This Black History Month, WABE’s “Morning Edition” is shedding light on a Civil Rights cold case dating back to 1945.
It surrounds crucial new information released about the murder of a 46-year-old Alabama farmer and mother, Hattie DeBardelaben. Initial reports said she died of a heart attack after resisting arrest on a charge of possession of bootleg liquor during a warrantless search of her home.
However, the facts surrounding her death at the hands of police and federal officers are now public after the FBI and Department of Justice released un-redacted records 80 years later. That was as part of the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018.
The act started the process of releasing public records of many racially-motivated crimes that went unsolved or unpunished in the Jim Crow South.
However, that does not mean they were not investigated. Local, state and/or federal authorities still conducted interviews and compiled detailed investigations into these crimes, according to the review board.
This story was also made possible at the urging of Hattie DeBardelaben’s living descendants — especially her granddaughter, Mary DeBardelaben, who lives in Ellenwood, Georgia, roughly 16 miles south of downtown Atlanta. She’s one of a few living relatives who can now share details beyond what the board has released.
For years, DeBardelaben pressed authorities for more details on her grandmother’s brutal assault and death. Then in late 2024, the unsanitized details arrived on her doorstep in an envelope, stuffed with federal documents from the Cold Case Records Review Board.
“These were big men, these were not small men, and how they hit her, repeatedly. Hit her until she fell down, on her knees, and just knocked her over a boiling pot of water,” DeBardelaben told WABE’s “Morning Edition,” noting that there is speculation in the documents that the officers also broke her neck.
“When they put her in the car, her son had to witness that she was foaming at the mouth, as she was dying there.”
Many relatives still refuse to read the documents. For days, DeBardelaben said, all she could do was cry.
The officers involved were never prosecuted, even at the urging of the NAACP and Hattie’s son, Edward. The 15-year-old was loaded into the back of a police car with his mother, and would hold her as she uttered her last breath. Edward would later move to Chicago, go to law school and spend his entire life seeking justice for his mother.
The NAACP repeatedly contacted the Department of Justice to investigate DeBardelaben’s death. In 1945, Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark even implored FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to open an investigation.
Eventually, a grand jury declined to indict the men who severely beat Hattie, according to the Cold Case Records Review Board. They are Autauga County Deputy Clyde White and three federal officers — John Barrenbrugge of the Alcohol Tax Unit of the Internal Revenue Department, J.C. Moseley of the Alcohol Beverage Control Board (working for the Alcohol Tax Unit) and L.O. Smith of the Alcohol Beverage Control Board.
Mary DeBardelaben shares more on the search for the truth about her grandmother Hattie’s death
Newspaper clippings indicate that White, Barrenbrugge, Smith and Moseley went unpunished as they continued work in their positions. White would even go on to be elected as Autauga County sheriff in June 1954.
“It’s demonstrative in terms of how the federal government and local government back during that time did not do anything to prosecute these people who actually broke the law. And they broke the law. They killed my grandmother,” DeBardelaben said.
No one knows for sure how many Civil Rights cold cases still remain unresolved. But according to the board, it’s likely that the number of cases spanning the time period of 1940 to 1979 is in the thousands.
