Guarding White Christians

By Donna Ladd Wednesday, June 27, 2007 3:13 p.m. CDT

Photo by Donna Ladd

The first Seale on record was a bodyguard—at 6-foot-6 and 300 pounds, Solomon Seale guarded King Alfred the Great, who ruled as the "King of the Anglo-Saxons" from 871-899. According to a two-volume, bound genealogical history of the "Seale" name on the shelf in the Franklin County Library in Meadville, the name likely came from the Old English word "seolth," which meant the most important house, or hall, in the village.

Certainly, the Seales that ended up in Southwest Mississippi by the mid-20th century believed in protecting their own. The name "Seale" appears dozens of times in the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files—and not because the family was trying to integrate lunch counters.

A number of Seales emerged as leaders in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1964, reportedly committing or supporting numerous acts of violence against blacks for the rest of the decade—but without real consequence. That is, until a federal jury this month finally found James Ford Seale guilty of kidnapping Henry Dee and Charles Moore, with the help of his father and his brother, among other Klansmen. Clyde Seale—James Seale's father and co-conspirator—was Tullie Seale's first cousin and a Grand Cyclops of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Klan began its third major period in U.S. history pushing back the threat of desegregation with violence and terror, being that the less-violent boycotts and threats of the Citizens Council didn't seem to be winning the battle. Since Confederate hero Nathan Bedford Forrest and buddies fired up the Klan during Reconstruction to scare off "agitation," the "need" for the nightriders in bedsheets (used to resemble ghosts to scare blacks) was only seen as acute when white supremacists thought they might be losing—during Reconstruction, to quell progressive movements in the 1920s and then against the encroaching Civil Rights Movement starting in '64.

That is, the Klan stepped up to finish the job—all in the name of God. They took an oath to follow "the spirit of Christian militancy" in order to "combat Satan" and "preserve Christian civilization."

Most of the Seale Klansmen were also in the White Knights, which met at Tullie Seale's church on Morgantown Road and drew its membership largely from the Mississipi and Louisiana counties surrounding Natchez, where hundreds of blue-collar workers at International Paper and Armstrong Tire & Rubber had joined the Klan. Natchez had become the de facto epicenter of Klan activity—due to its ready supply of plant workers firing each other up every day about the threats of segregation; its position at the heart of slavery wealth; and the fact that many blacks in the area had long refused to take abuse lying down.

By 1964, throughout the region, many blacks were standing up to fight back, eschewing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of Gandhian non-violence, which never worked well in white-or-die Mississippi, in favor of armed self-defense. It is no coincidence that the white KKK and the working-class black Deacons of Defense were taking root simultaneously in Adams, Franklin, Claiborne and Jefferson counties—what historian Lance Hill calls "Klan Nation"—in 1964; they were, in effect, there to defy each other. As one got strong, so did the other—leading to both escalated violence by the Klan and, in other cases, complete retreats.

Both the Klan terrorists and their black targets embraced religion, especially Christianity, as a way to strengthen their resolve. Even as African Americans prayed to be delivered to a kinder heaven than the cruel earth they were enduring, Klansmen considered themselves Christian soldiers marching on the state's strong tradition of race division—bigotry that divided many churches over the "race question" in ways that still exist right here in Jackson.

Southern bigots had long cynically used the Bible to justify the most horrible treatment of blacks and pinned the responsibility on God for the violent actions they had to take to "defend" their race.

White children throughout Mississippi have long grown up hearing, as little Shirley Seale did, that blacks are less than human, "animals," violent by nature, sexually crazed—and that God commands that we protect the purity of the white race, by any means necessary.

White Mississippians have also long been told that slavery was actually good for former Africans who have it better here, after all, than they would back over there. Besides, they've told our "Gone with the Wind"-soaked minds, white people were good to their slaves. The slaves would have run away if they weren't, we were told.

Like many, the granddaughter of Grand Dragon Tullie Seale believed those "history" lessons until God told her the truth at at Mount Locust Plantation in 2003.

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