1966 Congressional Hearing
On January 14, 1966, Seale was called to appear in Washington before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which was investigating Klan activities. Seale was there with nine other alleged Klansmen from the violent White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, including his father, Clyde Seale, and Charles Marcus Edwards, his alleged accomplice in the Dee-Moore murders. The Klansmen repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment, while the chief investigator Donald T. Appell and House members placed into the record what they believed the men had done, including kidnapping and murdering Dee and Moore in 1964. According to the hearing transcript, Appell introduced testimony of Alton Alford, a Meadville man, who said that Seale beat him with his shotgun. Appell asked Seale if he was involved in the 1965 death of a Klansman named Earl Hodges, who had fallen out with Seale's father. Appell accused Seale and Edwards of claiming "false arrest" by Mississippi highway patrolmen to help them escape criminal charges.
Two authors published books on the case: Don Whitehead wrote Attack on Terror: The FBI Against the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, (1990), which included some of the FBI's 1960s-era findings on the Dee-Moore murders. Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in Betrayed: The Presidential Failure to Protect Black Lives, (1996), also wrote about the Dee-Moore case, naming Seale and another suspect as responsible. He called for federal officials to indict the men on kidnapping charges. Hutchinson pointed out that because the crime occurred in a national forest, the federal government has jurisdiction.
Read more about this topic: James Ford Seale
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