the sheriff of Franklin County to the events alleged.”
They argued the lawsuit should be dismissed because the statute of limitations is three years for this type of litigation and would have expired in 1967.
But Lee concluded that doesn’t mean the clock starts ticking immediately.
The judge quoted from a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which found that the statute of limitations “does not run until the plaintiff is in possession of the ‘crucial facts’ that he has been hurt and the defendant is involved.”
The lawsuit brought by the families’ lawyers — Sweet, Warren Martin, Margaret Burnham and Charles Ogletree — said the then-Franklin County Sheriff Wayne Hutto and Deputy Kirby Shell conspired with the Klan to commit these crimes, refused to investigate after and then covered up their evil deeds.
To date, the courts have been a vehicle for belated prosecutions of individual perpetrators of racially motivated murders from the 1950s and 1960s. Prosecuting the perpetrators is an essential step towards justice and accountability for these crimes. But the individual Klansmen who did the shooting, bombing, burning and beating of African Americans are only part of the story. State responsibility for the violent crimes against African Americans in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South must also be addressed for justice to be done. This lawsuit against Franklin County looks at very specific ways local law enforcement played a role in the crime and in covering it up.
According to Judge Lee’s opinion that Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins can proceed with their case against Franklin County, these are known facts in the case:
When Seale was tried on the federal charge in 2007, [Charles Marcus] Edwards testified against him. Edwards implicated himself in the crime. He testified that after the men were kidnaped, but before they were killed, the kidnapers went to the Sheriff’s office and, with the sheriff’s aid but without a search warrant, searched the Roxie First Baptist Church in Franklin County. After the church was searched, the law enforcement officers left the scene without investigating the case or assisting Dee and Moore in any manner. The kidnapers then stuffed Dee and Moore into the trunk of a car and transported them across the river to Louisiana, where they were drowned. The Sheriff did nothing to secure the release of the men in the several hours that elapsed between the search and the drowning in Louisiana.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation thoroughly investigated the murders at the time they occurred in 1964. Their investigation included repeated interviews with Franklin County Sheriff Wayne Hutto and an interview with Deputy Sheriff Kirby Shell. At no time did Sheriff Hutto or Deputy Shell ever reveal to the federal authorities that they possessed information that was highly pertinent to the investigation. On July 13, 1964 Hutto was interviewed by the FBI and deliberately misinformed them of the facts. On November 4, 1964, Hutto and Shell were again interviewed by the FBI. Neither disclosed their participation in the events leading to the murders. On November 9 and November 12, Hutto was again interviewed by the FBI, and again failed to disclose his knowledge of the case. On November 6, 1964, when Seale and Edwards were charged with the crimes, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover issued a press release stating that the arrests “climaxed an extensive and lengthy investigation by FBI Agents and local authorities.”
In January 1965, before the charges against Edwards and Seale were dropped, Sheriff Hutto met with the county district attorney to discuss the evidence in the case. He did not reveal the role of his office in the search of the church on the day in question. Such information, if known to the assistant district attorney, would have implicated the Sheriff in the killings and provided critical evidence in the state’s case against Edwards and Seale. After the decedents went missing in May 1964, their relatives sought the assistance of their sheriff, Hutto. On or about May 9 he informed them that they were in Louisiana. On May 16, when the men could not be found in Louisiana, the relatives returned to visit Hutto. The sheriff told them he did not know their whereabouts but that he would try to locate them. That was the last contact the family members had with Sheriff Hutto about the matter. Thereafter, in July, the FBI took charge of the investigation.
This case may allow the families of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore to gain some more closure after decades of having no redress for their loss, and it could become a model for other victims’ families. Involvement by local government in the crimes and their cover up is not unique to the murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 1, 2009 at 6:06 am
I want to thank pdxWoman for exposing the falsehoods of Blair, who commented on my recent post on Megan Williams as well as on one of pdxWoman’s. pdxWoman was writing about underreporting of the Megan Williams case and of other cases of violence against and abductions of Black women; I was writing about the history white violence against Black women in domestic settings and why whites sometimes go ape shit and show blood lust for Blacks.
To pdxWoman, Blair wrote:
Now that interracial dating and marraige [sic] is not uncommon, more and more spousal abuse cases involve interracial couples. It appears that the Megan Williams case is turning out to be a case of domestic violence rather than a hate crime.
Bobby R. Brewster, one of six arrested in the case, had a relationship with the victin, He was charged in July with domestic battery and assault after a dispute between them. It appears that this is the motivation for the subsequent attack on Williams. All too often, husbands and boyfriends arrested for battering their spouses or girl friends often retaliate with the victims call the police.
Blair wrote a very similar passage on my blog, using many of the same phrases and formulations as above. As supporting evidence, on both pdxWoman and Hungry Blues, Blair made a lengthy, detailed description of Black violence against whites in the murders of Chanon Christian and Chris Newsom. I also heard from Yobachi that Blair made a similar comment on one of his Megan Williams posts.
Problem is that Blair’s version of what happened to Christian and Newsom rehearses white supremacist distortions of the case, to suggest it was an example of racially motivated, Black-on-white crime. pdxWoman found an SPLC article that explains:
On the night of Jan. 6, Knoxville, Tenn., couple Christopher Newsom, 23, and Channon Christian, 21, drove to a friend’s house to watch a movie after a dinner date. When they reached the friend’s apartment complex, they were carjacked at gunpoint by three men and a woman who forced them to drive to an abandoned house where the assailants raped and murdered the young couple. The next day, police discovered Newsom’s body shot and burned along city train tracks. Three days after that, officers discovered the body of Christian in an unoccupied house. She had been strangled and crammed into a garbage can.
Knoxville-area television stations and newspapers have covered the story heavily since the bodies were found. On the national media level, The Associated Press and MSNBC reported on the murders shortly after they occurred. But starting in April, a loud and growing throng of white supremacists began protesting what they call a conspiratorial media blackout, owing, they claim, to the fact that Newsom and Christian were white and their alleged killers black….
Attempting to capitalize on the propaganda value of a gruesome crime, white supremacists have flooded the Internet and radio waves with false details concerning the purported sexual mutilation of the victims and held a rally in Knoxville to protest “black crime.” Their lies – that the murders were a race-based attack and that the victims were horribly mutilated -are gaining traction. Without acknowledging the source, some mainstream conservative commentators in recent months have been parroting the key white supremacist talking point, characterizing the Christian-Newsom murders as a black-on-white “hate crime.”
It’s an old pattern with the Klan and these other extremist types. The get themselves and others all into a frenzy with their fantasies about dangerous Blacks, when in fact there are whites really doing the stuff they imagine Blacks might be doing.
Think back to the Klan’s 1964 torture and murder of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, two Black teens from Franklin County, MS. James Ford Seale, who in June was convicted for his involvement in the murders, and the other Klansmen involved, tortured Dee and Moore to extract information about supposed Black Muslim gun runners who, some feared, were bringing weapons into Franklin County. Though there were Blacks who defended themselves with guns and other means, Dee and Moore do not seem to have been involved, and there has yet to be any evidence of Blacks moving weapons into the county.
But the right wing rumor mill had been long at work. Since at least 1961 white supremacist government officials from throughout the South and beyond had been spreading rumors of a Black Muslim threat to the Southern way of life.
On June 4, 1961 Garland Lyell, Assistant Attorney General of Mississippi; Gwin Cole, Assistant Director of the Bureau of Identification, Mississippi Highway Patrol; Investigator DB Crockett, Identification Bureau, Mississippi Highway Patrol; and AL Hopkins, Investigator, MS Sovereignty Commission went to Atlanta, GA “for the purposes of attending a confidential meeting of state officials from several southern and western states.”
The purpose of this meeting was to establish better communications between the various states and to familiarize those present with past and current activities of Communistic, Socialistic, Subversive and Agitative individuals.
According to AL Hopkins, 11 states were represented at this meeting.
The delegates from Mississippi and the other states were welcomed by Major Harold Burson of the Georgia Dept of Public Safety and Lt. Col. Lowell Conner of the same dept.; Major Delmar Jones, Director of the Georgia Bureau of Identification; Captain BG Ragsdale, Asst. Dir. of GBI; and Special Agent Arthur L. Hutchins, GBI.
Presiding over the meeting was Lt. HA Poole, Security Division, GBI.
Lt. Poole stated that the purpose of the meeting was not to discuss the racial issue alone but to work out the best method of combatting any subversive acts and especially to discuss “The Muslim Cult,” “Communism,” and the “Freedom Riders.”
This is undoubtedly the most vicious organization in existence today and a real threat to the sovereignty of all states. They advocate violence and it is well known that they will unhesitatingly kill a suspected informant and that a great number of the members of have criminal records.
I can’t say whether Blair is like the government propagandists or like the Klansmen whose anxieties they cultivated—whether s/he is playing or being played. But either way, trading in these kinds of racist fantasies is trading in methods of inciting violence against Blacks and others. Blair, consider yourself banned from this site.
For more analysis on how these right wing distortions of Black-on-white violence confuse discussions of hate crimes, see David Neiwert’s post, Hate crimes: Muddying the waters.
For all interested parties Blair’s IP info; it appears s/he is a Netscape employee:
OrgName: Netscape Communications Corp.
OrgID: NSCP
Address: 501 E. Middlefield
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: USNetRange: 207.200.64.0 - 207.200.127.255
CIDR: 207.200.64.0/18
NetName: NETSCAPE-CIDR
NetHandle: NET-207-200-64-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.NETSCAPE.COM
NameServer: NS2.NETSCAPE.COM
Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate: 1996-09-06
Updated: 2001-03-28RTechHandle: AOL-NOC-ARIN
RTechName: America Online, Inc.
RTechPhone: +1-703-265-4670
RTechEmail: domains@aol.net
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 24, 2007 at 6:22 pm
P6 highlighted an important article in Slate, probing “why and when we will tolerate lawbreaking.”
Tolerated lawbreaking is almost always a response to a political failure-the inability of our political institutions to adapt to social change or reach a rational compromise that reflects the interests of the nation and all concerned parties. That’s why the American statutes are full of laws that no one wants to see fully enforced-or even enforced at all…. when politics fails, institutional tolerance of lawbreaking takes over.
P6 argues that this describes “the politics around racism, desegregation, integration, diversity or whatever term ‘diversity’ is scheduled to be superceded by” and that “[t]his is the sort of compromise that allows people in places like Jena, LA and Paris TX to honestly feel they have no race problem.”
I think it might be useful to reframe the history of racial violence that I am so interested in as the history of tolerated lawbreaking.
White people get away with everything around here, and most of the blacks know it, but [don't] dare to speak up. This place is low down and dirty, the police stay riding in the black neighborhood but never in the white neighborhood. Whenever a white person does something, to them it’s just a misunderstanding, but when the person is black it’s different.
That’s a resident of Franklin County, MS talking about the place where Henry Dee and Charles Moore were murdered by Klansmen in 1964. In June 2007, one of the Klansmen involved in killing the two 19 year old Black men was convicted for kidnapping and conspiracy to deprive them of their civil rights (but not murder). Afterwards a local newspaper declared triumph:
[T]he truth, which had been submerged for more than four decades, finally rose again.
Justice finally found its mark as James Ford Seale, a reputed Klansman, was convicted for his involvement with the crimes.
This case proves that justice never sleeps; justice never gives up; and justice can never come too late.
But the Franklin County resident I’m quoting was not talking about Franklin County in 1964. E. Anderson was commenting on a post I had written back in January about how people in Franklin County knew that reports of James Ford Seale’s death were false but did not tell the investigators who were pursuing the case.
It’s important that Seale got punished for murder kidnapping and conspiracy, but nobody wants to spend too much time talking about why he—and others who will never be prosecuted—got away with murder for 43 years. E. Anderson uses the tolerance for white lawbreaking in Franklin County as a measure of the racism that has not abated.
I have been living in Franklin County for the last 40 years, and this place is still highly racist, except now they do it through the sheriff department, and the circuit court office. Check the record of the Franklin county courts and see how many blacks are sent to prison for crimes, and then see how many whites are sent for the same crimes…. Mostly all the white people in Franklin county are still racist, from the sheriff office to the school system to the court system. All the older white people in the county knew James Seale was still living, they just didn’t care for it was black men that got murdered, and they know of other murders that have taken place also, but they do all they can to cover it up, the bottom line is Franklin County will never change, it will always be racist.
According to Anderson, the white lawlessness that people might associate with the Klan activity of yesterday is still the norm today.
There’s a brand of racial reconciliation that’s getting popular in Mississippi, where whites disavow their hatred for Blacks and make a show of getting along with them. It’s nice, for example, to hear James Ford Seale’s cousin is preaching tolerance and goes to an integrated church in Natchez. But until Franklin County directly addresses its historical and present day tolerance for white lawbreaking, the tolerance of individual whites for Blacks will not lessen the effects of racism on people living there.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 21, 2007 at 1:34 am
Diane Nash’s statement for my American Prospect article was longer than I could include in the published piece. Her statement is worth reading in full:
The State of Mississippi is trying to change its image to appear to be a state that is no longer racist. If Mississippi would focus on truly eliminating and/or decreasing racism instead of on public relations programs and schemes, a substantive change actually could take place.
I refer to schemes such as prosecuting one person out of a lynch mob and protecting the rest of the mob, especially those who are now financially well off and politically connected.
Another scheme: Prosecuting a token few while neither investigating nor prosecuting murders of hundreds of black men who were lynched. For example, there were other bodies found in 1964, while the FBI was looking for the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Those murders apparently have never been investigated nor has anyone been prosecuted for them. The same is true for bodies found in rivers, bayous, etc. throughout the state.
Prosecuting a token few and protecting the vast majority of murderers continues to send the message that one can murder black people and (most likely) get away with it. That is not acceptable. Mississippi should not be allowed to defraud the rest of the country into thinking that racist Mississippi is in the past. Make no mistake; racism is alive and well in Mississippi in 2007.
Justice demands the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If any one of those 3 elements is missing, justice is absent.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 28, 2007 at 8:33 am
For the last eight days in Jackson, Mississippi, reputed Ku Klux Klan member James Ford Seale has sat, mostly silent, in the James O. Eastland U.S. Courthouse. Seale has been watching the parade of witnesses take the stand — his former daughter-in-law, his pastor, a fellow Klansman, FBI agents, a retired Navy diver, an elderly church deacon, a small town newspaper publisher — to testify about his involvement in the 1964 murders of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two 19-year-old black men from southwest Mississippi.
The horrific deaths of the two young men, and their families’ years of suffering without remediation, illustrate why it is so important for perpetrators to be brought to justice, even decades after the crime was committed. “I’ve had nightmares every night for 43 years,” Charles Moore’s older brother Thomas told me in April. The Dee-Moore murders also raise questions about government complicity in Civil Rights era crimes — and whether case-by-case prosecutions are an adequate response.
In doing this article, I had the great honor of interviewing Diane Nash, Ben Chaney, John Steele, John Dorsey Due, Jr., Alvin Sykes, Kenneth O’Reilly and Congressman Kendrick Meek. Stay tuned for some of the outtakes, audio and text. There was some great stuff that was beyond the scope of the article or had to be cut because of space considerations.
UPDATE (via David Ridgen):
James Ford Seale was found GUILTY on all three counts of kidnapping at 6:30 pm (Central Time) this evening. The jury deliberated for under three hours. Sentencing in August. Each count carries a life sentence.
In today’s Clarion Ledger, Jerry Mitchell published information about the abduction, torture and interrogation in southwest Mississippi of 16 other Black men—in addition to Henry Dee and Charles Moore—during the first months of 1964. Mitchell’s article is based on a Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission report [pdf] which has long intrigued and disturbed me. The Sovereignty Commission was the spy agency established by the Mississippi State Legislature in 1956, to monitor and oppose civil rights activity. The Commission’s files were declassified in 1998 and are available online. The report suggests that what happened to Henry Dee and Charles Moore was part of a pattern of systematic abductions and brutal interrogations to gain intelligence about Black people who were involved in organizations, such as the NAACP, supporting the right to register and vote and—as the Dee-Moore case has brought out—organizing armed self-defense against their white attackers.
From February 18-20, 1964, Sovereignty Commission Investigator A.L. Hopkins investigated three abductions and beatings of Black men, reported by the Natchez Sheriff’s Department: Alfred Whitley on February 7, James C. Winston on February 15 and Archie Curtis and Willie Jackson together on February 16. Deputy Sheriff Mario Hernandez told Hopkins that while these men had come forward, they were just four of 16 Black men who had been similarly brutalized.
Mitchell uses Alfred Whitley’s story to illustrate the nature of the abductions, “eerily similar … to what happened three months later when Klansmen reportedly abducted two African-American teenagers, beat them, tied them up and drowned them.” According to the original Sheriff’s case file, Whitley was stopped by men wearing white masks while on his way home from work at Armstrong Tire & Rubber Co., at midnight.
He was taken from his car, put face down in [their] car on the floor. After about 30 minutes to 1 hour the cars stopped, about 10 men took him out of the car, cut his clothes off and beat him with 2 bull whips and cat tail, made him drink a bottle of Castor Oil and run shooting over his head…. All the time the whipping lasted, approximately 1 or 2 hours, they questioned him about the NAACP and Masonic organizations.
Whitley’s back was a mass of marks and cuts.
According to Whitley’s niece, Janie, whom Mitchell interviewed, her uncle “came out missing one eye, a lung … His ribs were broken. He was never the same afterward.” Whitley’s niece emphasizes that her uncle Alfred was not a member of the NAACP. Nonetheless, he—and other victims—were targeted because they were suspected of being members or having knowledge of others who were members.
Whitley and other victims of these roving Klan torture and interrogation units may well have been targeted because of what Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of slain civil rights worker Michael Schwerner, has called “the dangerous attention of the Commission.”
The violence was not the isolated acts of a few crazed individuals acting as a mob. Rather these crimes are heavily tainted with governmental misconduct. The Sovereignty Commission funded the White Citizens Council, which used this money for a campaign which spread a virulent racist ideology which served intentionally to encourage violence.
Archie Curtis, one of the other victims, and George West, about whom Curtis was interrogated, were identified as possible members of the NAACP in a 1959 Sovereignty Commission investigation into the “racial situation in Natchez and Adams County.” On June 24, 1960, Natchez Chief of Police S.C. Craft reported to Sovereignty Commission investigator Andy Hopkins that Archie Curtis and George West were two of four leaders in the Natchez Business and Service League, which law enforcement officials believed was a front for the NAACP.
After its initial findings, the Sovereignty Commission decided to investigate Curtis and West more fully—which also served to spread the word in the community that Curtis and West were suspected of being involved in the NAACP. On June 13 and 14, 1961, the Sovereignty Commission Director Albert Jones sent letters inquiring about Archie Curtis to five county officials: William T. Ferrell, Sheriff and Tax Collector; Robert E. Burns, Chancery Clerk; A.V. Davis, Jr., Circuit Clerk; Mrs. R. Brent Forman, Tax Assessor; and Claude Pintard, Jr., County Attorney. Each letter asked for general information about Curtis and sometimes requested information specific to the official’s office, such as asking Sheriff Ferrell for Curtis’ poll tax payment history and for his criminal record, if any. In addition, every letter but one asks the county official whether he or she has “information” regarding Curtis’ “activity with the NAACP” or with “other subversive organizations.” On June 30, 1964, Albert Jones sent five very similarly worded letters, requesting information about Geroge West, to the same five Adams County officials. All of the letters inquiring about West include requests for information about his involvement in the NAACP. (Letters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
It is also possible that the Sovereignty Commission inquiries concerning Curtis and West served as direct tip-offs to the Klan. When Paul Hendrickson, author of Sons of Mississippi, asked Ty Ferrell whether his grandfather, former Adams County Sheriff William T. Ferrell, was a Klansman, Ty Ferrell replied, “An elected official in a little Mississippi community? I can almost not imagine him being in the Klan.” Hendrickson also found that many, researchers and local people alike, have thought that Ferrell was a member of the Klan or, at very least, closely associated with Klan members. While not at all conclusive, Sheriff Ferrell’s likely ties to the Klan are suggestive of how the 1961 Sovereignty Commission investigation of Archie Curtis and George West may have been what led the Klan to target Curtis and other Black men for abduction and interrogation.
“The Sovereignty Commission hired staff investigators,” Bender continued, in her talk in April.
It employed informants. The investigators spied on people. The reports were transmitted to the governor and disseminated with the deliberate intent to cause damage to persons who were perceived as enemies of the status quo … resulting in beatings, fire bombings and murders.
Curtis, a funeral home director and ambulance driver, was indeed a member of the NAACP and was not afraid to speak about his experience. He reported what happened to him not only to the Sheriff’s Department but also to civil rights workers in the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and later to an investigator from the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council and in May 1964 hearings of the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR). COFO’s initial March 18, 1964 report to the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the USCCR includes Curtis’ story, as told to the COFO workers.
Archie Curtis of Natchez received a phone call at 12:45 A.M. He was told to go to Palestine Road and go “two miles past the black top” where “a man with a lantern will be waiting to show you the way to Henry Goodman’s house.” (He was told that Mrs. Goodman had had a heart attack and needed an ambulance.)
Curtis went out to Palestine Road as requested accompanied by Willie Jackson. After going two miles past the black top, they did not see anyone with a light. Curtis blew his horn. A car pulled up behind the ambulance. Two white men got out of the left side and two white men got out of the right side. All four had white hoods over their heads. One had a gun in his hand. Curtis and Jackson were told to get out of the ambulance. Curtis told them to go away because he had no time for foolishness. Curtis told them he was looking for a Mr. Goodman. One of the four white men said, “I’m Henry Goodman. I am the one who called you for an ambulance-and damn it, I want you to get out.” Another of the four men walked over the driver’s side of the vehicle and asked Curtis while pointing a gun at him. “Didn’t you hear him say get out?” Curtis turned to get out-they caught his hand and hit his hand pit. Curtis got out of the ambulance, he was told to take off his glasses. Curtis was slow getting them off; one of the men grabbed them and threw them away. Next Curtis and Jackson were blindfolded and carried to the white men’s car, pushed in the car. Both Curtis and Jackson were put in the front of the car and driven down to a field called Duck Pond. They were told to get out of the car in Duck Pond, which they did; they were told to remove their clothes. They refused. After being hit “two or three times,” they dropped their pants. Curtis was told to hand over his NAACP card. Curtis replied saying he didn’t have a NAACP card. He was told “yes, you have and that damn West has a NAACP card too.” Curtis said “I don’t think West has one.” Curtis and Jackson were told to lie on their stomachs and then they were beaten. One of the four men suggested killing them-but another said no “lets [sic] just leave them out here.” Curtis and Jackson went to a friends’ house and got a ride into town.
In his February 20, 1964 Sovereignty Commission report concerning the “whippings and armed robberies of Negro men in Adams County by hooded or masked men,” Hopkins named ten suspects in the beatings, including James Seale and his brother Jack Seale, who were both later implicated in the murders of Dee and Moore. Hopkins also named Tiny Lewis, “a Colonel on Governor Johnson’s staff.”
As far as anyone knows, Dee and Moore were of no interest to the Sovereignty Commission until after their dismembered bodies were found in a Mississippi River backwater on July 12 and 13, 1964. But the Mississippi state spy agency cultivated the climate of suspicion and intimidation which nurtured units of Klansmen who believed they could abduct, torture and murder with impunity any Blacks suspected of organizing for civil rights, self-determination or self-defense.
It is worth asking why Dee and Moore were murdered while other torture victims were left to nurse their wounds. It is also worth asking whether other unnamed victims were murdered by these Klan interrogation units. The courtroom will not tell, but history—and justice—demand an answer.
The James Ford Seale trial has been underway since Monday. I’ve been following it closely but have not had the time to give it coverage on my blog. In any case my second hand coverage would not compare to what is available elsewhere. Matt Saldaña is doing great, detailed coverage at the Jackson Free Press, where he is blogging daily.
While I am mentioning the trial, I’d like to direct you to a couple of related items.
1.
Last week, during the jury selection process, John Flemming published an interesting piece about James Ford Seale, Jr., the son of the defendant. Most of the article is about how Seale Jr. tried to protect his father from prosecution by telling people that he was dead. But check this out:
After The Los Angeles Times and the Clarion-Ledger reported that James Ford Seale was dead, Canadian film maker David Ridgen and Thomas Moore, the brother of Charles Moore, found him in July, 2005, near the little Mississippi town of Roxie. They had been alerted by Ronnie Harper, the local prosecutor in Natchez, that Seale was alive. They were skeptical until they actually saw him.
What’s wrong with this picture?
The Dee-Moore case was re-opened in 2000 but closed in 2003 and then reopened again in 2005 when it was learned that Seale was not dead. But who informed Thomas Moore and David Ridgen that reports of Seale’s death have been greatly exaggerated? Ronnie Harper, the local prosecutor in Natchez. Why didn’t the local prosecutor inform the US Attorney that Seale is still alive? I might add that Natchez is in Adams County, the next county west of Franklin County, where Seale and his alleged victims are from. Seems like Seale’s wellbeing and whereabouts were not such a big secret.
2.
One person attending the Seale trial is Alvin Sykes, President of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign. I heard Sykes speak at the Crimes of the Civil Rights Era conference, and he was very impressive. The Atlanta Journal Constitution caught up with Sykes while he was in Jackson, at the James O. Eastland Courthouse.
The FBI has uncovered 51 more killings, and the Southern Poverty Law Center has a list of 127 race-related killings between 1954 and 1968.
It’s in this atmosphere that Sykes has brokered meetings with people as various as U.S. senators, district attorneys and victims’ relatives to seek long-delayed justice.
His behind-the-scenes maneuvering was key to the FBI’s reinvestigation of the infamous 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black Chicago teen brutally killed after he allegedly whistled at a white woman in Money, Miss. (Earlier this year, a Mississippi grand jury did not return an indictment in the case.)
Sykes also generated the idea for legislation now before Congress that grew out of the reopening of that now-52-year-old slaying. Commonly known as the Till Bill, and sponsored in the House of Representatives by Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), it would fund a separate unit in the Justice Department devoted to investigating civil rights-era crimes….
Sykes was born to a 14-year-old at a home for unwed mothers, then taken in by a single 48-year-old friend of the family in Kansas City, Mo. He was sickly, in and out of hospitals with epilepsy, and says around age 11 he was sexually abused by a couple that lived across the street.
His formal education was spotty — he spent three years at Boys Town, the facility for at-risk kids in Omaha — then left school for good at 16.
He lived briefly with his biological mother — he thought for years she was a cousin — but says she was an alcoholic and rarely employed. He ran into her years later when he was homeless. She lived at the same shelter.
But Sykes calls leaving school the start of his education. Working nights managing a band, he spent his days holed up in a library. “Education was important to me — that’s the reason I left school,” he said. “The administration was more concerned with students getting a piece of paper than an education. So I started teaching myself.”
He also sat in on trials, watching legal strategies, researching what he didn’t understand. He became involved in a federal desegregation case with the Kansas City public schools and befriended a Justice Department official. “I learned about cases and the system and started applying it to real matters,” he said.
Sykes’ work as a victims’ advocate became locally renowned after a string of Kansas City musicians were murdered in the late ’70s and early ’80s. When a white defendant was acquitted of beating a prominent black musician to death, Sykes went back to the library with the victim’s wife. “It was like in the movies,” he recalled. “We just kept opening books. Then 10 minutes before closing time, I found it.”
Sykes unearthed an obscure federal statute that allowed the defendant to be prosecuted on a civil rights violation. He sent everything he found to Justice Department lawyer Richard Roberts, now a federal judge in Washington, who got an indictment. The defendant was convicted and received a life sentence.
“His seriousness of purpose was impressive,” Roberts said. “It made answering his phone calls much more attractive.”
“I have hoped and prayed for over 40 years for justice including full disclosure and the complete prosecution of all those involved in the murder of my son James, and his companions, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.” (Fannie L. Chaney, August 1, 2006)
Today (5/24) the soul of Henry Dee drew a little more near. The one known image of him came to light, after having been lost for 43 years.
In life Henry Dee and Charles Moore from southwest Mississippi had nothing to do with James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. Circumstances following their violent deaths at the hands of Klansmen brought them close together.
On July 12, 1964, at 8:00 PM, phone calls started coming across the Council of Federated Organizations’ (COFO) WATS line. A body had been found in the Mississippi River earlier that day, mid-state on the Mississippi-Louisiana state line. It was only the lower half of a body. It had a belt with a “buckle and letter M . . . like one Mickey [Schwerner] is supposed to have had, also [a] gold watch.” By about 8:55 PM they heard back from Mickey’s widow, Rita. The information did not check. By 6:45 PM the next day, the word was out that there were two bodies and their names were Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
The bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were found almost a month later, on August 4, buried in an earthen dam, in Neshoba County, on the property of Olen Burrage. They had been missing since June 21.
In 2005, Mrs. Chaney saw a small measure of justice in her son’s case, when Edgar Ray Killen was indicted on state murder charges and convicted for manslaughter.
[T]he 82-year-old mother of five returned [to Mississippi] from New Jersey to testify in the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, sharing her last encounters with her son, whom she called J.E., at her Meridian home on the morning of June 21, 1964.
She fixed breakfast for J.E. and his friends, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, “but J.E. never come back,” she said….
Before another year passed, Fannie Lee Chaney left Mississippi after a series of threats, including one to dynamite her house and another to put her “in a hole like James was.”
In 1967, a U.S. District Court jury in Meridian convicted Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, Neshoba County Deputy Cecil Price and five others on federal conspiracy charges, but the other suspects walked free.
No one was ever charged for murder in the case until 2005 when Killen was charged. (Clarion Ledger)
Schwerner’s widow, Rita Schwerner Bender of Seattle, said Wednesday that she and her late husband visited the Chaney home for meals and fellowship in the months before the killings. She said the 2005 trial was the last time she saw Fannie Lee Chaney.
“It sounds trite when you say it; she loved her children dearly. She was devastated by J.E.’s death.” (AP)
A full measure of justice has yet to be rendered. There was sufficient evidence to arrest and/or indict on federal charges related to the murders eight men in the 1960s, who are still alive today, in addition to Edgar Ray Killen. The Neshoba County Grand Jury has met at least four times since the Killen trial, most recently on April 30, but has indicted no one else for the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
The trial of James Ford Seale begins next week. He has been charged with two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy leading to the deaths of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.
~ Photo: Fannie L. Chaney testifying at the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, June 18, 2005. (AP)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on May 24, 2007 at 12:19 am
For 43 years, Henry Hezekiah Dee’s family and friends had only their memories of the 19-year-old, who, along with is friend Charles Eddie Moore, was abducted and murdered by Klansmen in southwest Mississippi in 1964. Filmmaker David Ridgen and Thomas Moore, brother of Charles, have recently discovered a photo and given back to the world the face of Henry Hezekiah Dee.
Until recently, the only photograph of Henry Hezekiah Dee that family members knew of was in his wallet when he was killed in 1964 with Charles Eddie Moore after reportedly being abducted by Klansmen in Meadville. Authorities never gave the family the picture back.
The only images family and friends had of Dee were the ones they carried in their minds.
“There had always been a picture of Charles Moore, but it felt like Henry Dee, once he had been murdered, had simply vanished off the planet,” said Canadian Broadcasting Co. documentary filmmaker David Ridgen….
Recently, someone they interviewed in 2005 discovered photographs in their home.
“Flipping through their collection, they saw one picture that reminded them of our questions and our quest,” Ridgen said. “We got back in touch with this person, were given the photograph by them and then checked the photo with several people who knew Henry.”
All confirmed it was Dee.
The picture is now in the hands of federal prosecutors for next week’s federal trial of Seale.
Sharing this photo means jurors will get a chance to glimpse pictures of both victims, as will Seale.
Dee’s sister, Thelma Collins, said when she found out there was a photograph of her brother, “I was so happy till I cried because we’ve been looking for it for a long time.”
The family had found no solace in visits to Dee’s grave because no marker was there, nothing to indicate this 19-year-old had ever lived and breathed the air in Franklin County, nothing to show what his life might have been.
Dee’s other sister, Mary Byrd, still feels the hurt – a hurt not only from losing a loved one, she said, but also from having nothing to remember him by.
When she learned Tuesday that a photograph had been found of her late brother, she exhaled and said, “It feels good. I’m so glad for that.”
Upon seeing the picture of his old friend for the first time, Thomas Moore said, “I almost felt the earth move beneath me. It was overwhelming.”
He saw in the photograph the Dee he remembered from his class in high school – tall, slim, white teeth, with a laid-back personality and the memorable hair he later treated to look like singer James Brown.
Thomas Moore is planning a service soon in Franklin County to remember the slain teenagers and to build a permanent memorial to honor them.
That memorial will now contain the photographs of Dee and Charles Eddie Moore together.
“They lived together, and they died together,” Moore said. “Now they’ll be together.”
43 years ago today, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were hitchhiking from Meadville, MS and were picked up by James Ford Seale. Seale and others took the two 19-year-old Black men into the Homochitto National Forest, which surrounds the highway, tortured and interrogated them. Later the same day, several of the Klansmen hauled Dee and Moore in the trunk of a car across the state line into Louisiana and then 100 miles north to a spot on the Mississippi River and dumped them in, weighting their bodies down with a jeep engine block and pieces of railroad track.
The Dee-Moore murders were originally referred to as the “Torso Murders” because the young men’s bodies were found in parts. The first body parts were discovered by James Bowles, a fisherman, in the Old River adjunct of the Mississippi River on July 12, 1964. Information from Klan informant Ernest Gilbert led Navy divers to the rest of the young men’s remains three and a half months later, on October 31. The MS Highway Patrol conducted a murder investigation in conjunction with the FBI. On November 6, 1964, MS Highway Patrol officers arrested James Ford Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards for the murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. But District Attorney Lennox Forman never brought the case to the Grand Jury and dropped the charges altogether by January 11 , 1965.
On January 24, 2007, reputed Klansman James Ford Seale was arrested on charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in connection with the murders of Dee and Moore. US Attorney Dunn Lampton will prosecute the case in the Southern District Court of Mississippi in Jackson. Jury selection is scheduled to begin May 29, 2007. Pre-trial hearings are currently underway.
Thomas Moore, is pictured above, with a photo of his brother Charles Moore, at the Crimes of the Civil Rights Era conference, which I also attended this past weekend, at Harvard and Northeastern.
Let us hope that James Ford Seale is convicted and that Mr. Moore and the family members of Henry Dee can feel able to have some closure in this terrible crime. Let us also hope that the trial of James Ford Seale is an occasion for honest discussion of a largely suppressed history of racist oppression and violence. Klan violence is only part of the story.
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.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on April 27, 2007 at 10:08 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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