NOREEN: Election was a long time coming

Thomas Moore has been waiting a long time for this day - a day he thought would never come.

But he is a patient, determined sort of man who is used to waiting. Moore, 65, waited 43 years to win a small piece of justice for his brother, a black man murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen in Mississippi in 1964, another feverish presidential election year.

Today, a black man is president-elect.

Charles Moore was hitchhiking with a friend when they were kidnapped and killed. Their bodies were found about three months later in the search for three slain voting-rights workers, a story told in the film "Mississippi Burning."

Thomas Moore, a year older than his brother, soon was drafted and went to Vietnam, where he earned a Bronze Star and the Combat Infantryman's Badge.

He served in the Army for 30 years.

With help from a documentary filmmaker, Moore reopened the investigation into his brother's death in 2004. There was a trial, a conviction. The truth got out.

So Tuesday's election was personal. Moore thoroughly enjoyed it from his Colorado Springs living room.

Sitting in his rocking chair in front of his television, Moore smiled broadly and clapped his hands when Barack Obama won Ohio.

"It's all over," he said. "It's going to be a landslide. It's something else, man."

Sure, the black community is celebrating a black man as president. "But he's about more than that," Moore said. "I just think he has the vision."

Moore's wish?

"I hope the country can be healed. I hope everybody can say, ‘What can I do?' instead of ‘What do I get?'"

Moore appreciates Obama's success on a level many of us cannot comprehend.

"I think about the people that died, the civil rights workers," he said. "I think about my brother every single day. I think about the evil people in Franklin County, Mississippi, who killed him. But those people did not die in vain."

Like many of us in the over-40 crowd, Moore thinks young people don't fully get it.

"I don't think the younger generations of black people have an understanding of the sacrifices that were made," he said.

Moore knows about sacrifice and about waiting.

"I was a hell of a soldier," Moore said, and he's proud he got a college degree. Yet he says getting one bit of belated justice in federal court was his biggest achievement.

"Not anything I've done will be as much as what I did for my brother," he said.
Moore sees Obama as someone who will do much more, and for millions of people.

At his age, Moore doesn't expect or need more opportunities. But he wants them to be there for his 28-year-old son, Jeffery.

Obama's election doesn't bring an end to racism in Mississippi or anyplace else, but it feels like all of us just took a big step. Forty-four years ago people were killed for daring to register black voters. Just two years ago, it would have been hard to imagine a day like today.

It's all wonderful reality for Thomas Moore: "I don't have to imagine no more."

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Contact Noreen at 636-0363 or noreen@gazette.com. He appears on Fridays on KOAA TV channels 5/30 and on KRDO radio 1240 AM and 105.5 FM.