Murders Around Mississippi

Until the killing of a black mother's son becomes
as imporant as the killing of a white mother's son,
we who believe in freedom cannot rest.

-Ella Baker


What happened to Henry H. Dee and Charlie Eddie Moore?

J. Edgar Hoover had just left Jackson in mid-July 1964 when a police report came in from Tallulah, Louisiana, eighty miles west of Jackson. A fisherman had seen the lower half of a man's body snagged on a log floating in a former channel of the Mississippi, Old River - now a bayou. Small search vessels went into the area and two corpses were found. But they were not the bodies of the missing three civil rights workers from Mississippi. The river bottom was searched anyway by a Navy frogman squad that was flown in from Charleston, South Carolina but no other bodies were found that day.

Later, through the FBI, it was reported that the bodies of Henry H. Dee and Charlie Eddie Moore, both 19, had been targets of the Klan - Dee, simply because he had once lived in Chicago and Moore, because he was known to have participated in a protest demonstration at Alcorn A&M. Both had been taken from a country roadside and beaten to death in a remoted section of the Homochitto National Forest.

Then several more bodies were found as the search for Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman continued. "These were the routine victims of the Mississippi police/Klan juggernaut - found and identified this particular summer only as an unintended consequence of the national attention drawn to the state.

"Apart from the Dee and Moore killings, one of the saddest discoveries of the season was the body of a never-identified boy, about fourteen, wearing a CORE T-shirt, which was found floating in the Big Black River," wrote Seth Cagin and Philip Dray in what is perhaps the most thorough book written on the Neshoba County murders, "We Are Not Afraid." (New York:Macmillan Edition, 1988, 447-449)




The authors interviewed eyewitnesses, participants and consulted hundreds of coduments, letters and oral histories to come up with their thorough description of what took place in Neshoba County. Hoover's assistant director, Joseph Sullivan, had quickly concluded that the Klan had literally or implicitly "enlisted" every white adult male in the county.

"Blacks, understandably fearful, kept off the streets as much as possible. Northern FBI agents who expected local blacks gladly to provide information the white community withheld were soon disappointed. Their federal badges and Yankee accents mean nothing. Blacks trusted them only slightly more than they did local policemen such as Rainey Price, Otha Neal Burkes, or Richard Willis, and had no reason to believe that what they said would not be immediately reported back to "Mr. Lawrence," "Mr. Cecil" or any of the town's new crop of "deputy sheriffs." (450)