James Ford Seale (June 25, 1935 – August 2, 2011) was a Ku Klux Klan member charged by the U.S. Justice Department on January 24, 2007, and subsequently convicted on June 14, 2007, for the May 1964 kidnapping and murder of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two African-American young men in Meadville, Mississippi. At the time of his arrest, Seale worked at a lumber plant in Roxie, Mississippi. He also worked as a crop duster and was a police officer in Louisiana briefly in the 1970s. He was a member of the militant Klan organization known as the Silver Dollar Group, whose members were identified with a silver dollar; occasionally minted the year of the member's birth.
Seale was convicted on June 14, 2007, by a federal jury on one count of conspiracy to kidnap two persons, and two counts of kidnapping. He was sentenced on August 24, 2007, to three life terms for his part in the 1964 murders of the two Mississippi teens. In 2008, Seale's kidnapping conviction was overturned by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, before being reinstated by that court sitting en banc the following year. He was incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he died in 2011.
Background
Southern Mississippi was an active area of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Many working class whites feared greater job competition from blacks if integration changed the society and tensions were high over desegregation of schools. The Natchez area became a center of Ku Klux Klan and other segregationist activity, with violence directed against black churches, often used as the center of community organizing, and black activists. Seale's brother Jack and his father Clyde were also members of the Silver Dollar Group.
Double murder in 1964
James Ford Seale abducted the two young African-American men, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, each 19, as they were hitchhiking near Roxie on May 2, 1964. Moore had been a student at Alcorn State College. According to F.B.I. records, Seale thought the two might be civil rights activists, especially as Dee had just returned from Chicago. He ordered them into his car by telling them he was a federal revenue agent, investigating moonshine stills.
He drove them into the Homochitto National Forest between Meadville and Natchez, having called Charles Marcus Edwards to have him and other Klansmen follow. As Seale held a sawed-off shotgun on the pair, the other men tied the young men to a tree and severely beat them with long, skinny sticks (called "bean sticks" because they're often used to "stalk" beans in gardens). According to the January 2007 indictment, the Klansmen took the pair, who were reportedly still alive, to a nearby farm where Seale duct-taped their mouths and hands. The Klansmen wrapped the bloody pair in a plastic tarp, put them into the trunk of another Klansman's red Ford (the deceased Ernest Parker, according to FBI records), and drove almost 100 miles to the Ole River near Tallulah, Louisiana. They had to drive through Louisiana to get there, but the backwater is located in Warren County, Mississippi.
At the river, the Klansmen took the pair away from shore in a boat, where they tied them to an old Jeep engine block and sections of railroad track rails with chains before dumping them in the water to drown. Reportedly still alive when put in the river, the young men were killed in Mississippi. According to a Klan informant, Seale said later that he would have shot them first, but didn't want to get blood all over the boat. Edwards himself testified in 2007 that the two boys were stuffed alive into the back of Seale's car before being taken to the farm where they were beaten. Edwards, who was granted immunity for his testimony after being indicted for aiming a shotgun at the two black men while fellow Ku Klux Klan members beat them, also testified that Seale had in fact attached heavy weights to the boys and then dumped them alive into the river.