Case of activists' deaths, long cold, finally solved

Sunday, August 20, 2006 The husband had founded the local NAACP chapter. MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS MIMS, Fla. — More than half a century after the civil rights movement began, Florida has solved one of the nation's worst hate crimes: the bombing of a black activist couple's home on Christmas Day. Four Ku Klux Klan members, long dead, are accused of planting the bomb at the home of Harry T. and Harriette Moore, the original architects of the state's civil rights movement, teachers and quiet leaders who fought against lynchings and police brutality. They were killed nearly 55 years ago, on their 25th wedding anniversary, becoming two of the country's first civil rights martyrs. For years, the bombing remained a tragic stain on this small citrus town just north of Cape Canaveral and one of the nation's most horrific unsolved civil rights cases. Until Wednesday. State Attorney General Charlie Crist delivered justice Wednesday under a rambling oak tree just yards from where the Moore home stood, now the site of a cultural center honoring the couple. The couple's daughter, Evangeline Moore, now retired and living in Maryland, said she is relieved the case has been solved. 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. The Moore case is one of the nation's 15 known civil rights "cold cases" of crimes committed before 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Early last year, a Mississippi jury convicted a Baptist preacher of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers who were registering voters. The case In the Moore case, investigators interviewed more than 100 people and combed through 50 years of documents. The bomb site was even excavated but yielded no new evidence. 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. At the time, Harry Moore, who 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, Crist said. On Christmas night 1951, the Moores had just gone to bed when the bomb exploded. Harry Moore was killed in the blast. His wife died nine days later.