Klan of Devils

Angebote / Angebote:

In the summer of 1965, several Ku Klux Klan members riding in a black pickup truck shot two Black deputies in Washington Parish, Louisiana. Deputy Oneal Moore, the driver of the patrol car and father of four daughters, died instantly. His partner, Creed Rogers, survived and radioed in a description of the pickup. Less than an hour later, police in Mississippi spotted the truck and arrested its driver, a decorated World War II veteran named Ernest Ray McElveen. They returned McElveen to Washington Parish, where he spent eleven days in jail before authorities released him. Afterward, the FBI sent its top inspector to Bogalusa to participate in the murder inquiry-the only civil rights-era FBI investigation into killing a Black law enforcement officer by the Ku Klux Klan. Despite that assistance, lack of evidence and witnesses willing to come forward forced prosecutors in Louisiana to eventually drop all charges against McElveen. The FBI continued its investigation but could not gather enough evidence to file charges either, leaving the murder of Oneal Moore an unsolved cold case. Klan of Devils is Nelson's subsequent investigation of the case, which the FBI probed from 1965 to 2016. He describes the Klan's growth and the emergence of Black activism in Bogalusa and Washington Parish against the backdrop of political and racial change in the 1950s and early 1960s. With the files and assistance of two retired FBI agents who worked the case, Nelson also explores the lives of the primary suspects, all of whom are now dead, and suggests which Klansmen were ultimately responsible for this senseless and horrific attack"--