Harry T. Moore of Brevard County, Florida has been called the first civil rights martyr. He founded the first branch of the NAACP in his state and later became its state secretary. Employed as a school principal, Moore spent his life investigating lynchings, filing lawsuits against voting rights cases and fighting for black teachers. Moore helped 116,000 blacks register to vote.
Moore was raised by a single mom who was forced to send her son away when she couldn’t afford him. Moore graduated from Bethune-Cookman College and taught at segregated schools in Florida. He met the woman who would become his wife, a teacher named Harriette Vyda Simms. The two would start the first NAACP chapter together.
The couple’s work of the became a problem for many whites. Moore was fired from his job and blacklisted in public schools. In 1946, NAACP membership declined when national dues were doubled to $2 per year. The NAACP national president, Walter White, fired Moore after an argument over the due increases and the focus of his activities.
After taking a job as a research professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Moore put his energy back into activism a few years later.
In 1951, four black men were charged with raping a white woman in Groveland, Florida. Between angry white mobs and police, the two black men still alive were to be given a fair trail after Moore and Thurgood Marshall stepped in. During transport, the sheriff shot the two remaining men and one survived. Moore called for indictment and dismissal of the case.
Then On Dec. 25, 1951, Harry and Harriette Moore were the fatal victims of a house bomb. It was their wedding anniversary. The racism of the county was so extreme, local florists refused to deliver flowers to their funerals because they were black.
The Moores left behind two daughters, Juanita Evangeline Moore and Annie Rosalea Moore.
In 2005, Florida Atty. Gen. Charlie Crist re-opened a state investigation of their deaths. It was found that members of the Ku Klux Klan were behind the double homicide. Earl J. Brooklyn, Tillman H. Belvin, Joseph Neville Cox and Edward L. Spivey were eventually found guilty of the arson and murder of the Moores.
In memoriam, Langston Hughes’ wrote the poem below for Harry Moore. The Moore home is now a national landmark, and there is a road and a park named in their honor.
“The Ballad of Harry Moore”
By Langston Hughes
When will men for sake of peace
And for democracy
Learn no bombs a man can make
Keep men from being free?
It seems that I hear Harry Moore.
From the earth his voice cries,
No bomb can kill the dreams I hold —
For freedom never dies!
(Article can be found on blackamericaweb.com)
