The past is never dead
Subtitle: the trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's struggle for redemption
By: by Harry N. MacLean.
Publisher: BasicCivitas Books
Published: 2009
Place of publication: New York, N.Y
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 290
ISBN-13: 9780465005048
Subjects: Seale, James Ford -- Trials, litigation, etc; Ku Klux Klan (1915- ); Trials (Kidnapping) -- Mississippi; Trials (Murder) -- Mississippi; African Americans -- Crimes against -- Mississippi -- History -- 20th century; African Americans -- Civil rights -- Mississippi; Racism -- Mississippi; Redemption -- Political aspects -- Mississippi; Mississippi -- Race relations
Genres: Trials, litigation, etc
Description: On May 2, 1964, Klansman James Ford Seale picked up two black hitchhikers and drowned both young men in the Mississippi River. Seale spent more than forty years a free man, before finally facing trial in 2007. There could have been two defendants in the resulting case: James Ford Seale for kidnapping and murder, and the State of Mississippi for complicityknowingly aiding, abetting, and creating men like Seale. In The Past Is Never Dead, best-selling author Harry MacLean follows Seales trial, the legal difficulties of prosecuting kidnapping and murder charges decades after the fact, and the strain on a state contending with a past that cant be forgiven. MacLean's narrative is at once the account of a gripping legal battle and an acute meditation on the possibility of redemption. - Publisher.