Louisiana: Bleeding Bogalusa

In Louisiana, the paper-mill town of Bogalusa has been teetering for a long time on the verge of bloody race vio lence. The Ku Klux Klan is active there, while the Negroes themselves have formed a vigilante group called the Deacons for Defense and Justice.

When Sheriff Dorman Crowe appointed two Negroes as deputies last year, the move seemed to please the Negro community. The deputies, O'Neal Moore, 34, and Creed Rogers, 42, mostly patrolled the Negro area and were welcomed there.

All the same, Bogalusa remained a sleeping volcano. Last week it erupted with a sickening blast. Deputies Moore and Rogers were cruising in their police car one night near the hamlet of Varnado, seven miles north of Bogalusa. An old pickup truck caught up with them from behind. Shotgun bursts smashed the deputies' rear window. Then the truck drew abreast of the car. A second volley ripped out. It caught Rogers in the shoulder and blew Moore's head open.

Moore was dead. But Rogers immediately sent out a radio alarm, giving a description of the black truck, detailed down to the Confederate-flag decal on the front bumper. Less than an hour later, police at a roadblock in Tylertown, Miss., just across the state line, stopped a truck fitting Rogers' description. Arrested was Ernest Ray McElveen, 41, a mill worker and sometime insurance man from Bogalusa, who happened to have two pistols with him.

At first, McElveen refused to waive extradition. But Louisiana's Democratic Governor John McKeithen, calling the murder a "dastardly, heinous, cowardly deed," immediately set the legal wheels in motion. McElveen, formerly an honorary member of the Louisiana state police, changed his mind and returned voluntarily to jail and a murder charge. Meanwhile, FBI agents and state and local authorities searched for possible accomplices; police believe that there were three gunmen.

Two nights later, six bullets splattered the home of Washington Parish's Chief Deputy Sheriff Doyle Holliday, a white man, who had been helping in the investigation of the Moore murder. No one was hurt, although some of the slugs narrowly missed Holliday and his wife. At week's end, the investigation continued. Governor McKeithen offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to a murder conviction, promised to "demonstrate to the world that Louisianans are law-abiding, Godfearing citizens, and that our state is no haven for cowards and murderers."