Family Still Dreams of Justice for ’65 Civil Rights Murder

It has been 33 years since Oneal Moore and David Creed Rogers were ambushed on a deserted stretch of Louisiana Route 21.

Moore and Rogers, the first black deputy sheriffs in Washington Parish, were on their way to a midnight snack when a dark pickup truck with a Confederate flag sticker on the front bumper fell in behind their patrol car. Then the shooting started.

“There was so many bullets coming, then it wasn’t a matter of seconds that he was hit and lost control and hit the tree, and they drove on by shooting,” Rogers said recently, recalling that June night. “A shotgun blast knocked him over on me.”

Rogers lost his right eye. Moore lost his life.

Back then, a man was arrested and a gun was found. Charges were filed, then dropped. The case languished and appeared to be dead.

Decades later, a flurry of activity brought renewed hope of justice for Moore’s family and for Rogers.

In 1991, charges were filed in another high-profile civil rights crime, the 1963 assassination in Jackson, Miss., of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers. Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of that murder in 1994.

About the same time, authorities found new evidence in the 1966 firebomb death of Mississippi civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. On Aug. 21, former Ku Klux Klan leader Samuel H. Bowers, 73, was convicted of murder and arson, and trials are pending for two others in the case.

After the verdict, members of Dahmer’s family hugged. His daughter, Bettie, had testified, “I just want my dad to have the same justice anyone else in America gets.”

Oneal Moore’s family feels the same way.

But since a tip in 1990, which prompted the FBI to dig up a concrete slab looking for weapons, leads have all but dried up. And at 63, Moore’s widow is resigned to the possibility that justice won’t come in her lifetime.

“Sooner or later, they will be prosecuted--by man or by God,” said Maevella Moore, a nurse who still lives in the house in Bogalusa where she and her husband reared their four daughters.

Others feel the days of septuagenarian racists being led into court in wheelchairs for crimes committed long ago may be over.

“I think it’s very possible that the Bowers case marks the end of an era,” said Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. “Without knowing what witnesses may come forward driven by pangs of conscience decades after these crimes, it’s hard to say definitively that there won’t be another case like this.

“But certainly the cases where the evidence most obviously was ignored or otherwise mishandled, we’ve seen the majority of them come to court, come to trial.”

In both the Evers and Dahmer cases, there were multiple trials, multiple hung juries--twice freeing Beckwith, four times freeing Bowers.

But both cases produced something to help keep them alive--a record that was admissible in court, said Tennessee Circuit Judge D’Army Bailey of Memphis.

Bailey, a student protester of the era and one of the founders of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, said the passage of time presents almost insurmountable barriers for both prosecutors and defense attorneys. Without a record of sworn testimony in an earlier trial, the lack of living witnesses and pristine evidence could be fatal to even the strongest circumstantial case.

“While these two cases, and whatever one or two more we may see, are important closures to tragic histories, I think that most sadly we will see so many others that will never be closed--and can never be closed,” said Bailey, who marched in Bogalusa with the armed Deacons for Defense and Justice in the summer after Moore’s slaying.

Some had hoped that new leads in old murder cases might come from files released earlier this year of the defunct Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which once spied on blacks, civil rights figures and anyone else who challenged segregation.

But the man who fought for 20 years to get those files doesn’t see much practical use for them.

“The main thing the Sovereignty Commission files have done is to shine the spotlight on these deaths,” said David Ingebretsen, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi.

Indeed, the files didn’t help the Dahmer case much, Potok said. It was the confession of a former KKK errand boy who was in a 12-step program and felt the need to come clean.

“It’s doubtful that you are going to make any of these cases based on yellowed files in a cabinet somewhere,” said Potok, editor of the law center’s “Intelligence Report.” “I think really, as a rule, you need live witnesses.”

Rogers, who at 76 still supervises work crews two days a week for the sheriff’s office, has lost hope of facing in court those who shot him and Moore. People have been identified to him as the attackers, he says--but only after they were safely dead.

But the FBI in New Orleans still receives tips from time to time.

“This shooting occurred when I was still in high school, and there have been a couple of generations of agents working on it around the country,” said agent John Fleming, the New Orleans bureau spokesman. “So we’re going to continue to work on it with the hopes of getting a break through some information that may come out of these trials. Who knows?”

Maevella Moore said she has let go of her bitterness about the murder. But she hasn’t stopped wishing for a trial.

“If you did this terrible thing, you should be brought forth,” she said. “I’m not going to feel sorry for them. They didn’t feel sorry for me and my daughters. . . . Old men, young men, gotta pay. They’re going to pay, one way or another.

“Man might not know, but God knows what’s been going on.”