It was on Christmas night 1951 when her father, Harry T. Moore, was murdered instantly when a bomb placed by racists exploded under the familys Mims home. <\/p>\n
Nine days later, her mother, Harriette V. Moore, died as a result of injuries sustained in the bombing. <\/p>\n
The Moores were some of the earliest civil rights leaders in Florida and began their work in Brevard County. Harry Moore, a graduate of Bethune-Cookman College (now University), was the Florida state field secretary for the NAACP. He fought for equal pay for teachers, spoke out against violent atrocities against African-Americans,and registered thousands of voters. <\/p>\n
At the time they were killed, Harry Moore, who also founded the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP, was registering large numbers of blacks to vote and protesting the circumstances around a rape trial in Groveland including the killings of two of the defendants by the Lake County sheriff. <\/p>\n
Such activism, in a state still under the harsh rule of Jim Crow, drew the ire of the Ku Klux Klan. <\/p>\n
Circumstantial evidence In 2006, Floridas then-Attorney General Charlie Crist spoke about the Moores murders under a rambling oak tree just yards from where the Moore home stood, now the site of a cultural center honoring the couple. <\/p>\n
Crist said strong circumstantial evidence unearthed during a 20-month investigation pointed to ultra-violent factions within the KKK as being responsible for this horrible act. <\/p>\n
In the Moore case, investigators interviewed more than 100 people and combed through 50 years of documents. The bombsite was even excavated, though it yielded no new evidence. <\/p>\n
But the stories of witnesses did. They told of a particularly violent group of men who were working to squash the efforts of the Moores. Those implicated were Earl J. Brooklyn, Tillman H. Bevlin, Joseph N. Cox and Edward L. Spivey. Crist, who said others may have been involved, failed to elaborate on the roles each man played. <\/p>\n
All dead Spivey reportedly confessed to investigators and an anonymous tipster before his death from cancer in 1980. But by that time, the case was nearly 30 years old and the other three men were long dead. <\/p>\n
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State & National<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was on Christmas night 1951 when her father, Harry T. Continue reading