(Photo: Thomas Hawk)

I have been trying to wrap my mind around BART police officer Johannes Mehserle’s defense in the shooting death of 22-year-old black man Oscar Grant.

Mehserle’s supposed weapon confusion is at the heart of why he was not convicted of voluntary manslaughter, let alone of second degree murder. The underlying logic of the defense seems to be that drawing the gun was an illegitimate, death dealing mistake but tasing Oscar Grant would have been a legitimate course of action.

A photo of Mehserle and surveillance video of his fellow officer Tony Pirone show each of them brandishing their tasers during the events prior to the shooting on the BART platform.

We are to suppose, then, that when police arrive on a scene where fighting that they have not observed has reportedly occurred it is acceptable to brandish weapons to gain compliance from black men. We are to suppose it is proper procedure to threaten any young black man with weapons if he is suspected of having been fighting prior to the arrival of the police.

We are also to suppose that tasers are not themselves lethal weapons. Electronic Village has compiled a list 84 documented taser death incidents since the beginning of 2009. In addition to a growing body of evidence that tasers are unpredictably lethal, there is evidence that they are over-used by law enforcement and that law enforcement officers tase blacks disproportionately.

A 2008 Amnesty International study found that 90% of those struck by tasers since 2001 were unarmed. Overall, among the 2009-2010 victims on the Electronic Village list, 38% were black, though blacks are only 13% of the total US population. Furthermore, tasers seem to be especially problematic in California. According to the Amnesty study, California and Florida have the highest taser death rates in the country. Among the taser deaths recorded by Electronic Village, twenty-one—or 25%—occurred in California.

The logic that legitimates using tasers, despite data such as above, is the logic of fear. Adam Serwer recently put it this way:

To convict on the higher charge of voluntary manslaughter, the prosecution would have had to prove that Mehserle’s fear of Grant and his friends was ‘unreasonable.’ It decided the crime was involuntary. In other words, Mehserle’s fear? That was reasonable.

Serwer provides broad historical context for America’s fear of black men, from Toussaint L’Overture to Oscar Grant. In the spirit of collaboration, I’d like to add some information to Adam’s history.

In Franklin County, Mississippi, May 1964, two black 19-year-old men, named Henry Dee and Charles Moore, were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a band of Klansmen. The abductions and torture of Dee and Moore were preceded by a spate of similar kidnappings and beatings, at least 16 according to one set of government documents, all in the same small, southwest corner of Mississippi.

During that four month period, bands of Klansmen ambushed black men coming home from work at night or lured them out to deserted roads on false pretenses, brought them out into the woods or oil fields and whipped them and interrogated them. Were their victims—or other blacks the victims knew—members of the NAACP, the Klan wanted to know?

It appears that until May 2, 1964, all of the victims of these abductions got away alive; some have lived with effects of severe injuries the rest of their lives. What brought the Dee-Moore abductions to a deathly end?

There is no evidence that the instigator of the Dee-Moore kidnapping and beatings was involved in the other incidents from early 1964. But when he targeted Henry Dee, he was not worrying about the the NAACP. When Klansmen threw Henry Dee and Charles Moore on the ground, tied them up and beat them with bean poles, the torturers asked the 19-year-olds about a black insurrection instead of about the NAACP.

Henry Dee had recently been to Chicago to visit relatives there. He came back to Mississippi wearing a do-rag and exhibiting other trappings of northern city life. This, with rumors that had started circulating that black Muslims from Chicago were bringing guns into Mississippi to arm local blacks, made Dee an embodiment of much that the Klan feared and had mobilized to suppress. The Klansmen were so intent on getting Dee that when his friend Moore joined him on the street and the two started hitchhiking together from Meadeville to Natchez, the Klansmen took Moore along for the ride and killed them both.

The Dee-Moore case is rare. Unlike scores of other cold cases from the Civil Rights Era, after 43 years, it was finally brought to court. One of the Klansmen involved went to prison in 2007 on federal kidnapping charges for his role in the murders, and, more recently, Franklin County settled a landmark civil suit with the families. Yet, even here, with significant closure for the victims’ families and government being held to account for collusion with the Klan, no perpetrator has been charged with murder and no government official has admitted to any wrongdoing.

In this history of fear, self-possessed black men, who advocate for their rights and are willing to defend themselves when attacked (or are suspected of these things), are met with pathological, frenzied violence. We have not faced this history or held past perpetrators accountable. Until we do, we will continue to have Oscar Grants and we will continue to lack the will for adequate justice.

(A note of thanks to David Ridgen, who made factual corrections and shared his original research for the passages on Henry Dee and Charles Moore.)

Henry Dee

Settlement Reached in Civil Suit Charging Franklin County, MS Role in 1964 KKK Murders

On Monday, June 21, Franklin County, Mississippi agreed to a settlement in an historic civil suit with the families of Charles Moore and  Henry Dee, two 19-year-old Black men who were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan on May 2, 1964.

“This is the first time, to my knowledge, that any civil lawsuit against public officials for collaborating with the KKK has reached the point of settlement,” said Margaret Burnham, lead attorney for the family members who brought the suit against Franklin County. Klansman James Ford Seale went to prison in 2007 for his role in the murders; this landmark civil suit addressed the roles of Mississippi government officials in the double murder and subsequent cover-up of what had occurred.

“It’s a bit of a stretch to say they were ‘held accountable,’” Burnham added, “because they did not admit to the facts we presented.”

“I’m convinced there’s nothing else that I can do to get any more truth,” said Thomas Moore, brother of victim Charles. Moore said further that African Americans in his home county “are joyful that somebody brought Franklin County officials to reality and to the way they treated other people.”

Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins, sister of victim Henry Dee, filed the civil suit against Franklin County, MS in August, 2008. The suit focused on the respective roles and actions from 1964 to 1967 of Franklin County Sheriff Wayne Hutto and Franklin County Deputy Sheriff Kirby Shell, both now deceased. “In the aftermath of the killings,” according to the complaint by Moore and Collins,

Sheriff Hutto misled the Plaintiffs when they inquired of the Sheriff about their loved ones. Further, Sheriff Hutto deceived the Plaintiffs into thinking he knew nothing of the whereabouts of Moore and Dee when in fact he did.

Throughout 1964, Hutto and Shell misled investigative agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the murders, concealing their participation in the events of May 2, 1964, the day the two young men were killed.

Hutto and Shell covered up their role in these crimes, deceiving law enforcement officials as well as the Plaintiffs.  Plaintiffs did not become aware of the participation of Hutto and Shell as co-conspirators until the federal indictment was returned on January 24, 2007. Nor could Plaintiffs have discovered Hutto and Shell’s culpability before the indictment. The U.S. Justice Department immunized Charles Edwards, one of the coconspirators and, on November 3, 2006, obtained from Edwards a full statement of the crimes revealing for the first time ever the involvement of Franklin County on the day the men were slain.

Thomas Moore holds photo of his brother, Charles. (Postcard for Mississippi Cold Case, created by David Ridgen.)

“The settlement didn’t need to happen,” noted documentary filmmaker David Ridgen, “if Franklin County officials would have simply apologized to the Moore and Dee families for the actions and inactions of their officials in colluding with and in some cases participating in the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during the civil rights era.”

Ridgen’s film Mississippi Cold Case documented Thomas Moore’s quest to learn the truth about what happened to his brother Charles and to Henry Dee. In their work together on the film Ridgen and Moore uncovered evidence that led to the indictment, trial and conviction of Klansman James Ford Seale.

“I am proud of Thomas Moore for being the juggernaut that pushed this civil suit forward with his lawyers,” Ridgen said, “and I am hopeful that it will lead to civil trials in the near future that will hold Mississippi and elsewhere, state and county, accountable.”

“This is a case about unconscionable crimes and unconscionable deception,” Moore and Collins charged in their complaint.

It is also a case about the systematic denial by Franklin County of law enforcement protection to African-Americans and to whites suspected of opposing the Klan’s campaign of racist terror.

It is a case about the collusive and unlawful relationship between the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and Franklin County.

Franklin County officials stated in their resolution that they do not condone “the horrific deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Dee. “The county desires not to imply the deaths were anything but abhorrent.”

But the county denied any responsibility for the deaths of the two 19-year-old Black men. The officials resolved that the county had not “caused or contributed to the deaths of these two young men. These deaths are believed to have resulted solely from the criminal actions of the Ku Klux Klan.”

In their resolution, the Franklin County officials questioned the evidence in the civil complaint, drawn substantially from the evidence presented in the criminal trial of James Ford Seale that led to his conviction.

George Colllins, President of the Franklin County Board of Supervisors, who signed the resolution accepting the terms of settlement with Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins, had no comment when he was reached on the phone on Tuesday night.

“What we sought to prove was common knowledge at the time,” Margaret Burnham said, “that these crimes could not have persisted without the support of local officials….There is no statute of limitations on murder, no expiration date on moral obligation, and there should be no impunity for human rights violators.”

“I am satisfied with the verdict of the criminal trial, and I’m satisfied with the settlement,” concluded Thomas Moore. “I ran the race and I fought a good fight. I am finished with this case.”

“I am at peace for the first time in 46 years,” Moore said.

(Cross-posted at Civil Rights Cold Case Project)

Podcast

Documents

• Franklin County Board of Supervisors Resolution (PDF)
• Statement, Civil Rights and Restorative Justice, Northeastern University School of Law (PDF)
• Moore v. Franklin County Complaint (PDF)

Additional Coverage

• Michele Norris, “Miss. Officials Agree To Settlement In ’64 Slayings” (NPR)
• Jerry Mitchell, “Lawsuit over ’64 deaths settled” (Jackson Clarion-Ledger)
• Jonathan Saltzman, “Justice follows decades of silence” (Boston Globe)

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.

Boston Globe reporter Bryan Bender was also on the story.

Nearly half a century after the height of the civil rights movement, hundreds of thousands of pages of government files about the volatile era remain shielded from the American public, buried in FBI field office cabinets, blocked by resistant bureaucracies, or available only with large sections blacked out, according to US officials and researchers.

The situation has prompted a new push in Congress, led by Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, to require that all records relating to the life and death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. be located, reviewed, and released by a review board at the National Archives similar to those established for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and for Nazi war criminals

Kerry’s plan to introduce legislation this week, however, is seen as only the first step in a broader movement to force the government to disclose what it knows – and did – about violence against blacks during the civil rights era, including scores of unsolved lynching and bombing cases.

Bender spoke with Thomas Moore, who, as brother of murder victim Charles Eddie Moore, now works with Cold Case project as a family advocate.

Thomas Moore is among the few family members to see the murder case of a loved one reopened decades after the height of the civil rights movement.

But that was only after a journalist obtained previously unreleased federal and state records about the killing of his brother, Charles.

“It wasn’t until 2005 that I was able to receive the unredacted FBI files,’’ Moore said. And it was not until this month, he added, that he obtained the Mississippi autopsy photos.

As for countless other cases, Moore said he believes “there is still a lot of information out there. It should have been released a long time ago.’’

Bender spoke with me as well:

Part of the problem, many researchers say, is that unless they know which specific documents to request there is little chance of success, and as a result there needs to be an alternate mechanism along the lines of what Kerry is advocating for King files.

They insist that what the government knew at the time about widespread racial violence could be crucial in solving some murders, such as the brutal killing of Clifton Walker, a father of five who was shot in the face on his way home from work in Woodville, Miss., in 1964.

“The FBI documents I have [on the case] are highly redacted. I stare at them every day,’’ said Ben Greenberg, 40, a freelance journalist in Somerville who is working with the Cold Case Project. “If I knew whose name was under there or could better piece together what circumstances are being described, I’d be further down the path.’’

He thinks government files about a rash of racially motivated killings at the time in southwest Mississippi might contain information that could help solve multiple cases.

“If these files were more broadly available and not redacted they could provide a road map,’’ said Greenberg, whose father, Paul, worked for King in the early 1960s.

There’s more in Bender and Mitchell‘s articles.

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.

I am pleased to announce that The Civil Rights Cold Case Project website is now up and running at http://coldcases.org.

My previous blog post, about my most recent trip to Mississippi, was cross posted from the Cold Case Project site.

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.

There’s more on the site and much more to come.

In October, I was in Mississippi again, following leads in my investigation of the 1964 murder of Clifton Walker, a black man from Woodville, MS.

Driving home from the swing shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS, Walker was ambushed by Klansmen, who stopped his car on a deserted road and blew his face off with shotguns in the dark of night. He never made it home to his wife and five children. He was 37 years old.

The Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol and the FBI investigated for nine months and identified numerous suspects—including two who were recommended for arrest—but no one was ever charged.

This post works around the edges of the story to convey a little of what it’s like to conduct a real-time investigation of decades-old events. I’ll be publishing an in-depth article about the case soon.

The Tip

“One of my cousins, who still lives in Woodville, told me Emma’s in Centreville,” came the excited voice over the phone. “She just opened up a club there.”

There are two towns in Wilkinson County, MS—Woodville, which is the county seat, and Centreville, which is 15 miles east of there.

The caller was one of Clifton Walker’s nephews. I had just met and interviewed him for the first time the day before in Louisiana. In 1964 he and his family lived on the same 87 acre family plot of land as Walker and his family.

This was big. 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents said Emma, a black cook at the truck stop where Walker’s murder was allegedly planned, had knowledge crucial to solving the case. I had found subjects in the documents and confirmed others dead, but I had nothing on Emma, past or present.

“Did your cousin say the name of the club or where it is?” I asked Walker’s nephew.

“No,” he replied, “she didn’t mention that.”

Centreville is a small town of 1500 people. Finding a club that just opened up there didn’t seem daunting. The town is 45 miles from the hotel where I was staying in Natchez. I got into my rental car and drove there.

Main Street in Centreville is about eight blocks long. I parked my car near the western end, got out and started walking east. After a few blocks, I passed a small group of young black men near the corner of West Park Street and noticed a little place down that road that looked like a bar. A number of people were standing around outside. Was that Emma’s “club”?

After another block, I came to the Camp Van Dorn World War II Museum—the tall, box shaped, single-story brick building might have once been a bank or post office; the brown paint looked newer than the paint on any of the other buildings. Camp Van Dorn was an army base that operated in Centreville from 1942-1947.

It wouldn’t take long in such a small town for rumors about my work to spread widely. Maybe inside the museum I could get into a conversation that would reveal what I needed to know without asking direct questions about Emma.

The door was locked. The museum closed at 4:00 pm, and it was already after 5:00. I turned around and started walking back in the direction of my car and tried to come up with Plan B. One of the guys from the street corner was now standing across the street from me.

He called out: “What’re you looking for?”

His name was Robert. I had my camera over my shoulder. I said I was from Boston.

“Boston, Massachusetts?” he asked, “where they have whales and shit?”

Robert suggested beers; I assented, thinking we might go to the place on West Park, but he took me down the block to McKey’s Grocery.

“What kind of beer you drink?” he asked. “I drink Bud Light.”

“That’s fine. Hey, it’s on me,” I said, giving him a 20, “just give me the change.”

He came back a few minutes later with two 24 oz Bud Light cans.

“Seventeen dollars and three cents. Let me hold some of that for you,” Robert offered. “I’ll take you out to Camp Van Dorn and show you underground bomb bunkers, old torpedos and shit like that. You might take a few pictures of me standing in a cave.“

“Thanks,” I answered. “Maybe if I make it back here, but I need to get back to Natchez soon.”

We walked another block, crossed the street and walked a few feet down West Park and sat down on a stoop in front of an old pair of forest green double-doors.

His friends started coming by.

“This guy is a photographer from Boston,” Robert said.

Robert grabbed one of his buddies and started posing and flashing gang signs.

“Snap me. Don’t forget to snap me.”

One guy pulled off his shirt to show off his tattoos from prison.

“You make sure you take this shit back to Boston, Massachusetts.”

“What kind of white girls you got up there in Boston? They freaky?”

I gestured towards the bar down the block. “How long has this place been around?”

“A long time. Years.”

I snapped more photos of Robert’s friends.

Robert leaned over to me, saying, “They see you sitting here with me, so you’re cool. Why don’t you let me hold that 10 for you?”

It was getting dusky and it was time to go.

At the street corner one of the guys started asking me for $5 for a pack of t-shirts.

I thought about where else I could ask around about Emma’s club, but it was definitely time to go.

I heard them calling out as I walked back to the car. I didn’t turn around. I got into the car and drove down a side street to weave my way back to Highway 24.

I called Walker’s nephew from the car and told him I didn’t find Emma’s place.

The Source

In the morning, I drove to the Natchez Coffee House, got some breakfast, used the wifi and sorted through some of my photographs. At around 11:00 am, I went out to my car to call the Woodville cousin who was the source of the information that Emma had a club. Her mother, now deceased, was another of Clifton Walker’s sisters. All of Walker’s 10 siblings are dead.

“Why did he go and run his mouth off like that without knowing the facts?”

She was exasperated.

“Emma opened a new club there. But it was twenty-five years ago,” she said. “I was a little girl when I heard it. I went to Centreville with my mother. Emma walked past us in the store we were shopping in. Mama said, ‘if it wasn’t for that woman, my brother would still be alive.’”

“Is Emma still there? Is she alive?” I asked.

“I have no idea.”

It was a 25-year-old tip.

Return to Centreville

I decided to visit the office of Centreville Chief of Police Jimmy Ray Reese.

“It was over him either using the white restrooms or drinking out of the white water fountain” at International Paper, Chief Reese told me.

Reese said he knew all about the Walker case. He said a number of things I hadn’t heard others say before.

“Back in those days they had the signs, you know. He’d been told don’t do one or the other. And apparently he did and he was found shot with buckshot. Something like 250 holes were found in his car. I think a tree might have been cut across the road and he might have gotten out to check on the tree and they shot him.”

I told him about Emma.

“Yeah I know her,” he said.

“She still around?” I asked.

“Yup,” he replied, “I talked to Emma last week. She was involved?”

It was no longer dated hearsay. Emma was alive.

“She’s mentioned in the documents as having knowledge,” I explained, trying to not speak too excitedly.

“I’ve been in law enforcement in this town 33 years, 34 years in January. She’s been here ever since then,” Reese said. “She ran a big night club. I know her quite well, and we always got along good.”

“When she ran that juke, I was the deputy and we had a lot dealings,” Reese continued. “A lot of them at these jukes don’t like to tell you who was fighting, but she’d always point em out to me and have em arrested and try to stop things. She tried to run a pretty good place. She had a lot of pull back in them days.”

I finally met Emma the next morning. She was 81 years old, tall, even as she bent to use her cane. She had small, braided pigtails pinned tightly behind her ears. She was getting over the flu and was wearing a white, terrycloth robe. Her recollections comported with details in the 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol documents.

“They come down there and they questioned me,” she said. “They knocked on the door, I answered the door and they just pushed the door on over.”

After the murder she was living in Louisiana.

“They brought me big pictures. He was laying there with blood, he was full of blood and I didn’t look at them cause it was horrible.”

She clearly had not forgotten it.

Did she have information crucial to my investigation? She sure didn’t think so, but that remains to be seen.

(Cross-posted on The Civil Rights Cold Case Project blog.)

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.

In 2007, Stanley Nelson, editor of the Concordia Sentinel, in Ferriday, LA, took a look at the FBI’s list of cold cases and was surprised to find a Black victim from Ferriday, named Frank Morris. In December of 1964, Morris’ shoe shop was burned, and he was forced inside of it by the arsonists.

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.

A cousin of JoEd Edwards, Carl Ray Thompson, recalled that he and three friends were were picked up by Concordia Parish Sheriff Frank DeLaughter and taken to the Ferriday jail.

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.”

Afterward, according to Thompson, DeLaughter told him and his friends to keep quiet about what happened or they “could all turn up missing like Joe-Ed.” Nelson has also been told by a former FBI agent that an informant claimed Edwards was subsequently skinned alive in a secret Ku Klux Klan torture chamber.

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.

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.

A day after the FBI asked for the public’s assistance in solving 43 unpunished killings in Mississippi during the civil rights era, researchers say they know of at least 18 more slayings that haven’t been included.

“There definitely needs to be a bigger list,” said Margaret Burnham, professor at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston.

On Thursday, the FBI highlighted 43 killings between 1955 and 1967 in Mississippi.

Burnham said research has uncovered 11 additional cases. She said one name the FBI released is misspelled – it should be the Rev. J.E. Evasingston, who was killed in 1955 in Tallahatchie.

Ben Greenberg of Boston, a journalist and blogger investigating the Feb. 28, 1964, killing of Clifton Walker, north of Woodville, said he’s run across seven names in his research that don’t appear on the FBI list and weren’t cited by Burnham’s research. “And there might be more,” he said.

Three of those – Lula Mae Anderson, Eli Jackson and Dennis Jones – were found dead in a car in December 1963, not far from Poor House Road, where Walker is believed to have been killed by Klansmen….

Surprisingly, all seven additional names that Greenberg found were either mentioned or referenced in the FBI file itself.

He has obtained a copy of the file of the Walker case, but some of the most important information has been redacted, such as the names of the two suspects recommended for arrest by the FBI, he said.

If the FBI is truly interested in solving these cases, the entire files should be released to the families and the public, he said.

He recalled sharing some of the FBI files with the Walker family – files the family had never seen.

“A full approach to justice involves more than just procedures in the courtroom,” he said. “It also involves as full accounting as possible of the truth in the community where the murders occurred.”

Related Reading

• FBI wants info on 43 slayings

It has been hard to put any of this into words. For me it begins with my being a child of the Civil Rights Movement. As many readers of this blog know, in the early 1960s, my father worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as Special Assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked in the SCLC NY office and fought on the front lines of the civil rights battle in Birmingham, AL. One of the youth leaders of the Birmingham movement, the late William Douthard (aka Meatball), lived with us when he first moved to Albany, NY in 1978.

I started this blog to write about my father’s history in the Movement and in the process I have had the privilege of getting involved with the broader community of Civil Rights Movement veterans. I’ve made new friends and joined hands with them in the continuing struggle for racial justice in America.

It is incredibly potent to see images of a Black man elected to be President—in a historic, landslide victory, no less. To see that, and to see America’s embrace of the Obama family, and to see Michelle and Barack’s two little Black girls who are going to grow up in the White House—is to see barriers broken that I hoped but did not expect to see broken in my lifetime.

This is not the ultimate fulfillment of the struggle imparted to me by my father and his comrades—but it is a watershed moment. America still has a long way to go. And we don’t know what kind of president Obama will turn out to be; he may well end up being a centrist Democrat in the tradition of Bill Clinton. There are also indications that his administration will promote unprecedented changes in American government and society. It is likely that the Obama administration will be a mix of these things. But Obama’s candidacy and election are more than these emotions and are more than the sum his policies and accomplishments of his administration.

One of the Civil Rights Movement veterans I’ve gotten to know is Joyce Ladner. Joyce grew up in Palmers Crossing, Hattiesburg, MS. She and her sister Dorie became leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and were involved in much of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. Joyce has gone on to be a prominent sociologist, a pioneer in Black women’s studies, a president of Howard University, a Clinton appointee to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

In January, Joyce launched her Ladner Report blog to support Barack Obama in the midst of the contentious and often ugly Democratic primary race. Before the election results were known on Tuesday night, she wrote:

Joyce Ladner and Michelle Obama

I am posting this piece before the election results are in, so I don’t know if Senator Barack Obama will become President Obama. I going out to an election returns party tonight. But the race has already been won. I don’t know if the numbers will allow us to call him “President Obama” but what I do know is this: we have turned this country around. It can not, it will not shift back to the greed, mean spiritedness, selfishness, and all the other negative adjectives I could call it.

I was reminded of a passage written by Franz Fanon:

Each generation must define its mission,
Fulfill it, or betray it.

I think Fanon’s words have a lot of relevance today because older generations worked in this campaign to restore us to our better selves, while the young stepped forth to define their missions. In time, they, too, will step up and figure out how to carry them out. They will have a great transformational leader in a President Obama.

With this in mind, I told a fellow volunteer at the Obama campaign office today that the laws of the universe helped to shift us away from the horrors that led people to rise up and clamor and work for CHANGE. Obama was a conduit for the change we citizens must have. He understands that too because he keeps telling us that the election is not about him but it’s about US.

I spent some time yesterday and today waving my Obama sign at major intersections in this beautiful Florida city that is so deeply Republican. I saw many McCain-Palin supporters taking their last breaths in their old identities. Several very old men gave me the finger sign, which shocked me because they looked like it was hard for them to raise their arms. Infirm. Old. Set in 19th century ideas, but still nasty, hostile, and in some cases racist. It’s not enough to say that these people are driven entirely by self interest. It goes deeper than that. It is about the redefinition of who we are as a nation. It taps into the better part of our selves for the negative experiences to which we have been subjected are destroying our inner spirits….

Let’s hope this two year experience many of us have had with this campaign will leave us all with a renewal of energy and optimism, that will fuel our desire to sacrifice for the changes the society needs. I have not had experiences similar to those in this campaign since I was a college student civil rights activist. I hope we who had similar experiences in the past can now feel content to bequeath to the younger generations that same sense of struggle and morality, optimism and hope, hard work and sacrifice. They are up to the task and we should be more than ready to move to the side and urge them to lead.

May God protect Senator Obama and may he guide and protect us as well, as we work for higher purposes and goals that demand that we all step outside ourselves to work for the greater good.

On Wednesday morning, I wrote an email to my friend John Due.

John was born in Indiana, where he attended Indiana University. There, in 1957, three years before the Southern sit-in movement, he helped organize a testing campaign of segregated off-campus housing, restaurants and barber shops. After several more years of activity in the NAACP and union organizing, John went to Florida A&M in Tallahassee to attend law school and get in involved in the Civil Rights Movement  there. John worked for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, which sent him to Mississippi in 1964, where he conducted a dangerous investigation of violent reprisals against Black citizens and their SNCC and CORE workers seeking the right to vote in Southwest Mississippi—the same area of Mississippi my current investigations of civil rights era racial violence focus on. John has been active in practically every civil rights organization one could name. More recently he was a leader of the successful campaign for Miami-Dade County to adopt the most comprehensive living wage ordinance in the country. John’s wife, Patricia Stephens Due, a civil rights leader in her own right in the Tallahassee movement and beyond, co-authored with one of their daughters, Tananarive Due, the book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.

My subject line to John was “Congratulations to us all.”

I’m thinking of you and your family today. I just tried to call your home to say congratulations and that the news that we have elected Barack Obama as President of the United States is more meaningful because I know you.

John replied in a vein similar to Joyce’s blog post:

Like John Lewis—as Obama has said—my wife, myself, your father and other unsung heroes are and were the Moses Generation.

Obama said he was of the Joshua Generation, like you are.

And crossing the Red Sea that was made easy by the Lord is nothing compared to the River Jordan that you and your children will have to do because the Jordan is still not crossed yet. You will soon find out the difference between McCain saying “I,” and Obama saying “You.”

So I accept your congratulations as a matter of recognition of helping to put you and your generation in place. “To Come This Far.” Now it is your turn. So I agree—”Congratulations to us all.”

Neither Joyce nor John have illusions that Obama is the silver bullet for our nation’s woes. They are ardent supporters of Obama, who see him and his candicy as having invigorated my generation and American politics with the capacity to now start moving ahead to the next stages of evolution. It will be no less of a struggle. But there is hope now that we can meet it. Yes we can.