Justice at last
The racial terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan and certain other Southerners in the 1950s and 1960s was the closest America has come to the terror mounted against the Jews by Nazi Germany. Many more Jews died, of course, but in terms of subjugation and terrorizing of an entire people, the Klan campaign to keep blacks racially subservient was still a major crime against humanity.
I always cheer when one of these increasingly old Klansmen is found, arrested, and hauled into court. That will happen in Mississippi today when James Seale is accused of participating in the murders of two black teenagers in 1964, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. The link goes to the story in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, a newspaper which threw out its racist past and now crusades for justice in these old cases. Seale is the 28th person arrested in a Civil Rights era crime since 1989, when the Mississippi Attorney General first began to seriously go after cold cases. Twenty-two of them have been conducted.
Why did these Klansmen escape justice for so long? The entire system back then was fixed, at least in certain places. The Klan, local police, FBI, and local juries all did their part to frustrate the arrest and punishment of men who often boasted openly of their crimes. With the FBI, which was then run by J. Edgar Hoover, there were good agents, but too often they were stymied by agency rules and procedures and customs put in place by superiors who were less than sympathetic to the idea of black civil rights.
There is a move afoot to create a civil rights cold-case unit in the U.S. Justice Department to seek out and arrest suspects in these old crimes, much as a similar dedicated unit once sought out former Nazis living in hiding in the U.S. There can be no forgiveness for these old crimes before a criminal trial is conducted. Only that way can the stain of this horror be expunged.