The Harry MacLean Interview
By Gloria Johnston
Photos by Adriana Carlson
Swing Vote: While the FBI was searching for slain civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (the Mississippi Burning case), the bodies of Moore and Dee were discovered. How close were the locations of these two crimes?
Harry MacLean: Just about the opposite sides of the state. The Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney murders were in eastern Mississippi and the Dee and Moore murders were in the southwest corner. Not quite to the borders, but pretty far apart in Mississippi. Both of those areas were considered to be the most dangerous areas in Mississippi. It's appropriate somehow that they would have happened there because those were the most dangerous areas where the Klan was the strongest and most violent.
Swing Vote: Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards were arrested for the crime in 1964, but much earlier the FBI turned the case over to local authorities who dismissed the charges. Did the FBI never follow up on this?
Harry MacLean: They didn't follow up on it. When they were arrested in November of 1964 after a Klan informant gave them a long statement about what Seale had told them about what happened, the state arrested them. In January of 1965 the charges were dismissed. At that point the local DA said he was going to continue with it, but he didn't. That DA's name was Forman, and when I was in Mississippi on tour a couple of weeks ago, his son came up to me. I was pretty critical of Forman for dismissing the case and his son said basically the reason he had dismissed it was because he was an elected politician, plus he would have never gotten a conviction if he had tried it. But still, in all, he had the case. When his son came up to me, I kind of braced myself, but he was as nice and thoughtful as he could be and he said, "I thought you were fair to my father because you put it in the context of the times." But back to your question, the FBI did drop it. They just flat out dropped it. And Jim Ingram, one of the FBI agents who had been involved in that case all the way up from the Seale case, and who recently died, but always had a good perspective of all this was always upset that the FBI dropped it. The reasons are hard to pin down specifically, but one of them is that the resources were going into the Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney case in Neshoba County. They had two hundred and fifty agents there ordered by J. Edgar Hoover. Why? Two of the people who were murdered were white and from New York. Sometimes you look at the Emmett Till case and ask why did that become what it became?
There are hundreds of unsolved black lynchings in Mississippi alone that aren't recorded anywhere. You can go into some of those communities and talk to some of those people. Some of them are recorded, and they found the bodies and they were identified. But why Emmett Till, why did he become this great symbol? One of the reasons was that he was from Chicago and that hooked in the northern media into the effort and you had Congressman Diggs down there from Michigan at the trial. But that case could have disappeared like hundreds of other ones.
Swing Vote: What was the local reaction to Judge Henry T. Wingate presiding in the court?
Harry MacLean: He was appointed by Reagan and he's a very well respected Federal District Court judge. When you get to that position the qualifications are quite exact, and he's known to be very fair, very balanced and thoughtful, and very smart. So everybody from an objective point of view was pleased. The irony of Charles Marcus Edwards sitting next to him was not lost. But Wingate is so respected that nobody had any problem with it.
