Evangeline Moore, who sought to preserve the often-forgotten legacy of her activist parents, whose deaths in a 1951 Christmas bombing at their home in Florida were called the nation’s first civil rights assassination, was found dead Oct. 26 at her home in New Carrollton, Md. She was 85.

Her son, Drapher “Skip” Pagan Jr., said she died after going to bed on Saturday. The cause has not been determined.

Moore was working for the federal government when she boarded a train in Washington on Dec. 26, 1951, to join her parents – Harry and Harriette Moore – for a holiday celebration at their home in Mims, Florida.

Only when she stepped off the train a day later did she learn of the family tragedy that sparked international outrage and inspired a poem by Langston Hughes.

“They’re the only husband and wife who died in the civil rights struggle,” Ben Green, the author of “Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr,” said Wednesday in an interview.

Harry Moore had been an advocate for racial justice in Florida since at least 1934, when he formed a chapter of the NAACP in Brevard County, midway between Jacksonville and Palm Beach on Florida’s east coast. The Moores were teachers and administrators in black schools of Brevard’s segregated education system.

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Working with a civil rights lawyer and future Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Moore filed suit in 1937 over disparities between the salaries of black and white teachers in Florida.

Moore later became state secretary of the NAACP and, in 1944, organized the Florida Progressive Voters League, which registered more than 100,000 black citizens to vote, giving the state the highest proportion of African American voters in the South. Beginning in 1945, Moore began to investigate cases of police brutality and lynchings throughout Florida, sending affidavits to Marshall and other civil rights leaders.

Evangeline Moore helped her father work on his speeches and typed the letters he sent to Marshall and other officials.

The Moores were fired from their jobs by the all-white Brevard County school board in 1946, but they continued their activism. On Christmas Day in 1951 – also their 25th wedding anniversary – the Moores had just returned home from a celebratory dinner.

Not long after the lights were turned out, there was an explosion that was heard more than four miles away. A bomb had gone off directly under the Moores’ bedroom.

Harry Moore’s mother and Evangeline’s older sister, Annie, also were in the house but survived without serious injury. Neighbors took Harry Moore to the closest hospital that would treat African Americans, 30 miles away. By the time they arrived, he was dead.

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Nine days after the bombing, Harriette Moore died of her injuries.

The FBI was brought into the investigation. A member of the Ku Klux Klan in nearby Orlando committed suicide one day after he was questioned, but no one was charged with the killings.

Only since the 1990s, when journalists and historians began to examine the story of her parents, did Evangeline Moore take a public role in preserving the memory of her family’s contributions to the civil rights movement.

Evangeline Moore came to Washington after graduating in 1951 from Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

After working at the Labor Department, Moore became an administrator at the State Department. She retired in 1995 from what is now the Epilepsy Foundation of the Chesapeake Region.


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