Evangeline Moore is still looking for peace today, 60 years after her parents' murders. (669 hits)
These Civil Rights Martyrs Deserve Honoring
Christmas of 1951 was anything but a season of peace for Evangeline Moore. And she’s still looking for peace today. That was when Moore, who was 21 at the time, arrived home after a marathon train ride from Washington, D.C. to Mims, Florida to learn that her father, civil rights and NAACP leader Harry Moore, had been killed in an explosion on Christmas Day. Her mother, Harriette, had been severely injured – and she died nine days later.
Moore's parents – the only husband and wife to die in the civil rights struggle – are viewed by many as the movement’s first martyrs. Harry Moore, in fact, put himself on the fast track to martyrdom when, among other things, he confronted Florida’s white power structure about lynchings.
That took some serious intestinal fortitude.
Lynchings assured white people that they not only didn't have to worry about lowly black people robbing them of their belongings, but that they also didn't have to worry about uppity black people robbing them of their assumptions of privilege. Florida, in fact, had the most lynchings per capita between 1900 and 1930, and 61 black people were lynched in the state between 1921 and 1946.
Harry Moore didn't sit and wait for the white power structure to come to Jesus about those injustices. He wrote letters demanding that they stop the killings, and even went as far as to investigate the lynchings himself. Moore's defiance of the social order is what lit the blast that killed him and his wife. "The whole course of my family's history changed when they killed my parents," Moore, who is now 81, told The Washington Post. "I won’t stop until someone is held accountable."
But that could prove tough.
The Justice Department recently closed the case because it believes the killers are dead. And to me, it's one more reminder of how, for some reason, time and inconvenience always seems to get in the way of justice for black people. ...
