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.
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.
