GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
In May 1964, about six weeks before the infamous murders of three young civil rights workers, a lesser known hate crime was carried out and remained unresolved for more than four decades.
Two young African-American men, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, were hitchhiking on the side of the road in Meadville, Mississippi. It's a town just on the outskirts of the Homochitto National Park. The men were picked up by a Klansman named James Ford Seale. They were taken to the nearby forest, tortured, and then driven down to a tributary of the Mississippi River, where Moore and Dee were forcibly drowned.
Writer Harry MacLean picks up the story from here.
Mr. HARRY MACLEAN (Author, "The Past is Never Dead: The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's Struggle for Redemption"): When the bottom half of Charles Moore's body was found hung up on a log by a fisherman in a back chute of the Mississippi River 30 miles north of Natchez, over 250 FBI agents were in Mississippi on J. Edgar Hoover's direct orders, scouring the countryside for the three civil rights workers who had disappeared after being released from jail in Neshoba County. Law enforcement and the national media hustled eagerly to the river, only to be disappointed when the body turned out to be one of the missing black youths from Franklin County.
RAZ: The murders of the three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were headline news for months. And a quarter century later, they became the inspiration for the movie "Mississippi Burning." But the case of those other two men, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, languished; that is until 2007 when a federal court in Mississippi tried and convicted James Ford Seale for their murders.
Harry MacLean actually moved to Mississippi to chronicle that trial. It's the basis of his new book, "The Past is Never Dead." And Harry MacLean joins me from KCFR in Denver.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. MACLEAN: Thank you.
RAZ: Harry MacLean, you write that this trial that began in 2007 wasn't just a trial of James Ford Seale, but the trial of the state of Mississippi. That state was on trial.
Mr. MACLEAN: Well, this was Mississippi's eighth trial of a former Klansman for murders that took place in the '60s. And in a larger sense, you can see that Mississippi is trying to redeem its past many ways; but in this particular respect, by going back and kind of cleaning up these old race murders that had taken place and had lain unprosecuted. So Mississippi was kind of on the line itself, as well as James Ford Seale.
RAZ: Harry MacLean, let's go back for a moment to 1964. Seale was the original prime suspect. He was even arrested and then let go. In the face of so much evidence, witnesses and others, how was he allowed to live as a free man for 40 more years?
Mr. MACLEAN: Well, for a while, they actually thought Seale was dead. But initially, he and Charles Marcus Edwards were charged with the crime of kidnapping and murdering the two youths. That was 1964, not too long after they disappeared.
However, in January of '65, the charges were dropped by the state and the feds. The federal government very interested in that time at pursuing the crimes in Neshoba County, of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, did not pick up on the case. So it sat there for 43 years, as basically was forgotten.
RAZ: How did Seale come back to the public's attention?
Mr. MACLEAN: Actually, ABC News "20/20" program, the producer and Connie Chung got on this case after they had successfully unearthed another Klan murder case, and which was successfully prosecuted. They were in Mississippi. They started looking. And they got a hold of the files on him and they did a public show on it.
RAZ: You write a lot about the Justice Department prosecutor, Paige Fitzgerald. This in no way was an open and shut case for her, right? I mean, she faced a lot of challenges. Some of the evidence was old, people had died, as you say. How was she able to pull this off?
Mr. MACLEAN: In most of these cases, where they are trying Klansmen for the crimes of the '60s, there was a previous trial, so they had the transcript of the testimony and they could actually read that transcript out in front of the jury. In this case, there was no previous testimony.
RAZ: Hmm.
Mr. MACLEAN: So she had basically informant statements. She had an alleged confession by Seale.
RAZ: This is the confession that he made…
Mr. MACLEAN: And hopefully…
RAZ: This is the confession he made at the time. He…
Mr. MACLEAN: Yeah. He said, well, yeah, I did it, but you're going to have to prove it. They got that into evidence. They got Charles Marcus Edwards, one of the co-conspirators and killers, was allowed to testify. And they were trying to get the informant's statement in. That was like double or triple hearsay and that wasn't allowed in. So she really just had Edwards saying what Seale had told him 40 years earlier, which is a pretty slim read, really.
RAZ: Hmm. I mean, as you say, her whole case hinged on this man, Charles Marcus Edwards, himself a former Klansman, who then goes on to express remorse for what happened. Was it genuine, in your view, when you saw it?
Mr. MACLEAN: It was very convincing. Edwards really was the one who set the whole crime in motion. And at one very dramatic moment in the trial, he turns to the family members of the two boys that were murdered and says, I apologize for what I did. I ask your forgiveness. And very dramatic moment and, to me, very convincing.
RAZ: Throughout the trial, Harry MacLean, there were plenty of people in Mississippi who argued that James Ford Seale was old, in poor health, and that the case really shouldn't have been pursued.
Mr. MACLEAN: What's interesting about that argument was you heard it from a wide variety of people. I heard it from urban whites, from rural whites. I heard it from blacks who said, you know, we really need the resources that are being brought to this trial to deal with contemporary problems we have in Jackson; the crime and drug problems there.
The other rational for it was that God will be the judge. It's not up to us to judge. But I think the overwhelming sentiment was that they should be prosecuted. You heard a lot of white people say, well, yeah. I mean, justice should be done but - and you didn't feel that they very much believed it; that they just kind of felt like, well, yeah, let's get over with.
RAZ: So, in a sense, did it allow a certain segment of Mississippi society to feel maybe absolved, that in a sense the state was or had come to terms with its past?
Mr. MACLEAN: I think it's one step. And I think everybody realizes that, and that's the right thing to do. But I don't think anybody has a sense that coming to terms with their past is over because of this.
RAZ: Harry MacLean is the author of the new book "The Past is Never Dead: The Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's Struggle for Redemption." He joined me from Denver.
Mr. MacLean, thanks.
Mr. MACLEAN: Thanks very much for having me.
RAZ: And you can read an excerpt of Harry MacLean's book at our Web site, npr.org.
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