Henry Dee and Charles Moore were two teens who on May 2, 1964 in Meadville, Mississippi while hitchhiking were kidnapped by the KKK and murdered. These young men were interrogated and tortured. They were then locked in a trunk of a car, driven across state lines, chained to a jeep motor block and train track rails, then dropped alive into the Mississippi River.
Dee and Moore’s bodies were found on July 12th and 13th of 1964 respectively during a massive search for the missing 3 civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. Two men ( let’s just say they were klan) Marcus Edwards and James Seale were arrested for the crime, after the #FBI turned the case of to the local authorities saying they overwhelmed with the Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney case. The Dee/Moore case OF COURSE was dropped by local authorities some of whom the FBI and HUAC (House Of UnAmerican Activities Committees) documents say were involved.
In 2007 - after 42 years Marcus Edwards admitted to the murders. Edwards was granted immunity to testify against klansman James Seale. Seale was convicted in 2007 sentenced to three life sentences for one count of conspiracy to kidnap two persons and two counts of kidnapping, where the victims were not released alive.
(Question? Why was he not given the death penalty- were these not capital offenses in 1964?). Justice Delayed is Justice Denied!
Final Case Notes:
Documentarian David Ridgen convinced Thomas Moore, older brother of Charles, to return to Mississippi to seek justice for his brother and Henry Dee. Thomas Moore had already been investigating his brothers case. A brothers quest to get justice and the documentary “Mississippi Cold Case” by Ridgen shined a light on this atrocity cause the case to be reopened.
Thomas Moore and Thelma Collins, Henry Dee's sister, filed a federal complaint in a Natchez, Mississippi court in 2008 claiming the state’s complicity in the deaths of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. The lawsuit claims that in Franklin County in 1964, Sheriff Wayne Hutto and his chief deputy, Kirby Shell, conspired with the Klansmen who abducted and killed Dee and Moore. On June 21, 2010, Franklin County, Mississippi agreed to an undisclosed settlement with the families of Charles Moore and Henry Dee.
Other Case Facts-
The Seale's family for years told reporters looking into the case that Seale had died. But in July 2005, Moore and Ridgen found Seale alive and residing in a mobile a few miles from the site where the kidnapping took place.
Documents obtained by CBC News show that then Mississippi governor Paul B. Johnson Jr., at the time of the 1964 killings of Dee and Moore censored a news release related to the case and kept photos of their remains from the media, those can now be found in the former governor's collection of papers stored at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Ridgen, David (Independent Filmmaker). "The Dee and Moore Case: Cracking a Mississippi cold case". Northwestern University School of Law. Archived from the original on 2014-07-14. Retrieved 2014-07-12.
Godoy, M., & Lohr, K. (2007, June 14). Timeline: The decades-old case against James Ford Seale. National Public Radio (NPR). Retrieved June 15, 2007, from www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyld=11097952.
CellBlue-I Do Know This!
CellyBlue: Henry Dee and Charles Moore -- two beautiful young men.
We must remember!
If we do not, we are doomed to repeat.
CellyBlue: I was born of a Walloon-Belgian (i.e., Francophone Belgian) woman who had suffered the occupation of our country through the Third Reich and in the process lost her dear mom to a cancer accelerated through the stress.
Being born in the late '40s, I was conscious of events throughout the '50s as a growing child.
I grew up where what you recount were frequent occurrences.
What you recount is tragic memory to me from the evening news with Walter Cronkite, CBS, and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, NBC.
Thank you for keeping these flagrant murders and Governmental complicity before us.
These are not academic narratives. These are real events in our news during the '50s and '60s.
And they are not merely in the past.
When there is talk of "immigrants poisoning our blood", we are living in volatile and dangerous, racist times.
I am a 76-year-old white man. Part of MY cultural heritage, that I LOVE is Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, WEB DuBois, MLK, Medgar Evers . . . Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Zora Neale-Hurston, James Baldwin . . . Today's Jesmyn Ward -- a write of strong, poetic and beautiful spirituality.
I LOVE your column, including on other platforms, that explained 1619 and indentured servitude and later slavery and the evolutionary adaptation of dark skin and protective cells.
Yours is a voice I love to listen to and THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH, SO VERY MUCH, INDEED, for sharing of your love and your moral convictions.
You are and INSPIRATION.