The search was not for them.
The search for three missing civil rights workers turned up the bodies of eight other men. Who were they?
On Friday, historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the three civil rights workers who were murdered sixty years ago, during Freedom Summer. I knew about James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. I knew that they were abducted and killed, and that their bodies were found more than six weeks later, buried in an earthen dam. There has been a lot written about those three men, and rightly so. Dr. Richardson’s piece is especially eloquent, and puts the event into historical context.
The disappearance of these three men made national news. Here’s an hourlong television show about the case, hosted by Walter Cronkite. It aired on June 25, 1964, before the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were found. It’s worth a watch.
I was struck by a phrase in Richardson’s essay. She wrote that “the agents searched—turning up 8 murdered Black men, but not the three they were looking for.”
I wanted to know who those 8 Black men were. Were their remains just ignored? Why? When I thought about it, I wasn’t really surprised.
Schwerner and Goodman were white, after all.
On May 2, 1964, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, nineteen-year-old Black men, were hitchhiking from Meadville to Roxie, Mississippi. Unlike Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, Dee and Moore were not active in the Civil Rights Movement. Henry Dee was a mill worker, and Charles Moore was a student at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College.
Dee and Moore were picked up by members of the Ku Klux Klan, including Charles Edwards and James Seale, who assumed Dee and Moore were involved with the Black Panthers. Their reasoning? Dee wore a black bandana. The Klansmen took Dee and Moore deep into the Homochitto National Forest, where they beat them with poles and branches. Then, while the mutilated teens were still alive, they were stuffed into a car trunk, driven to Louisiana, chained to an engine block and railroad ties, and dumped into the Mississippi river.
On June 12, while authorities were searching for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, they pulled Moore’s remains from the water. In this video, at about 17 minutes in, you can see the body being recovered (TW: It’s graphic). The narrator says, “It was the wrong body. The finding of a Negro male was noted and forgotten. The search was not for him.” The next day, Dee’s body was found. The search for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner continued.
After an investigation, the FBI arrested James Seale and Charles Edwards, and turned them over to local authorities. The charges were dropped.
In 2005, Moore’s brother, Thomas Moore, accompanied Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen to Mississippi to search for answers. They uncovered evidence and found James Searle and Charles Edwards still alive. The FBI arrested Searle and Edwards in 2007. Edwards agreed to testify against Searle in Federal Court in exchange for immunity. Searle was found guilty and died in prison in 2011, at age 74.
The documentary film about Dee and Moore’s case, Mississippi Cold Case, aired on CBC. A podcast series by Ridgen, Someone Knows Something, can be found here. Accompanying video is here.
Another of the African American bodies found in the search for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner was believed to be 14-year-old Herbert Oarsby. (In my search for information about him, I discovered that he was alive in September 1964, a month after the bodies of the three civil rights workers were discovered.) Oarsby’s body was rumored to be wearing a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) T shirt, but that was disputed. His death was ruled an accidental drowning, and the case was closed.
The bodies of five other Black men were discovered in the search for Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. We may never know who they were.
The NAACP reports that thousands of Black men, women, and children were lynched between 1882 and 1968. Lynchings were generally very public affairs, intended to instill terror into the African American community. But how many murders happened out of the public eye? How many were hushed up? How many cases were left unsolved, or not even investigated? How many murderers walked free?
Despite the passage of decades, the disappearance of evidence, and the death of witnesses and perpetrators, efforts continue to identify the African Americans who died in racially-motivated murders and to bring their killers to justice. In February, I wrote about the efforts of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. The Civil Rights Cold Case Project is a collaboration of journalists dedicated to revealing “the long-neglected truth behind unsolved civil rights murders, and to facilitate reconciliation and healing.” The Cold Case Justice Initiative at the Syracuse University College of Law “seeks justice for racially motivated murders during the Civil Rights era on behalf of the victims, their families, local communities, and society at large.”
The late Congressman John Lewis introduced the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act in 2007, and it was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2008. The Emmett Till Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama, reauthorized and expanded the Emmett Till Act.
It is hoped that reexamining these crimes will bring justice—or at least closure—to the families and communities of those who died. The murders happened in the past, sometimes decades in the past, but they resonate today. As Yale Historian Elizabeth Hinton said, “[History] helps us figure out ways in which we can move forward and transcend the institutions and systems that have made Black lives not matter for the entire history of this nation.”
A project called “Un(re)solved” by PBS and Frontline has produced a powerful web interactive about the Till Act, and tells the stories of the more than 150 individuals whose lives were cut short by racially-motivated violence. As you move through the site, it asks you to say their names.
We may never know the names of all the men, women, and children who perished, but they all had names.
They all mattered.
Let us continue the search—for all of them.