04/28/2026
His tombstone says "Cherlie Eddie Moor" because the local stonecutter couldn't even spell his name right. His real name was Charles Eddie Moore, a 19-year-old Black college student the Klan killed in the Mississippi River in May 1964.
Sixty years later, his big brother is still trying to get him a stone with his real name on it.
It sits in a small Black cemetery in Franklin County, Mississippi, under the shade of a huge oak. The carving reads "Cherlie Eddie Moor."
His real name was Charles Eddie Moore.
He was nineteen years old when Klansmen tied him to an old Army Jeep engine block and put him into the backwater of the Mississippi River. The local stonecutter who carved his marker could not even spell his name right.
His older brother Thomas has been embarrassed about that stone for sixty years. Standing under the oak tree decades later, he told a reporter he was going to have to get a new one.
"A local guy did this," Thomas said. "He didn't spell his name right."
That misspelled name is where this story has to start. Because for forty-three years, almost every part of what happened to Charles Eddie Moore was kept wrong on purpose.
Wrong cause of death on the local report. Wrong indifference from the local sheriff.
Wrong silence from the local courthouse. The misspelled stone was the first wrong, and somebody had to refuse all of them before any of it ever got set right.
Charles was born on August 10, 1944, in a three-room shotgun house out near Meadville, about thirty-two miles east of Natchez. His father died when he was a toddler.
His mother Mazie raised him there with his older brother Thomas in one room and herself in the other. You could see daylight through the wooden slats of the walls.
There was no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing, no gas, no television. Mazie had never owned a car.
She spent her free hours in a tiny damp kitchen cooking biscuits and fatback and butterbeans, frying chicken, mixing the potato salad people in Franklin County still talked about. Most days she sent the boys off to school carrying their lunch in greasy paper bags.
Everybody called Charles "Nub." He was the smaller and quieter of the two, but he was also the one who pressed his pants every night with a smoothing iron heated by the fire and polished his shoes the night before school.
By senior year he had been class president three times, voted Best Dressed and Most Intelligent. Thomas, the bigger brother, the fighter, used to say Charles would have made a Ph.D.
Thomas had failed a year on purpose so the brothers could play senior football together. When no scholarship came, he went to work in New Orleans and held back from college for a year so Charles could go ahead to Alcorn State up in Lorman.
On his Alcorn application, Charles typed out one line about why he wanted to be a schoolteacher. "I like helping people to learn," he wrote.
He lasted one full year. In the spring of 1964, his second semester, he joined a small student protest about the poor quality of the cafeteria food.
The college president, J.D. Boyd, suspended him for "conduct on the campus unbecoming a student." That was Charles Eddie Moore's only documented brush with politics in his entire life.
A protest about bad cafeteria food. He came home to Meadville in April to figure out what to do next.
His childhood friend Henry Hezekiah Dee was working at a sawmill in town. Henry was tall and slim, with white teeth and a quiet, laid-back way about him.
He wore his hair in a James Brown-style conk, neatly processed and shining. Thomas would later say Henry had the best hair in that part of the state.
Henry had been splitting his time between Chicago and Franklin County. In southern Mississippi in 1964, a young Black man going back and forth from up North made certain white men nervous.
For decades after Henry's death, his sisters did not even have a picture of him. The only photograph of him on earth had been folded inside his wallet the day he was killed, and the authorities never gave the wallet back.
When a researcher finally turned up a picture of Henry forty-three years later, his sister Thelma Collins said she was so happy she cried. Thomas, who had played with Henry as a boy, looked at the picture and said, "I almost felt the earth move beneath me."
That was the shape of it. They could not even keep the boys' faces.
On Saturday, May 2, 1964, Charles met Henry in front of Dillon's gas station in Meadville. The two friends started walking and hitchhiking along Route 84, headed toward Roxie.
Mazie drove past them on her way to the doctor that afternoon. She saw her son standing there in the heat with Henry, both of them with their thumbs out, and she made a plan in her head to pick them up on the way back.
She came back later that afternoon. They were gone.
Several members of a local Klan chapter called the Bunkley klavern had pulled over before her. The Klansmen had been told that Black militants were running guns into the county to fight back against white violence.
The story was not true. There were no guns.
But the Klansmen needed someone to interrogate, and two unarmed Black teenagers walking on a country highway were what they found. A Klansman named James Ford Seale told Charles and Henry he was a federal revenue agent.
The boys got in.
Seale and the other Klansmen drove them deep into the Homochitto National Forest, twenty-five miles from Natchez, to a clearing where the pines closed off the sky. There, they tied the teenagers to trees and beat them.
The Klansmen demanded to know where the guns were hidden, demanded names. Henry, broken, finally told them what they wanted to hear.
He said the guns were stored at First Baptist Church in Roxie. There were no guns at First Baptist.
There were no guns anywhere. The beating did not stop when Henry answered.
The Klansmen wrapped the boys in tarp, put them in the trunk of a car, and drove.
They drove for about two and a half hours on backcountry roads, across the bridge into Louisiana and then back across the river to Parker's Landing in Warren County, Mississippi. The boys were still breathing when the car stopped.
At Parker's Landing the Klansmen weighted Henry Hezekiah Dee with old railroad rails and a cotton gin wheel. They weighted Charles Eddie Moore with an Army Jeep engine block.
The Klansmen rowed them out into a backwater of the Mississippi River, one at a time. Henry went first.
Then Charles. The river took them.
The Klansmen drove home and reported the imaginary cache of guns to Sheriff Wayne Hutto. Hutto and his deputies searched First Baptist Church in Roxie and found nothing, because there was nothing to find.
They did not investigate why two local nineteen-year-olds had vanished off Route 84 that same afternoon. Mazie Moore reported her son missing.
So did Henry's family. Nothing happened.
Two months passed. The country was busy with another search.
On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers, two of them white, had disappeared in Neshoba County while organizing for Freedom Summer. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner.
Their case became Mississippi Burning. More than two hundred FBI agents flooded the state.
On July 12, U.S. Navy divers searching the Mississippi River for those three civil rights workers found a body. There was excitement at first that they had found one of the missing men.
They had not. The next day a second body was recovered.
Again, excitement. Again, the same conclusion.
The FBI report used the words that would haunt the Moore and Dee families for decades. The wrong bodies.
The wrong victims of terror.
When investigators identified the remains as Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, the national media interest evaporated. Reporters who had been waiting for confirmation about Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman packed up.
Two more dead Black teenagers in Mississippi was not the story they had come to write. A faded college ID in a pants pocket told the FBI which one was Charles.
Thomas was in the Army by then, away at training. His commander pulled him aside one afternoon and told him his brother had been found.
Thomas came home to Meadville on emergency leave. Nobody in town would speak about the killing.
Not the neighbors. Not the law.
Not the white people who knew exactly who had done it. The funeral was held at West Funeral Home in Natchez, the Black one.
It was small. A few classmates, some relatives, some community people.
Mazie asked Thomas to wear his khaki Army uniform and to walk in front of the casket as it was moved in and out of the church. She wanted them to see her son carried in by a soldier.
Soon after, the misspelled stone went up over the grave. Cherlie Eddie Moor.
In November 1964 the FBI arrested James Ford Seale and another Klansman, Charles Marcus Edwards. Both gave partial confessions.
The local district attorney took the file, sat on it, and on January 11, 1965, filed a motion to dismiss. Seale and Edwards walked out free.
The federal government concluded the murders were a state matter and let it go. For forty years, Mississippi let it go.
Thomas Moore did not, but Mazie made him promise to wait. She was scared the killers would come for her only living son.
For years she lay in bed at night and Thomas would hear her through the thin walls. "Why did they do that to my son?" she would ask the dark.
She died thirteen years after Charles, in 1977. Thomas had kept his promise to her.
He served in Vietnam. He retired from the Army in 1994 as a command sergeant major.
He earned two bachelor's degrees, the second one dedicated to his brother. The hate stayed with him through all of it.
In 2005, a Canadian filmmaker named David Ridgen tracked Thomas down. The two of them drove back to Mississippi together with a video camera and a stack of unredacted FBI files.
Everyone in the county had told them Seale was dead. He was not.
A man in Roxie pointed them to Seale's trailer, and Thomas Moore stood face to face with the man who had taken his brother's life for the first time in forty-one years. Then they found Charles Marcus Edwards.
Edwards was a deacon at a church in Meadville now. Thomas walked up and said, "You're Charles Marcus Edwards."
"Yes, I am. Who are you, fella?" Edwards said.
Thomas told him. Edwards looked at him and said, "I didn't kill your brother."
That was the lie that finally broke. Pressure built.
The U.S. attorney took another look at the file. In January 2007 a federal grand jury indicted James Ford Seale on kidnapping and conspiracy.
Edwards took immunity and became the prosecution's star witness. On June 14, 2007, after deliberating less than two hours, the jury convicted Seale on every count.
He was sentenced to three life terms. Outside the courthouse, Thomas Moore told reporters, "Mississippi spoke today."
Some time later, Edwards came up to Thomas in private. He told him he had walked around for forty-two years with that burden on his shoulders.
Thomas, who had carried four decades of grief and rage in his chest, looked at him and quoted the eighteenth chapter of Matthew. He told Edwards that Peter had asked Jesus how many times you should forgive your brother.
He told Edwards that Jesus had answered, not seven times, but seventy times seven. Edwards finished the passage with him.
Then Thomas said, "So you are forgiven." Edwards said, "I appreciate it."
Thomas would later say of that moment, "That released me from the cell I had locked myself in."
In 2010, Franklin County, Mississippi, settled a civil suit with the Moore and Dee families for an undisclosed amount, finally admitting in court what everyone in town had always known about Sheriff Hutto. James Ford Seale died in federal prison in 2011.
In July 2021, fifty-seven years after the murders, the state of Mississippi installed a historical marker in Meadville. The names of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee are cut into the metal, spelled correctly.
At the dedication, Thomas Moore stood in front of about two dozen people and led them in a hymn. I will trust in the Lord till I die.
I am going to treat everybody right till I die. I am going to stay on the battlefield till I die.
The state marker spells the name right.
The stone in the cemetery still does not.
Thomas, who is in his eighties now, says he is going to fix that one too. He still has the address.
He still has the oak tree. He still has the cracked carving that reads Cherlie Eddie Moor, and one day soon, the boy his mother named Charles is going to get his name back the way she gave it to him.
I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
https://ko-fi.com/blackhistorystories
Every coffee helps me keep creating.
NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about racial violence during the Civil Rights era and the long fight for justice waged by the families of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.
