A righteous quest
Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore were black teenagers in Franklin County, Mississippi, in the spring of 1964 when they fell victim to the racist violence then gripping the area. They were beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan, weighted down, and tossed into the Mississippi River.
Their decomposed bodies surfaced two months later.
Now, improbably, two local lawyers are spearheading an effort to bring justice to their families.
Margaret Burnham of Northeastern University School of Law and Charles J. Ogletree of Harvard Law School are representing their survivors, who filed a federal lawsuit earlier this week seeking damages for their decades of pain and suffering.
Both Burnham and Ogletree have a long history of taking on civil rights cases across the county, particularly cases of historical importance. To them, no case is settled until justice has been fully pursued. "This is a national case, and a national moment of shame," Burnham said yesterday. "The issues that it raises are national issues. They aren't unique to Mississippi. Their past is really our past as well."
The suit claims that Sheriff Wayne Hutto and his deputy, Kirby Shell, participated in abducting Dee and Moore, and helped to cover it up by repeatedly lying to the FBI about what they knew. Because they were acting as county officials, the suit argues that Franklin County was, and is, liable. The survivors are seeking unspecified monetary damages. More importantly, they are seeking acknowledgment of local government's role in the killings.
The murders of Dee and Moore came at the height of racial violence in Mississippi, driven by the KKK. Dee and Moore, both 19, were accosted by Klansmen who were trying to identify the black "radicals" in town. At a Klan meeting that spring, some knucklehead had decided that Dee fit the profile of a militant. Apparently, that was because he wore a bandanna on his head and had recently visited Chicago.
The facts of the case were not revealed until 2006, when a former Klansman granted immunity told his story. The other longtime suspect in the murders was convicted on federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges last year. James Ford Seale is now serving multiple life sentences.
Dee and Moore were taken to the woods, where they were brutally beaten. The Klansmen wrongly believed blacks were sneaking guns into town, and demanded to know where they were being stored. Dee and Moore claimed there were guns being stored at a local church, probably to stop getting pummeled.
That's when law enforcement got involved. The sheriff, deputy sheriff, and a group of Klansmen searched the church, while other members of the Klan held the men hostage. After no guns were found, the Klansmen beat Moore and Dee some more before driving them to the Louisiana side of the Mississippi and tossing them in to die. Their families reported them missing, but the sheriff assured them that they had probably just gone to visit relatives. There was a full-scale FBI investigation after the bodies surfaced, but Hutto claimed repeatedly that he didn't know anything about the murders, and never mentioned the beatings, or the search of the church.
Since the late 1980s, many such cases have been reopened, resulting in convictions for crimes that were covered up in the 1960s. Civil suits have been rare though, because in most cases the statute of limitations has expired.
Burnham has been on a quest for years now to prosecute crimes from the civil rights era. A veteran of the civil rights movement, she firmly believes there can be no moving forward without addressing the sins of the past.
"These prosecutions are going on all across the South," she noted. "This is a race against time. The witnesses are dying or in their 70s, and they have stories to tell. It's important that these stories be preserved."
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com. 
