Get Over It?

A Virginia troglodyte of a legislator recently said that Blacks should “get over” the slavery thing and its aftermath. But how can one do so when just this week – finally - a man with the blood of a 1964 Mississippi lynching on his hands was arrested? In so many ways, the past is still too much the present.

James Ford Seale is 71. He’s lived 43 years longer than he allowed two Black teenagers, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, to live. They were kidnapped, strapped to a tree, beaten, driven to Louisiana, then tossed into the Mississippi River to drown.

This incident caught my attention not only because of the issue of justice but because I am a Moore, maybe or maybe not connected genetically to Charles Eddie Moore given how Blacks took names after slavery. My folks and his folks were from the same neck of the woods.

This from the Associated Press: "Forty years ago, the system failed," FBI Director Robert Mueller said in Washington. "We in the FBI have a responsibility to investigate these cold-case, civil rights-era murders where evidence still exists to bring both closure and justice to these cases that for many, remain unhealed wounds to this day."

For me, this is not a cold case. I’m on it.

You can hear more about this from Michelle Martin's interview with Charles Eddie Moore's brother on News and Notes: www.npr.org.