TALLAHASSEE - Evangeline Moore learned the art of oratory as a terrified 14-year-old, standing in for her father, Harry T. Moore, who wrote powerful speeches but lacked the proper voice to deliver them. Sixty years later, she is still speaking on his behalf, bearing witness to two enormous injustices.
The first was the unsolved Christmas night 1951 bombing of the family home, near Mims in Brevard County, that killed her father - who had single-handedly founded Florida's civil rights movement - and fatally injured her mother, Harriette Moore.
The FBI tried hard but couldn't crack the Ku Klux Klansmen it suspected, although one of them blew himself away with a shotgun after being questioned a second time. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement reopened the case in 1991 at Gov. Lawton Chiles' request, but reached another dead end. Too many suspects and witnesses were dead, missing or chronically unbelievable. Too much evidence was gone forever.
After more than half a century, it is illogical to think that anyone ever will be brought to justice. Still, Evangeline Moore hopes.
The other great injustice is that in Montgomery, Ala., there is a splendid memorial to America's civil rights martyrs, but none of the names engraved in granite is that of Harry or Harriette Moore.
It is not too late to rectify that.
Twelve years before Medgar Evers died in Mississippi and a Klansman's bomb killed four little girls in a Birmingham church, Harry Moore died for having fought lynchings, Klan bombings, and peonage in Florida.
Thirteen years before James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner were murdered by the Klan in Mississippi, Moore died for having brought the world's attention to bear on the kangaroo court convictions in Florida's infamous Groveland rape case.
Fourteen years before the Rev. James Reeb and Viola Greg Liuzzo were murdered for taking part in the Selma-to-Montgomery march that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act, Moore died for having secured voting rights in Florida.
His martyrdom was reported and decried around the world and even debated at the United Nations. How could it be forgotten in America?
"The most poignant epitaph for Harry T. Moore," wrote his biographer, Ben Green, "is that he was killed three years too soon."
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which created the Civil Rights Memorial, hews with a classically foolish consistency to a decision that the "modern civil rights era" began only on May 17, 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in the case known as Brown vs. Board of Education, and that the era ended, for the purpose of defining martyrdom, with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., in 1968. Forty names are listed.
For years, Evangeline Moore could not talk about what had happened to her parents. She does now. She spoke at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg's civil rights conference earlier this month. She did not raise the issue of the memorial, but when I asked her about it she said it still hurts.
Paradoxically, the Poverty Law Center has agreed to eventually add the name of Johnnie Mae Chappell, an innocent victim in March 1964 of random violence during civil rights demonstrations at Jacksonville, and of a subsequent police coverup. After my colleague Adam Smith wrote about it, the Poverty Law Center ceremonially rededicated the Memorial in Mrs. Chappell's honor. She is the only Floridian they recognize. The state of Florida has honored the Moores with a memorial where their home used to be, with a new Brevard courthouse named for them, and in other ways, but national commemoration remains seriously overdue.
When I called the Poverty Law Center, Penny Weaver, their director of community affairs, explained that "there had to be a time frame . . . We couldn't do a memorial for every single person who was ever killed in the cause of civil rights." Many people have called about the Moores, she said, but "That's just the way it is . . ."
That's what they told Evangeline Moore too: "That's just the way it is."
"I'm not really satisfied with that," Moore said, "but I just don't know where to go from here . . . If they wanted to be absolutely truthful and forthcoming they could do something, I'm sure."
Yes, they could. The first step would be to stop saying, "That's just the way it is."
Those words brought to mind a moment in professor Lew Killian's race relations class at Florida State University about 48 years ago. He put us in groups to play-act a scene in which a black parent tries to explain to a black child - all of us were white, of course - why they can't sit at the front of the bus.
"That's just the way it is," insisted the Charleston, S.C., belle who was cast as my mother.
"But why, Mama? Why?" She couldn't or wouldn't say. I persisted until the professor broke it up.
"That's just the way it is" is no better an excuse now than it was then. No matter who is saying it.
