Good Morning POU! Today we learn about The Silver Dollar Group.
The Silver Dollar Group was an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan white nationalist terrorist group, composed of cells that took up violent actions to support Klan goals. The group was largely found in Mississippi and Louisiana, and was named for their practice of identifying themselves by carrying a silver dollar. The group is believed to have had only some twenty members. The group formed in 1964 at the Shamrock Motor Hotel in Vidalia, Louisiana by Raleigh Jackson “Red” Glover, amidst dissatisfaction at the lack of forceful action by Klan groups in the region.
The group killed a black man, Frank Morris, by arson in Ferriday, Louisiana, and is suspected in two car bombings of NAACP leaders in Natchez, Mississippi, George Metcalfe and Wharlest Jackson. Morris had a shoe repair shop in Ferriday, and died after his shoe repair shop was burned. The group is also suspected in the disappearance and murder of a black employee of the Shamrock Motel, Joseph Edwards. Some members of local law enforcement, including Concordia Parish Sheriff Department deputies Frank DeLaughter and Bill Ogden, were members of the Silver Dollar Group.
The murder of Wharlest Jackson
Wharlest Jackson was a Korean War veteran. He was married to Exerlena Jackson on February 17, 1954. Together they had five children, Debra Jackson (Sylvester), Denise Jackson (Ford), Doris Jackson, Delerisia Jackson, and Wharlest Jackson Jr. Jackson worked at the Armstrong Rubber and Tire Company for twelve years. The company had several white employees who were affiliated with the Klan, and under pressure from civil rights activists, the company’s management had offered more positions to African Americans and it also promoted Jackson to a more advanced explosives-mixing position, a position that had previously only been held by whites.
The promotion was heavily opposed by his wife, but the pay of 17 cents an hour meant that his wife could quit her job as a cook at an all-black school and spend more time with their children. Exerlena Jackson, Wharlest Jackson’s wife, later commented “I begged him not to take that job”. Just two years earlier, the same circumstances had befallen a friend of the Jackson family, Metcalfe. He was the president of the local chapter of the NAACP and Wharlest worked under him as its treasurer. After receiving a promotion at Armstrong Rubber and Tire Company, Metacalfe got into his car and started the ignition, triggering a similar explosion which severely injured him. The Jackson family took him in and nursed him back to health until he returned to his job a year later. No one was ever charged for this crime either.
The person who first came upon Wharlest Jackson after the accident was his son, Wharlest Jackson Jr., who recounted “When I made it to him he was lying in the street… his shoe was blown off and the truck was mangled”. The cases are still in the backlogs of the FBI, and out of 109 similar cases, only two of them have ever been solved.
The 1964 Kidnapping and Murder
Silver Dollar member James Ford Seale abducted two young African-American men, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, each 19, as they were hitchhiking near Roxie on May 2, 1964. Moore had been a student at Alcorn State College. According to F.B.I. records, Seale thought the two might be civil rights activists, especially as Dee had just returned from Chicago. He ordered them into his car by telling them he was a federal revenue agent, investigating moonshine stills.
He drove them into the Homochitto National Forest between Meadville and Natchez, having called Charles Marcus Edwards to have him and other Klansmen follow. As Seale held a sawed-off shotgun on the pair, the other men tied the young men to a tree and severely beat them with long, skinny sticks (called “bean sticks” because they’re often used to “stalk” beans in gardens). According to the January 2007 indictment, the Silver Dollars took the pair, who were reportedly still alive, to a nearby farm where Seale duct-taped their mouths and hands. The men wrapped the bloody pair in a plastic tarp, put them into the trunk of another man’s red Ford (the deceased Ernest Parker, according to FBI records), and drove almost 100 miles to the Ole River near Tallulah, Louisiana. They had to drive through Louisiana to get there, but the backwater is located in Warren County, Mississippi.
At the river, the men took the pair away from shore in a boat, where they tied them to an old Jeep engine block and sections of railroad track rails with chains before dumping them in the water to drown. Reportedly still alive when put in the river, the young men were killed in Mississippi. According to a Klan informant, Seale said later that he would have shot them first, but didn’t want to get blood all over the boat. Edwards himself testified in 2007 that the two boys were stuffed alive into the back of Seale’s car before being taken to the farm where they were beaten. Edwards, who was granted immunity for his testimony after being indicted for aiming a shotgun at the two black men while fellow Silver Dollar members beat them, also testified that Seale had in fact attached heavy weights to the boys and then dumped them alive into the river.
The bodies of the pair were found about two months later by US Navy divers who were working on the investigation associated with the disappearance in June of three civil rights workers: Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman; both from New York City and James Chaney from Meridian, Mississippi. The FBI made an investigation of the Dee-Moore murders (they had more than 100 agents around Natchez, trying to reduce violence), and presented their findings to local District Attorney Lenox Forman. FBI agents and Mississippi Highway Patrol officers arrested Seale, then 29, and fellow Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards, 31, on November 6, 1964. According to FBI informants, both men confessed to the crime. They were released on November 11, after family members posted $5,000 bond each.
In 1998 Thomas Moore, the older brother of Charles and a retired 30-year Army veteran, began to work on the case. Then living in Colorado, he wrote to District Attorney Ronnie Harper “asking him to look into his brother’s murder. He agreed.” Various media journalists began to look at the story again, including Newsday, 20-20 and investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi). On January 14, 2000, Mitchell reported that the murders occurred on federal land. This spurred the FBI to take another look, as the location gave them jurisdiction, but some of their resources got diverted to the revival of the investigation of Edgar Ray Killen in the 1964 Neshoba County murders.
Moore was contacted by the filmmaker David Ridgen of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Together they went to Mississippi on July 7, 2005, to begin shooting the documentary Mississippi Cold Case, about the events of Moore’s brother’s murder. Together they began a search for justice in the case. They had also arranged to work with journalist Donna Ladd and photographer Kate Medley from the Jackson Free Press, an alternative newsweekly in Jackson, Mississippi.
On July 8 the two men interviewed the District Attorney Ronnie Harper, who told them that James Ford Seale was alive. Seale’s family members had reported him dead to the media a few years before. The pair confirmed this fact when Kenny Byrd, a resident of Roxie, pointed them toward Seale’s trailer. The same morning, Moore and Ridgen met with Ladd and Medley. During this trip, the former Klansman James Kenneth Greer told Ladd and Medley that Seale was living in Roxie, Mississippi next to his brother.
The discovery of Seale helped to revive interest in the case; Moore and Ridgen visited the U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, who pledged to re-open the case.[14] Two weeks after the trip, Ladd published the first of several articles in the Jackson Free Press about the investigation and the discovery that Seale was alive.[8] Moved by the response of people he talked to about the case, in July Thomas Moore formed the “Dee Moore Coalition for Justice in Franklin County.”
Seale was arraigned and denied bond because he was considered a flight risk: he owned no property, was a pilot, and lived in a motor home. He and his wife had already left Roxie for a brief time after the reporting team’s initial July 2005 visits, according to Roxie residents. Primary testimony was from fellow Klansman Charles Marcus Edwards. After he was confronted by Thomas Moore and David Ridgen during filming of a scene in Mississippi Cold Case, state and federal officials gave him immunity from prosecution to tell the full story of what happened.
Seale was convicted of kidnapping and conspiracy on June 14, 2007, by a federal jury. On August 24, 2007, Seale was sentenced to serve three life terms for his crimes. Judge Wingate said that he took into account Seale’s advanced age and poor health, but added, “Then I had to take a look at the crime itself, the horror, the ghastliness of it.”
He was incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he died in 2011.