Hatewatch for the week of August 29th 2007

Aryan Nations Bank Robber Threatens Judge At Sentencing
A white nationalist who said he robbed banks to fund a "racially pure homeland" told the judge who sentenced him to 20 years that racial holy warriors will "visit revenge to your doorstep."

Klansman Sentenced To Life For 1964 Murder
James Ford Seale, 72, was sentenced to three life terms in prison for his role in kidnapping and killing two black teenagers in 1964...

White Supremacist Gang Member Faces Execution
Prosecutors continue to seek the death penalty for Public Enemy Number One enforcer Michael Allen Lamb, 32, who was convicted of murdering one of the gang's founders for breaking its code of silence...

Police Bill For Racist Rally: $150,000
The cost of providing security at a rally staged by white supremacist radio host Hal Turner outside a Department of Public Safety building included $118,000 to pay 398 police officers...

Idaho Men Charged With Felony Hate Crimes
Steven Leas, 24, and Cody Lindell, 18, allegedly chased, shoved and hurled racial epithets at a black man outside a convenience store...

Ex-KKK man jailed for life in US

A US court has sentenced a 72-year-old former member of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group, to three life prison terms for his role in the 1964 killings of two black men.

James Seale was sentenced on Friday in Jackson, Mississippi after being convicted in June of kidnapping and conspiracy in the killings of Henry Dee and Charles Moore.

"This case is an outstanding example of our ongoing, vigilant efforts to prosecute racially-motivated crimes to the fullest extent of the law, regardless of how many years have passed," Alberto Gonzalez, US attorney general, said. Seale's lawyer said he will appeal against the convictions.

A former police officer, Seale was arrested in 1964 but was released after police said they lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute him. Seale was believed dead for years until Thomas Moore, brother of Charles Moore, located him in southern Mississippi while investigating his brother's murder.

Men drowned

Dee and Moore, both 19, were kidnapped in 1964 while hitch-hiking in Mississippi and taken to a forest, where Seale aimed a shotgun towards the men while his companions attacked them. The teenagers were driven to a tributary of the Mississippi river, attached to heavy weights and thrown alive into the water from a boat, prosecutors said. Their bodies were recovered during a search for three other civil rights activists later that year.

Mississippi lies at the heart of the so-called "deep South" that was long associated with hangings and other violent attacks on blacks by the KKK and other white supremacist groups.

The main prosecution witness in the case against Seale was Charles Marcus Edward, another former Klansman who was involved in the attack on Dee and Moore. Edward, who was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony, told the court that Seale admitted he killed the men.

Lenard Wolf, a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said during the trial that Seale was unmoved by the investigators' belief that he was involved in the killings.

"We know you did it, you know you did it, the Lord above knows you did it," Wolf told Seale, according to the testimony. "Yes, but I'm not going to admit it; you are going to have to prove it," Seale answered.

Violent campaign

While Seale was not charged with murder, the indictment claimed the abductions resulted in the deaths of Dee and Moore.

"While this sentence can never repair the suffering and loss brought by these heinous acts of racial violence, it will hopefully bring some closure to the families of Henry Dee and Charlie Moore who have waited decades for justice," said Wan Kim, US assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

A string of federal prosecutions across the US has attempted to address crimes during the 1950s and 1960s by white supremacists. The KKK waged a violent campaign against the black community and against the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans in the southern US, where racial segregation was in place. In many cases, such groups were supported by local law enforcement and judicial authorities, while black Americans had few legal protections.

Aljazeera

Ex-KKK man guilty of 1964 murder of black teenagers

A US marshal escorts James Ford Seale, 71, from the federal
courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi earlier in the trial.

A 71-year-old man alleged to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan has been found guilty of kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1964 deaths of two black teenagers that sparked a summer of violence later depicted in the film Mississippi Burning.

James Ford Seale had pleaded not guilty to the charges relating to the deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Dee, both aged 19 at the time of their disappearance on May 2 1964. Their bodies were later found in the Mississippi river.

Seale's conviction was achieved on the words of a confessed Klansman, Charles Edwards, who was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for turning on his old friend.

He testified that Seale had belonged to the same Klan chapter, or klavern, as he had, which was led by Seale's late father. The prosecution team admitted to the jury they had made "a deal with the devil" but argued that it was the only way to get justice 43 years after the killings.

Seale, who declined to testify, now faces up to two life sentences. He is unlikely to leave prison alive.

As the guilty verdicts were returned, the victims' relatives hugged each other and cried.

Seale's prosecution may mark one of, if not the last trial of its kind from the brutal heyday of the KKK and its violent clashes with the civil rights movement. As witnesses pass away, the likelihood of further trials diminishes.

During the trial, the jury heard that white supremacists, often with the complicity of local police officers and the courts, were consciously targeting civil rights activists in an attempt to terrorise them into silence. Seale was arrested a few months after the men disappeared, but murder charges were later dropped against him.

Prosecutors alleged that the two victims had been picked up while they were hitchhiking, thrown into the boot of a car and taken to a forest where they were beaten in an attempt to extract information on firearms being brought into the area.

Edwards said that he saw Seale hold a gun to Dee and Moore, while the two young black men were beaten for about half an hour, 30 or 40 times each. Edwards claimed that although he had been involved in the beating, he had not been present when the men had been thrown into the river.

He said Seale later told him how the men were dumped alive in a backwater of the Mississippi river with weights attached to them.

Defence lawyers that the case was flimsy because it relied on the evidence of one man, an "admitted liar". "This case all comes down to the word of one man, an admitted liar, a man out to save his own skin. A case based on his word is no case at all," the lead defence lawyer, Kathy Nester, said.

Seale has always denied membership of the KKK.

Before the trial started, a former FBI agent gave evidence that he had confronted Seale and accused him of the murder a few months after the deaths. Edward Putz said Seale had replied: "Yes, but I'm not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it."

Guardian

Back from the dead and facing life - trial recalls horrors of the Klan

Ex-policeman, 71, accused of 1964 race killings
Victim's brother traced suspect said to be dead

Thomas Moore is looking forward to finally coming face-to-face with James Ford Seale, a Ku Klux Klansman who came back from the dead. "I want to look at him," he said. "I want to tell him about the pain he caused me and my family."

Mr Moore, 63, a retired sergeant-major, recalled the day he found out that Mr Seale was still alive. "I was so happy. We thought he was dead - and so did everyone else."

The trial opens here today of Mr Seale, 71, a former worker in a paper plant, crop-duster and policeman, accused of kidnapping and conspiracy in relation to the murder of two black teenagers in 1964, one of them Mr Moore's brother. According to the indictment, the two 19-year-olds, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, were kidnapped by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, tortured and dumped in the Mississippi, Moore tied to a jeep engine block, and, according to an FBI informant at the time, still breathing.

The killings marked the beginning of a summer of madness, as the KKK responded to the civil rights movement with the fiery crosses, church bombings and murders depicted in Alan Parker's 1989 film Mississippi Burning.

The Seale prosecution could be among the last of the KKK trials. Although the justice department has promised to re-open cases, witnesses are dying off and files have been lost.

Now living in Colorado, Mr Moore had been brought up in Franklin County, one of the strongholds of the White Knights. He returned in 2005 with a Canadian film-maker, David Ridgen, to investigate the murders. Pulling up at a petrol station for an egg and sausage sandwich, he met by chance a distant cousin, Kenny Byrd.

Mr Moore explained why they were there and said it was a pity that Mr Seale, who had been one of the main suspects, was dead. His family had been saying so since 2000. The local Clarion-Ledger had reported it as fact: so too had the Los Angeles Times. Mr Byrd replied: "Hell no, he lives over there."

Mr Moore traced lost files, spoke to potential witnesses, harassed former Klansmen, mobilised the African-American community and successfully campaigned to have the FBI re-open the case.

Mr Seale is expected to plead not guilty in a trial expected to last about a fortnight. If found guilty, he faces life sentences.

Mississippi is different these days, at least on the surface. It is evident to anyone arriving at the airport at Jackson, now called Jackson-Evers International in recognition of the civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963. It is evident, too, in the fact that the judge who will try the case is African-American, Henry Wingate.

But Heidi Beirich, deputy director of intelligence at a Jackson-based civil rights group, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which investigates hate crimes, cautioned that although the KKK and institutionalised racism is mainly a thing of the past, Mississippi still has problems. She noted that when the state voted in 2002 to retain the Confederate flag, a symbol of hate for African-Americans, the divide was on racial grounds. African-Americans in the state continue to live in the poorest areas, with the worst schools.

"As far as the Klan is concerned, its heyday is definitely in the past. It hit its peak in the 1920s at 4 million. The number of Klansmen is way down: we estimate 5,000-6,000. It is not a cohesive organisation any longer: it is fragmented. They are no longer capable of the kind of terror they rained down on the South in the 1950s and 1960s," Ms Beirich said.

But the sense of dread inspired by the KKK has not gone completely. Ridgen, who put together a documentary Mississippi Cold Case, said: "The psychological threat was always there. There was fear every time in Franklin County. We never took the same route. We never told anyone in advance about coming."

At the trial, the key witness is likely to be a former Klansman, Charles Edwards, a suspect at the time, who is expected to give evidence against Mr Seale in return for immunity. Former FBI agents who carried out a fairly thorough investigation at the time are also scheduled to testify. After their investigation in 1964, they handed the case over to the local justice department who, as was not unusual at the time, quickly dropped it.

No real explanation has been given for the killings. Klansmen at the time told the FBI that Mr Dee had been peeping at one of their wives while others alleged gun smuggling into a black church. The indictment suggests otherwise: "The White Knights ... targeted for violence African-Americans they believed were involved in civil rights activity in order to intimidate and retaliate against such individuals."

Mr Dee's sister, Thelma Collins, who now lives in Louisiana, said yesterday she could not remember him being involved in any civil rights activity. "He was quiet, never said much," she recalled. She is saddened that the case has taken 43 years to come to court: "It is pitiful that those boys were killed and no one did anything about it."

Like Mrs Collins, Mr Moore will be given his chance to make a victim's statement in court. He said: "I want to tell how it is to go without a brother, my son without an uncle, how Charles never had the opportunity to make mistakes, to live his life."

Backstory

The reopening of racist murder cases from the 1960s in the South began in 1990 when a white supremacist, Byron La Beckwith, was indicted and eventually jailed for the assassination in 1963 of Medgar Evers, then chairman in Mississippi of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This encouraged the FBI and local justice departments to look again at unsolved cases. Since then, there have been six prosecutions in Mississippi, including Mr Seale's today. Authorities in seven states have re-examined a total of 29 killings and made 29 arrests, leading to 22 convictions.

One of the most prominent was the trial and jailing in 2001 of Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. The revulsion created by the bombing helped turn public opinion behind the civil rights movement. In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was jailed for the murder of the three civil rights activists depicted in Mississippi Burning. But the reality is that there may not be many more cases brought to court: elderly witnesses are dying off and records of crimes have been lost.

Guardian