Stanley Nelson - Klan of Devils: The Murder of a Black Louisiana Deputy Sheriff

KLAN OF DEVILS

KLAN OF
DEVILS

THE MURDER

OF A BLACK LOUISIANA

DEPUTY SHERIFF

STANLEY NELSON

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS BATON ROUGE

Published with the assistance of the Mason C. Carter Fund and the John and Virginia Noland Fund

Published by Louisiana State University Press
lsupress.org

Copyright 2021 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any format or by any means without written permission of Louisiana State University Press.

Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing

Designer: Mandy McDonald Scallan

Typeface: Sentinel

Printer and binder: Sheridan Books, Inc.

Maps by Mary Lee Eggart

Jacket photograph: The patrol car driven by deputy Oneal Moore the night of June 2, 1965. Photograph courtesy FBI.

Names: Nelson, Stanley, 1955 September 18 author.

Title: Klan of devils : the murder of a black Louisiana deputy sheriff / Stanley Nelson.

Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021010931 (print) | LCCN 2021010932 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7607-8 (cloth) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7646-7 (pdf ) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7647-4 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Moore, OnealDeath and burial. | Ku Klux Klan (1915 ) | United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation. | Center for Investigative Reporting (U.S.) | Police murdersLouisianaHistory. | SheriffsLouisianaBiography. | MurderInvestigationLouisianaHistory. | Investigative reportingUnited States. | LouisianaRace relationsHistory.

Classification: LCC HV8145.L8 L46 2021 (print) | LCC HV8145.L8 (ebook) | DDC 364.9763dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010931

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010932

I used to think maybe there was some good to the Ku Klux Klan, but theyre nothing but a pack of no-good devils.

A white woman in Bogalusa, Louisiana, whose husband was abducted and beaten by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964

CONTENTS

KLAN OF DEVILS

INTRODUCTION

Almost six decades ago on a quiet Wednesday night, June 2, 1965, a sheriffs office patrol car eased through the village of Varnado around 10:15. Located in the southeastern corner of Louisiana, Varnado is seventy-five miles north of New Orleans. Following behind was a black pickup first observed a few minutes earlier by the two African American deputies inside the police cruiser. As they crossed the railroad tracks on Main Street, gunshots rang out when the pickup began to pass. Suddenly, the patrol car swerved off the street and crashed into an oak tree. Inside the bullet-riddled vehicle, the driver, Oneal Moore, a young man with a wife and four daughters, was dead. His partner, Creed Rogers, a few years older, was seriously injured but survived. Within minutes, parish and state police officers arrived at the scene along with FBI agents. One of the biggest tasks for investigators was to solve the main puzzle: Who were the occupants of the pickup?

Less than an hour later, based on a description provided by Rogers, police officers in Tylertown, Mississippi, spotted the vehicle racing through town. Quickly apprehended was the pickups driver and ownera forty-one-year-old white paper mill worker from BogalusaErnest Ray McElveen. He was alone. The only person ever charged in the murder of Oneal Moore, McElveen refused to talk to the FBI or to reporters from across the nation who contacted him periodically over the thirty-eight years between the killing and his death in 2003. McElveen had returned home from World War II a decorated war survivor. Soon afterward, he began a quiet family life in Bogalusa and a terroristic personal life, involving himself in vigilante justice, working to disenfranchise hundreds of Black voters from the voting rolls of Washington Parish, serving as president of the local chapter of the white Citizens Council, and later becoming a member of the Original Knights, the largest Klan group in Louisiana, which spawned the White Knights in Mississippi in 1964. He was held in jail eleven days before his release. Although the sheriff charged McElveen with murder, the district attorney never asked a grand jury for an indictment because Rogers, the key eyewitness who identified the truck holding the attackers, never got a clear view of the occupants. He could not identify McElveen as the driver or as a passenger. Behind the scenes, several grand jurors, friends of the defendant, pushed to hear the case so they could reject an indictment and clear McElveens name. Additionally, fear of the Klan made the work of the law enforcement even harder. Witnesses in both the white and Black communities whose testimony in court may have assisted in identifying all of the killers refused to do so.

Washington Parish, Louisiana

The two deputies had been on the job for a year and a day when the shooting occurred. Each had been hired by the white sheriff, Dorman Crowe. His decision enraged members of local units of the Original Knights. The hiring also was historic: Moore and Rogers were the first Black men to serve as deputies in Washington Parish. And the case stands out in another way: it appears to be the only one during the civil rights era in which the Klan targeted Black law enforcement officers.

Six miles to the south of Varnado is Bogalusa, where news of the shooting resulted in more bloodshed in the city streets. For months, the Bogalusa Voters and Civic League, allied with the Congress for Racial Equality and the Deacons for Defense and Justicean armed group that protected Black neighborhoods and activists from the Klanhad led multiple marches and demonstrations seeking to desegregate the mill town and to have the mandates of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 fully enforced. Disrupting these events were the Original Knights in Washington Parish, home to the largest concentration of Klansmen in Louisiana. The situation in Bogalusa, made all the more volatile due to the shooting of the deputies, became perhaps the greatest challenge of the first term of Governor John J. McKeithen, who came from northern Louisiana, where the Original Knights had first organized in 1960 in Shreveport-Bossier. McKeithen met with civil rights leaders and with Klan leaders in attempts to quell the violence. His last visit with Washington Parish Klan leaders came during a secret meeting in Bogalusa two days before the shooting of the deputies. McKeithen thought he had convinced Klansmen to stay off the streets and end the violence. Consequently, the reality of the shooting of the deputies stunned him and opened his eyes to the fact that violent Klansmen could not be trusted or managed. As a result, McKeithen, who had sought the governorship as a segregationist, moderated his position on race and came to understand that enforcement of civil rights laws was a necessity.

Historian Adam Fairclough noted in his epic study of the civil rights movement in Louisiana that Bogalusa, because of its geographic location in a parish bordered on the north and east by Mississippi, was more like a Mississippi town than a Louisiana one. In Mississippi, where the White Knights had launched a statewide reign of terror, one of the most iconic Klan murder cases of the era involving three civil rights workers (Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman) in Neshoba County in 1964, was still being intensively investigated by the FBI and continued to hold the attention of a shocked nation. Fairclough opined that had the same crisis in Bogalusa occurred in Mississippi it was improbable that it would have been tackled with the same combination of constructive mediation from the governor and resolute intervention by the Department of Justice.