This is the most complete story I've seen so far on the arrest of James Ford Seale in one of the last unsolved crimes of the civil rights era.
The article details the efforts of Thomas James Moore to get justice for the killing of his brother, Charles Eddie Moore, and his friend Hezekiah Dee.
According to this CBS News story,
A white former sheriff's deputy who was once thought to be dead was arrested on federal charges Wednesday in one of the last major unsolved crimes of the civil rights era — the 1964 killings of two black men who were beaten and dumped alive into the Mississippi River.
The break in the 43-year-old case was largely the result of the dogged efforts of the older brother of one of the victims, who vowed to bring the killers to justice.
James Ford Seale, a 71-year-old reputed Ku Klux Klansman from the town of Roxie, was charged with kidnapping hitchhikers Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, both 19.
The victims' weighted, badly decomposed bodies were found by chance two months later in July 1964, during the search for three civil rights workers whose disappearance and deaths in Philadelphia, Miss., got far more attention from the media and the FBI.
Thomas Moore had all but given up on justice for his brother's death. Happening in the same time frame as the "Mississippi Burning" murders of three Northern civil rights workers, the deaths of two black men got lost in the shuffle.
But, consumed by the search for the three missing civil rights workers, the FBI turned the case over to local authorities. And a justice of the peace promptly threw out all charges against Seale and Edwards.
In 2000, the Justice Department re-opened the case, but the wheels of justice turn slowly. It wasn't until Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen became interested in the case and dug up more information and informants that things started to look up.
This case is a sad and shameful episode in our history and I am glad that justice will be done before all the participants have died of old age.
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