A new state historical marker honoring two young Black men who were kidnapped and killed by Ku Klux Klansmen 57 years ago was erected in a small Mississippi town last week.
In July 1964, investigators found the remains of college student Charles Eddie Moore and lumber mill worker Henry Hezekiah Dee in a backwater of the Mississippi River, It happened as officers were searching for three civil rights workers who had disappeared from central Mississippi the previous month. 
At the historical marker ceremony, military veteran Thomas Moore, 78, said that the new marker helps ensure his brother and their friend and high school classmate, Dee, will be remembered and that they won’t just be footnotes in the history of what the FBI called the “Mississippi Burning” case — the Klan killings of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
James Ford Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards briefly faced state murder charges in the deaths of Dee and Charles Eddie Moore in 1964, but the charges were dismissed because local law enforcement officers were in collusion with the Klan, federal prosecutors said in 2007.
Prosecutors said Seale was with a group of Klansmen in May 1964 when they abducted the two 19-year-olds from a rural stretch of highway, took them into the woods and beat and interrogated them about rumors that Black people in the area were planning an armed uprising. The victims were thrown in the trunk of a car, driven across the Mississippi River into Louisiana and then were weighted down and dumped into the water while still alive.
Many people thought Seale was dead until 2005, when Thomas Moore and a Canadian broadcaster, David Ridgen, found him found living in a town near where the teens were kidnapped. Federal authorities opened a case, and Edwards became the government’s star witness after he was promised immunity from prosecution. When jurors were out of the courtroom one day during Seale’s 2007 trial, Edwards apologized to the victims’ families.
A federal jury in Jackson, Mississippi, convicted Seale of kidnapping and conspiracy. He died in federal prison in 2011.
