At Christmas, Evangeline Moore thinks of her martyred parents and demands justice

Evangeline Moore closes her eyes as she recalls what happened on Christmas, 60 years ago. She’s able to tell the story because she wasn’t home in Florida when the bomb went off.

Her father, Harry Tyson Moore, was an early, fearless civil rights leader in Florida who spent the late 1930s and 1940s investigating every lynching of blacks in the state.

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It was on Christmas 1951, shortly after 10 p.m., that someone, likely a Klansman, lighted the fuse to a massive explosive charge rigged under the family’s home in Mims, about 40 miles from Orlando.

Evangeline, then 21 and working in the District as a clerk typist for the federal government, learned the tragic details when she arrived in Florida two days after Christmas, expecting a joyous family reunion.

Her father had been killed by the blast that leveled their home; her mother, Harriette V. Moore, would die nine days later.

Nearly 12 years before Medgar Evers was fatally shot, 14 years before Malcolm X was slain and 17 years before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Harry Moore became an important early martyr for civil rights.

Langston Hughes wrote a poem about his slaying a few months later.

It seems that I hear Harry Moore,

From the earth his voice cries,

No bomb can kill the dream I hold —

For freedom never dies!

Now retired and living in Bowie, Evangeline Moore has spent her life goading investigators to find her parents’ killers — and for a time a few years back, she had reason to hope. But that hope was dashed in the fall.

Christmas marks the passage of another year. Still, the 81-year-old refuses to give up.

“I think that God has left me here all these years to get justice for my dad and my mom,” she said. “The whole course of my family’s history changed when they killed my parents. I won’t stop until somebody is held accountable.”

Harry Moore started the first branch of the NAACP in Florida in Brevard County in 1934, the first among more than 70 he would help start over the next 17 years, officials said.

Over the years, his biggest challenge was racial violence. Florida had a long history of brutality against blacks, often with law enforcement and government officials cooperating with racist groups.

In 1947, the Moores were fired from their jobs as teachers, a move designed to intimidate him. Instead, Harry Moore began working full time for the NAACP.

He wrote to the Florida delegation of Congress: “Again we must remind you of the urgent need of a strong Federal law against lynching and mob violence. . . . We need a Federal law with ‘teeth.’ ”

In 1949, Harry Moore investigated a case in Groveland, Fla., in which four black men were accused of raping a white woman despite questionable evidence. When a sheriff, Willis V. McCall, shot two of the suspects on the eve of their retrial after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned their death sentences in 1951, Moore “demanded that McCall be indicted and tried for murder,” his daughter said.

Friends warned that he might be in danger.

“He was incredibly courageous,” said Paul Ortiz, author of “Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920” and director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida in Gainesville.