JACKSON, Miss.—A couple dozen people, black and white, fill the wooden courtroom pews to show solidarity with the relatives of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two promising young black men whose lives were violently stolen on May 2, 1964, when the friends were only 19.
A smaller group of six or eight people—wife, stepdaughter and a few others—sit behind reputed Ku Klux Klansman James Ford Seale, who is now 71 and hard of hearing and is on trial for federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges in a long-ignored crime from Mississippi’s turbulent past.
An eclectic group of others fill the public seating in the fourth-floor courtroom of the James O. Eastland Federal Courthouse in downtown Jackson, where a Yale-educated black judge presides and a blue velvet curtain covers a 1938 Works Progress Administration mural that includes black people picking cotton. Historians, authors and journalists busily scribble notes during testimony, while courthouse employees and a few, random downtown workers sit quietly and listen.
Many at the trial say they feel compelled to witness history in the latest of more than a dozen Jim Crow-era cases that prosecutors have revived across the South since the early 1990s.
“I hope some justice is done. I hope there is fairness to all sides,” the Rev. Ed King, a 70-year-old white man whose face still bears a prominent scar because he was physically attacked for his civil rights activism in Mississippi decades ago.
The mostly divided courtroom seating arrangement is almost like that at a wedding. Instead of bride and groom, it’s prosecution and defense. After benches behind the prosecution side of the aisle are filled, some spectators slide into the spaces behind Seale, usually with an empty row left behind his family.
The one jarring exception was one day last week when white supremacist Richard Barrett, a lawyer who leads the Learned-based Nationalist Movement, meandered into the courtroom and sat for a short time on the front row near the Dee and Moore families.
Seale, a retired crop-duster, was indicted in January and has pleaded not guilty to the kidnapping and conspiracy charges. He has denied belonging to the Klan.
Several witnesses this past week testified they knew Seale and others in his family were in the secretive organization that took root in most parts of the deep woods of southwest Mississippi, including in law enforcement organizations, during the 1960s.
Attorneys spent nearly four days selecting a jury of eight whites, four blacks and three white alternates.
The prosecution and the defense made their opening arguments this past Monday, and testimony came that afternoon from the first three witnesses—men who, on two sweltering days in July 1964, pulled the badly decomposed partial corpses of Dee and Moore from a Mississippi River backwater south of Vicksburg, more than 70 miles from where the two young friends were last seen while shopping and making Saturday night plans with other buddies in Meadville.
Testimony extended through Friday from Charles Marcus Edwards, a confessed Klansman who said he and Seale took part in the attacks; Robert W. Middleton a former Baptist minister who, in 1963, watched Seale saw off a shotgun and heard him wonder aloud about shooting black people; a series of retired investigators who either tracked Klan activities or examined physical evidence from this crime; a son and daughter of a black minister who kept a handwritten journal about racial violence in Franklin County in 1964; Thelma Collins of Springfield, La., a sister of Dee; and Thomas Moore of Colorado Springs, Colo., the only brother of Moore.
Prosecutors say they expect to wrap up their case early this coming week, then defense attorneys said they plan to call seven witnesses. Seale, they said, will not testify.
Among the spectators in the courtroom Ellie and Bettie Dahmer, who have attended almost every day and have been sitting in the front row on the prosecution side, near Thomas Moore and his son.
Ellie Dahmer is the widow and Bettie Dahmer is the daughter of Vernon Dahmer Sr., who died in 1966 after the Klan firebombed their family’s home near Hattiesburg in January 1966. Vernon Dahmer Sr. was a local NAACP leader who actively worked for black voter registration.
“This is living history,” Ellie Dahmer said outside the courthouse one day last week. “I think there ought to be at least some students here.”
Bettie Dahmer said it’s important for her and her mother to support the families of Dee and Moore: “We wanted them to know we’re there for them.”
Two years ago, Bettie Dahmer went to Neshoba County to watch Klansman Edgar Ray Killen stand trial in state court in the “Mississippi Burning” case—the slayings of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, exactly 41 years to the day after the young men were killed. Killen is serving a 60-year sentence.
During the 1960s, Bowers was the Mississippi leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the group that killed Dahmer; Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney; and, prosecutors now say, Dee and Moore.
Bowers was convicted in 1998 for the Dahmer bombing. He died in state prison this past November, at 82, while serving a life sentence.
One of the regulars at the Seale trial is Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, an activist who pushed authorities to reopen an investigation into the 1955 Mississippi Delta slaying of Chicago teenager Emmett Till. Officials announced earlier this year that no new indictments would be brought.
Two published authors are in taking in the scene.
Olympia Vernon, 34, was born in Louisiana and spent most of her childhood summers visiting her grandmother in rural south Mississippi. When Vernon was 12, she and her mother moved to her grandmother’s hometown of Osyka, Miss., just north of the Louisiana line.
Her 2006 novel, “A Killing in this Town,” is about a Klan murder. Vernon attended the Killen trial two years ago in Neshoba County and said she’s watching the Seale trial now to absorb history.
Harry N. MacLean, a Denver attorney and nonfiction writer, is writing detailed notes about the Seale trial. MacLean wrote “In Broad Daylight,” a 1989 nonfiction best-seller about the killing of a town bully in tiny Skidmore, Mo.
MacLean said he plans to use the trial as a launching point for a book, already under contract, about an outsider’s view of the complexities of Mississippi—a state he believes is often misunderstood.
“I think there’s a natural curiosity out there about Mississippi,” MacLean said.
