Mississippi ex-Klansman on trial for race murders

JACKSON, Miss, June 5 (Reuters) A former Ku Klux Klansman went on trial for kidnapping two black men murdered in Mississippi in 1964 in a case that highlights white supremacist violence during the civil rights era.

James Seale was arrested in January and charged over the killings of 19-year-olds Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. He faces a maximum life term on each count if convicted.

According to an indictment, Seale trained a shotgun on the teenagers while his companions beat them. Then they attached heavy weights to the pair and threw them alive into the Mississippi River.

Government prosecutor Paige Fitzgerald repeated to jurors a comment Seale made to two highway patrolmen when he was first arrested in November 1964 and asked if he had committed the murders.

'''Yes, but I am not going to admit it. You're going to have to prove it,''' she quoted him as saying.

''Ladies and gentlemen, we are here to do just that,'' Fitzgerald said. ''You're going to get an inside view into the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a group fueled by racism so extreme that they justified kidnapping and murdering Charles Moore and Henry Dee.'' Seale, who wore a light blue shirt and khaki trousers, sat impassively through the presentations yesterday. At one point he smiled at relatives in the courtroom.

Members of the victims' families were also in the court.

''My client is not on trial for being a racist. He is not on trial for murder. He is on trial for kidnapping,'' said Seale's lawyer, George Lucas. ''We believe there is no credible evidence to find this defendant guilty.'' The case has attracted heavy publicity in Mississippi and several potential jurors were dismissed or said they could not serve because their views about the case would prejudice them.

In the early sixties, the murders attracted little publicity.

They were typical of dozens of such killings in the Deep South, many involving Klan members shielded by authorities who approved of their tactics to tyrannize blacks to try and halt the civil rights movement.

The rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, used nonviolence and civil disobedience in a campaign to outlaw racial segregation in the South and permit blacks to vote there.

Dee and Moore were killed on the pretext that whites feared that activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were running guns into the area.

Their bodies were recovered during a high-profile search for three other civil rights activists later that year which helped crystallize revulsion at the racial violence in Mississippi. Two of the three activists were white volunteers from New York trying to register black voters.

In 2005 a Mississippi jury convicted Klansmen Edgar Ray Killen of three counts of manslaughter over those murders, which formed the basis of the 1988 film ''Mississippi Burning.'' REUTERS DH BST0434