JACKSON, Miss. (BP)–As a 71-year-old man faces prosecution in connection with the violent deaths of two black teenagers nearly 43 years ago, Southern Baptist ethicist Richard Land said the phrase “justice delayed is justice denied” is unduly pessimistic.
“It’s never too late to do the right thing,” Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said. “And while justice delayed is not the impartial and perfect justice which is our nation’s goal, it certainly honors our ideals and the promises of our founding documents more than ignoring the past or seeking to sweep it under the rug.”
James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was arrested Jan. 24 on federal kidnapping charges in connection with the slayings of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in May 1964. His apprehension marks the 28th arrest from the civil rights era since 1989 as authorities are finally bringing to justice many of the murderers who slipped by during a time of high tension among blacks and whites.
“I believe that these prosecutions are ultimately good for our society in that they help to further heal deep wounds in our social fabric from dark days within the lifetime of somewhere between a third and half of our population — when people were horribly mistreated and denied even basic human and constitutional rights because of the color of their skin,” Land, who was a senior in high school in 1964 and remembers the conflicts well, told Baptist Press.
“These prosecutions are one way that our society bears witness to the evil of racism and bigotry, and it’s a way of saying to the millions of our fellow citizens who were victimized a collective ‘We’re sorry,’” Land added.
Seale pleaded not guilty Jan. 25 to two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy, and then he asked a federal judge to dismiss the charges, saying the statute of limitations has expired.
A break in the case came last year when Thomas Moore, a brother of one of the murdered teens, and Canadian documentarian David Ridgen confronted Seale’s cousin, Charles Marcus Edwards, in rural Mississippi.
FBI documents indicate Henry Dee and Charles Moore, both 19 at the time, were hitchhiking along a highway outside Meadville, Miss., when Seale pulled up and pretended he was a revenue agent hunting for bootleg whiskey stills, and he told the boys to get in the car. Seale then allegedly drove them to a nearby forest where he and fellow Klansmen beat the teens nearly to death before dumping them in the Mississippi River, tied down with weights.
Several months later, Seale and Edwards were arrested on murder charges, but because the FBI was consumed with the high-profile “Mississippi Burning” case, they turned the two men over to local authorities. The case was quietly dropped.
In 2000, when The Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson, Miss., indicated the beatings might have happened in the Homochitto National Forest, the U.S. Department of Justice reopened the case, claiming federal jurisdiction. Again, though, the case slipped out of the spotlight.
When 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen was convicted in 2005 for the Mississippi Burning killings of three men, Moore and Ridgen knew they had another chance at reviving the Seale case. Edwards finally opened up about what he knew last fall, which led to FBI agents arresting Seale. Edwards has not been charged.
In arguing that the charges against Seale be dismissed, assistant federal defender Kathy Nester said the statute of limitations for kidnapping crimes is five years, which means the deadline to charge Seale was 1969, the Associated Press reported. But a precedent was set in 2003 when Earnest Avants was convicted of aiding and abetting in the killing of a black man in the Homochitto National Forest in 1966.
A federal judge in that case ruled that because the federal government did not know it had jurisdiction until 1999 when it discovered the killing had happened in a national forest, the statute of limitations had not expired, AP said. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judge’s ruling.
Since 1989, Mississippi and six other states have re-examined 29 civil rights-era killings, leading to 22 convictions, The Clarion-Ledger reported.
“We are extremely pleased to see that the federal government is truly committed to taking care of its unfinished business from the civil rights era,” Alvin Sykes, a Kansas City activist who helped lead to one reinvestigation, told The Clarion-Ledger.
Killen’s conviction in 2005 was the latest. He was the ringleader in a group of Klansmen who ambushed three civil rights workers on a dark, dirt road outside Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964. The men shot the three workers and buried their bodies in an earthen dam they had prepared in advance.
In 1967, an all-white jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of convicting Killen, a part-time Baptist preacher, for the crime. He was set free because the holdout said she couldn’t vote to convict a preacher.
Authorities in Mississippi and Alabama in recent years also have won convictions in the 1963 assassination of NAACP activist Medgar Evers and the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls.
Sykes, of Kansas City, has worked on the case involving the 1955 killing of Emmet Till, which The Clarion-Ledger said may be presented to a grand jury later this year. Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was brutally murdered by two white men in Mississippi who were acquitted but later confessed to the crime.
Sykes is advocating legislation that would create a cold case unit within the Justice Department charged specifically with prosecuting killers from the civil rights era.
“When Congress passes the Till bill, you can best believe there will be a lot more perpetrators from that era who will be facing the bar of justice for the lynchings they thought they got away with many years ago,” Sykes told The Clarion-Ledger.
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