In late July of 1966, there would be another racially-motivated murder in Louisiana that tragically recalled the 1965 slaying of Deputy Sheriff Oneal Moore.
Twenty-four-year-old Clarence Triggs was an Army veteran and a bricklayer who had only just moved to Bogalusa, Louisiana with his wife Emma from their former home in Jackson, Mississippi. Though he had never been particularly involved in civil rights causes beforehand, once he moved to Bogalusa—a hotbed of Klan activity and an area still under the sway of Jim Crow laws—he became more motivated to participate.
Clarence attended a few meetings of the Congress of Racial Equality, and was known to have been present at one or two integration marches in the area, though he was far from a leader in the movement.
Less than a month after this protest, on July 30th, 1966, Clarence Triggs was found dead in his car on the side of the road, the victim of a single bullet wound to the head.
Civil rights advocates immediately put pressure on the police to solve the case, and emotions reached a fever pitch when it was discovered that Emma Triggs was not even allowed to identify her husband’s body at the scene of his murder.
Two days following the slaying, officers apprehended two white men, Homer Seale and John Copling Jr., and charged them with the crime. A car belonging to Seale’s wife had been found wrecked near the scene of the shooting, and both men were suspected members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Copling was placed on trial but quickly acquitted, while Seale was never tried at all. Although some small amount of progress had been made in Bogalusa with regards to KKK activity, it seemed, the organization was still powerful and connected enough to protect its own.
Just as in many of the other civil rights-related murders detailed in this book, the killing of Clarence Triggs was reopened after the 2007 passage of the Till Act, but just as in a depressing number of said cases, the investigation was subsequently closed again by the FBI, citing the death of main witnesses and suspects and the unlikelihood of obtaining any justice at this late juncture.
Clarence Triggs’ name, like those of several previously discussed victims, appears under the “Civil Rights Martyrs” designation on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
Crime Immemorial 