Justice Delayed..is justice denied...


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Muhammad Ali


Rodney D. Coates
Professor

Justice Follows Decades of Silence in Mississippi

Northeastern Law Students Aid Kin of Miss. Slay Victims

By Jonathan Saltzman
Boston Globe
June 23, 2010
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/06/23/northeastern_students_aid_justice_in_64_slayings/

On May 2, 1964, two black teenagers disappeared while
hitchhiking in Franklin County in southwestern
Mississippi, a hotbed of racial violence during the
civil rights era.

The decomposed bodies of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles
Eddie Moore, who had been beaten and weighted down,
surfaced two months later in the Mississippi River. But
it took more than 40 years for anyone to be prosecuted
for their slayings. In June 2007, a reputed Ku Klux
Klansman, James Ford Seale, was tried and convicted of
kidnapping and conspiracy in the deaths.

This week, a Northeastern University School of Law
professor helped relatives of Dee and Moore achieve
another milestone in their quest for justice. The
relatives - represented by Margaret A. Burnham, head of
the school's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice
Project - settled a federal lawsuit that had accused
Franklin County law enforcement officials of assisting
Klansmen in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of the
two 19-year-olds.

Neither the plaintiffs nor the county would disclose
the terms of the settlement because of a
confidentiality agreement. But Thomas Moore, the 66-
year-old brother of Charles Moore, said he was
satisfied that Franklin County has been held
accountable and credited Burnham and her law students.

"This has been a long journey, 46 years,'' he said in a
telephone interview from Colorado Springs, Colo. "After
we got the verdict in the Seale case, you'd think that
was it. But that was just part of the mission. Had it
not been for Margaret, Franklin County would still be
in denial.''

Burnham and about 15 law students spent roughly 2 1/2
years on the case, combing through thousands of pages
of old FBI files and police reports, interviewing
dozens of witnesses in Mississippi, and researching the
history of racial bias by law enforcement in the
county.

She said the evidence her legal team gathered confirmed
an open secret in the county: The slayings "could not
have taken place but with the collaboration, or passive
cooperation, of local law enforcement.''

The Franklin County Board of Supervisors unanimously
approved the out-of-court settlement Monday, passing a
resolution that said the county was "not in a financial
position to continue litigation.'' Nonetheless, the
resolution said the county denied contributing to the
slayings and "in no way condones the horrific deaths.''

"These deaths are believed to have resulted solely from
the criminal actions of the Ku Klux Klan,'' the
resolution said.

The killings of Dee and Moore are among about two dozen
cold cases from the civil rights era that state and
federal prosecutors across the South have brought to
trial since the early 1990s. But they have received
less attention than other rekindled cases, much as the
disappearance of Dee and Moore was overshadowed by
other racially motivated slayings.

Dee and Moore were kidnapped by Seale and other
Klansmen on US Highway 84 near Meadville, the county
seat, according to the lawsuit. The Klansmen targeted
the two because Dee had recently visited Chicago and
wore a bandanna on his head, prompting the kidnappers
to accuse him of being among a group of black militants
the Klan contended were bringing guns into the county.

The kidnappers took Dee and Moore to Homochitto
National Forest, the suit said. Klansmen beat them with
bean poles and tree limbs for about 30 minutes while
demanding where the purported guns were. Finally, one
of the kidnapping victims falsely stated that the guns
were hidden at the Roxie First Baptist Church, the suit
said.

That is when county officials came into the picture,
according to the suit. Several Klansmen drove to the
Sheriff's Department and asked Sheriff Wayne Hutto, a
fellow Klan member, and a deputy sheriff to search the
church with them, without a warrant. They found no
guns.

After the search came up empty-handed, Seale and other
Klansmen drove Dee and Moore, who had been bound and
placed in a car trunk with their mouths taped, across
state lines to Louisiana, the suit said. They tied Dee
to an engine block, took him by boat into the
Mississippi River, and dumped him overboard to drown.
They strapped Moore to a railroad tie and iron weights
and dumped him overboard, too.

Parts of their bodies surfaced in mid-July. At the
time, however, the case was overshadowed by the massive
search for Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew
Goodman, the civil-rights workers who disappeared from
Neshoba County in June 1964 in what became known as the
"Mississippi Burning'' case.

In November that year, Seale and one of the other
Klansmen kidnappers, Charles Edwards, were arrested and
charged under state law with murder in the deaths of
Moore and Dee. But the Franklin County district
attorney persuaded the court to drop the charges
several weeks later. But at no time did the sheriff
disclose his contact with the Klansmen that night, even
when he was interviewed by the FBI at the time, the
suit said.

It remained a secret until Seale was tried in US
District Court in Jackson in 2007, after Thomas Moore
and a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary
maker uncovered evidence about the killings and
contacted federal prosecutors. At the trial, Edwards
testified under immunity about what happened that day,
including the Klan's search of the church with the
sheriff and deputy.

"We allege that the sheriff could have prevented the
deaths had he inquired of the Klansmen, `Where did you
get this information about the guns?' '' Burnham said,
adding that Moore and Dee were still alive at the time.

Seale was convicted and sentenced to the maximum of
three life sentences. The sheriff and deputy are both
deceased.

Burnham, a former Boston Municipal Court judge who
founded the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice
Project three years ago, said the settlement included
money that satisfied relatives of Moore and Dee.

A former student who worked on the case said it changed
her life. Janeen Blake, who graduated from the school a
year ago, sat in on the deposition at which lawyers
questioned Charles Edwards and he repeatedly invoked
his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Blake, 27, who grew up in suburban New Jersey and is
black, had heard stories about the civil rights era,
but seeing a former Klansman up close "shook me up.''

Now that the case is settled, Thomas Moore said he
plans to visit the tombstones of his brother and Dee in
Franklin County in a few months.

"I'm going to stand in front of the graves,'' he said,
"and say, `Brothers, I did all I could do, with the
help of Margaret Burnham. We held the county
accountable for what they did to you 46 years ago.' ''

Saltzman can be reached at [log in to unmask] c
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

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