How the Mississippi Burning murders sparked landmark change in the US

Throughout July, as FBI agents continued to scour the Mississippi swampland looking for the three missing civil rights activists, they repeatedly came across the remains of other black murder victims. One of these was the body of 14-year-old Herbert Oarsby, who was discovered wearing a Core T-shirt. Charles Eddie Moore, who had been one of 600 students expelled from Alcorn State University in April 1964 for participating in civil rights protests, was found alongside the body of his childhood friend Henry Hezekiah Dee. The two 19-year-olds had been abducted in May 1964 by the KKK, who had brutally beaten them with sticks before drowning them in the Mississippi River. In 2007, 71-year-old James Seale, a former policeman, was convicted of the killings after Charles Marcus Edwards, a church deacon and self-confessed Klansman, admitted to participating in their abduction. He was given immunity in exchange for his testimony. The bodies of five other black victims of violence, discovered by the FBI while looking for the missing activists, have never been identified.