That Boomerang of Justice Keeps Coming ‘Round to Take Racists Down
Date: Sunday, July 24, 2005
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com
In an old cartoon, a man flings a boomerang with all his might and it flies out of sight. It doesn’t come back for hours. That’s impossible in the real world.
Well, maybe not.
Let’s say that boomerang is truth and justice. Let’s say you are a racist murderer who tossed that boomerang out of sight way back when -- so long ago, in fact, that you pretty much have forgotten about it.
Let’s say that one day, when you’re just going about your ordinary business -- sipping your coffee, smoking your cigarette, laughing with the boys down at the barber shop -- you suddenly hear a faint “whoop, whoop” and someone asks, “What’s that?”
Let’s say that whoop starts growing louder and louder 'til -- BAM! -- there it is, that old boomerang, right back in your face, taking you down.
You can’t believe it, but it’s real. They’ve been gone for decades, but truth and justice have come back.
It must feel something like that in Mississippi these days where, it seems, every few months a prosecutor is announcing his intention to open a cold case from the 1960s civil rights movement involving murder.
This wave of new prosecutions began with the indictment, trial and subsequent conviction of Byron DeLay Beckwith for the 1963 shotgun slaying of Medgar Evers. At the time Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson, Miss. home, he was an official with the NAACP.
It took 30 years of dogged pursuit by Evers’ devoted widow, Myrlie, and the emergence of an intrepid and right-hearted prosecutor in Bobby Delaughter to get Beckwith. But get him they did, and he went down in a Mississippi prison.
Since then, the Emmitt Till case has been reopened, creating quakes and shakes in certain southern quarters; and the mastermind of the Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney murders has been convicted and sentenced to spend his remaining days behind iron bars.
That old boomerang is a tough avenger.
It may soon have more targets.
U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton now wants to go after a long ago case involving two 19-year-old who were tied to a tree, beaten, chained to an engine block and thrown into a river -- the same river the U.S. Navy once searched when authorities were looking for Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.
You may recall that the sailors did not turn up the three civil rights workers’ bodies -- they would later be dug out of a clay dam -- but did find other human remains in that river.
Although their cases did not gain international attention like the Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney murders, the slaughter of Charles Eddie Moore, a student at Alcorn A&M (now Alcorn State University), and Henry Hezekiah Dee, who worked at a local sawmill, have haunted Mississippi for 41 years.
Two alleged Klansmen were arrested in the Moore and Dee murders six months after the crime. But the charges were later dropped. The boomerang was tossed.
But thanks to the intrepid, committed younger brother of Charles Eddie Moore and an inquisitive insistent Canadian filmmaker, the boomerang is on the move again. If they’re still alive -- and some say they are -- James Ford Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards may be hearing that whoop, whoop any day now.
It’s funny when that happens in cartoons.
It’s got to be scary as hell when it happens in real life.
Posted By:
Monday, July 25th 2005 at 11:56AM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
