IT HAS BEEN 43 years since Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two young black men, were kidnapped in Mississippi, beaten, bound and thrown into the Mississippi River, where they drowned. On Thursday, they got a little justice.
On that day, a Mississippi jury convicted James Ford Seale of kidnapping and conspiracy in the case. Seale, who is 71, is to be sentenced in August. Given his age, he is likely to die in a federal prison.
The Seale case is the 23rd in the past 18 years in which people were finally brought to trial for murders committed by white supremacists during the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s. Each one of those trials has been cause for both celebration — justice done at last — and sorrow, because justice was so long delayed.
Justice was delayed for so long because, for many years, it was not possible to convince a Southern white jury that it was really a crime to kill a black person — or, for that matter, a white person — who was threatening the status quo. Justice was delayed because the law was too often silent or even complicit in the murders.
Those who lived through those times were unwillingly schooled in the darkness of the human soul at its worst. It was a time of sanctioned violence and political demagoguery in which law seemed to have lost its power to civilize. The arrogance of the Ku Klux Klan and the Mississippi White Citizens Council was abetted by state officials who, red-faced, screamed their defiance of the Constitution.
Justice was not only delayed, it was enslaved.
After so many years, do the convictions of Seale and the others really make any difference? Yes, if for no other reason than those convictions require the nation to again confront the injustices of the past.
Generations have been born since those dark days; generations who have not seen the depths to which a democracy can sink when it allows fear, hatred and violence to take control.
The trials remind all living generations of the evil that has been done and could be done again.
Patrick S. Kelley
Editorial Page Editor