James Ford Seale
| James Ford Seale | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 25, 1935 United States |
| Died | August 2, 2011 (aged 76) Terre Haute, Indiana, United States |
| Occupation | Lumber worker |
| Criminal penalty | Three terms of life in prison |
| Criminal status | Deceased |
| Allegiance | Ku Klux Klan |
| Conviction(s) | Kidnapping and conspiracy |
James Ford Seale (June 25, 1935 – August 2, 2011) was a Ku Klux Klan member charged by the U.S. Justice Department on January 24, 2007, and subsequently convicted on June 14, 2007, for the May 1964 kidnapping of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, two African-American young men in Meadville, Mississippi. At the time of his arrest, Seale worked at a lumber plant in Roxie, Mississippi. He also worked as a crop duster and was a police officer in Louisiana briefly in the 1970s. He was a member of the militant Klan organization known as the Silver Dollar Group, whose members were identified with a silver dollar; occasionally minted the year of the member's birth.
Seale was convicted on June 14, 2007, by a federal jury on one count of conspiracy to kidnap two persons, and two counts of kidnapping where the victims were not released unharmed. He was sentenced on August 24, 2007, to three life terms for his part in the 1964 murders of the two Mississippi teens. In 2008, Seale's kidnapping conviction was overturned by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, before being reinstated by that court sitting en banc the following year. He was incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he died in 2011.
Southern Mississippi was an active area of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Many working class whites feared greater job competition from blacks if integration changed the society and tensions were high over desegregation of schools. The Natchez area became a center of Ku Klux Klan and other segregationist activity, with violence directed against black churches, often used as the center of community organizing, and black activists. His brother Jack and his father Clyde were also members of the Silver Dollar Group.
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