Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - After 43 years, Thomas Moore can tell his brother that his killer has been brought to justice.
"I'm going to go to that cemetery, that Mount Olive Cemetery," he said. "I'm going to tell Charles Moore, `I told you that I see it to the end.'"
The end came Thursday with the conviction of reputed Klansman James Ford Seale on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee.
Seale's racist butt faces life in prison when he is sentenced Aug. 24.
The 19-year-olds disappeared from Franklin County on May 2, 1964, and their bodies were found later in the Mississippi River.
With none of his fellow KKK boys in sight, Seale, 71, sat stone-faced in court as the verdict was read and showed no emotion as marshals led him away.
Afterwards, Seale's disgraced relatives, including his wife, ran out of the courthouse to a waiting sport utility vehicle, bumping some reporters in the scramble.
If I were them, I would have run too. Guess it was asking too much to say I'm sorry for your loss, or may God be with you to the victims before leaving.
The prosecution's star witness was Charles Marcus Edwards, a confessed Klansman. Having cut an immunity deal with the prosecution, Edwards testified that Dee and Moore were forced into the trunk of Seale's Volkswagen and driven to a farm.
In an attempt to find out if blacks were bringing firearms into Franklin County,
they were later tied up and driven across the Mississippi River into Louisiana.
According to Edwards, Seale told him that heavy weights were attached to the two teenagers and they were then dumped alive into the river. Seale was arrested on a state murder charge in 1964, but the charge was later dropped.
The killings of Moore and Dee are among several decades-old civil rights cases reopened by federal investigators.
Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Klansman, was convicted last June of manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.
In Alabama, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. In 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted.
With all these states apologizing for slavery, the best thing Southern legislators can do is to allocate more resources to secure even more convictions. This is just the tip of the iceberg!