JACKSON, Mississippi — Jurors in the trial of reputed white supremacist James Ford Seale heard excerpts yesterday from a 1964 letter he wrote asking fellow white Mississippians to wage a holy war against integration.“The time has come for the Christian people of this nation to stand up and fight for what is right in the eyes of God and man and not what a few men in congress or the senate decided on under pressure from the niggers and communists,” Seale’s letter to a local newspaper said.

The letter, an attack on the then-recently enacted Civil Rights Act, was published less than two weeks after the badly decomposed bodies of black teenagers Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore were discovered.

Seale, 71, has pleaded not guilty to federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges connected to the deadly attacks on Dee and Moore, whose decomposing bodies were pulled from a murky Mississippi River.

The bodies were found more than 70 miles from where the teens were last seen. Prosecutors say Seale was among the white supremacist Ku Klux Klansmen who abducted and attacked the young men, then drove them across the Mississippi River into Louisiana and took a rural highway to reach the spot where Dee and Moore were weighted down and dumped to their deaths.

In the letter to the editor of the Advocate, then a pro-segregation newspaper, Seale railed against the Civil Rights Act.

“The time is here and passing fast for the people of this great nation to fight and die for what is right,” he wrote. “If you choose to live and die under communism dictatorship, may God have mercy on your souls.”

Seale has denied ever belonging to the Klan, though a former daughter-in-law this week said she saw his Klan robe.

Mary Lou Webb, who operated the newspaper in 1964 with her husband, David, testified yesterday that the letter was a paid ad.

Asked whether the newspaper would publish such a letter today, Webb, after a brief pause, said “Yes.”

She said the newspaper accepted letters to the editor and advertisements whether she and her husband agreed with the point of view or not.