Harry T Moore
By
John C Abercrombie
This is day 16 of 28 and focuses on Harry T Moore a civil rights activist who was killed along with his wife by a bomb placed under their bedroom on their 25th anniversity. An act of violenced that generally was not investigated allowing the perpetrators to avoid any possiblee charges.
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Harry T More was a civil rights activist who established a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He also helped thousands of Blacks register to vote in the 1940s. He was also active in addressing unequal salaries, segregated schools, and the disenfranchisement of Black voters.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) has exhibits that help tell Moore’s story and connection to events of the early 20th century up to today.
Moore was born November 18, 1905, to Stephen John and Rosalea Albert Moore in Houston, Florida. His father was a farmer and storeowner. His mother worked as an insurance agent. In school he was noted for his diligence to learning and earned the nickname “Doc”. He graduated from Florida Memorial College High School in 1924 and decided on a teaching career, accepting a job at Cocoa Junior High school where he was faced with firsthand reality of what is called “separate but equal”. The separate was a reality, but the “but equal” was a long way from reality. Moore was fighting significant odds, including poor facilities, and limited financial resources.
With his strong family and tight-knit Black community to support him, Moore developed a passion for activism and spent the rest of his life-fighting discrimination. He joined the NAACP in 1934 and became president of the Brevard County branch shortly after he and Harriette founded the local organization. Moore used the NAACP platform to challenge inequality at the local and statewide level. In 1938, for example, he supported a local schoolteacher who filed for litigation against unequal pay based on race. This was one of the first lawsuits in the Deep South that challenged salary discrimination among teachers, and it was a case supported by Thurgood Marshall. Moore and the plaintiff argued that Black teacher salaries were much lower than their white people counterparts and they demanded equal pay. Even though they lost the case, some believe it paved the way for equalization of teacher salaries ten years later.
Moore continued to fight for justice and equality by organizing the Florida State Conference of the NAACP in 1941, and in 1944 he formed the Florida Progressive Voters League (chartered in 1946). He wanted to increase African American participation in the Democratic Party and could not do that through the non-partisan NAACP. He also organized protests against lynchings and police brutality and was known for speaking openly about racial injustice. When change did not immediately occur through legal measures, he took to the polls and in 1944 organized the Progressive Voters’ League. Through this organization, Moore helped register at least 100,000 Black people for the Florida Democratic Party.
Fighting for rights often came with a great price and he and his wife both experienced the backlash and lost their teaching jobs because of the fight. No longer able to teach, he became an advocate of prevention and the prosecution of lynchings. There are some who believed that Moore investigated every lynching in the state of Florida. Thorough investigations that included interviewing victims, families as would an investigative reporter.
Moore also became involved in the Groveland Rape case in the summer of 1949 working directly with Thurgood Marshall. This was a high-profile case where four young African American men were accused of raping a 17-year-old White woman, Norma Padgett, in Lake County, Florida. During the hearing and in pre-trial meetings, one of the defendants, Earnest Thomas, was shot and killed by a mob. Sheriff Willis McCall shot two others during transportation to the second hearing, taking the life of Samuel Shepard and injuring Walter Irvin. The fourth defendant, Charles Greenlee, was sentenced to life in prison. This sentencing is also suspect because of the extremely high number of convictions that result in death penalties.
Moore continued to work for legal and political justice as the State Coordinator of branches of the NAACP. Ku Klux Klan activity was on the rise and on Christmas Eve, 1951 the Moores were killed by a bomb placed under their bedroom as the couple were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.
Another tragedy followed. Today we see people taken to hospitals nearby, but in the case of the Moores, all of the hospitals in the immediate area were White hospitals. The nearest hospital that accepted Black patients was 30 miles away, delaying much needed care. While we don’t often face this problem today, it was frequent in those days, resulting in death and exacerbated injuries from lack of immediate care.
According to historians, Moore’s death was the first assassination of a civil rights leader in the modern Civil Rights Movement. The Moores’ deaths made national news in both the Black and White people press. Again, we may be surprised at there being two presses, one Black and one White, but news of Black people seldom made in the White press who were devoted mostly to telling disparaging stories based on race.
Harry Moore was laid to rest on January 1, 1952, in front of a large gathering, which included FBI agents who were there to protect grieving friends and family. Harriette was buried next to her husband.
Harry T Moore
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S1, EP 5 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN FLORIDA: “WHO IS HARRY T. MOORE” (PT 1)
You are tired and sleepy and can’t wait to lay your weary body down. Finally, you settle down and your mind drifts off into the abyss. You hear a voice in the distance; and you strain to make it out. The voice is faint; yet, telling the unfiltered history of the 1951 murder of Harry T. Moore.
“Who is Harry T. Moore?” you ask yourself, and “Why should I listen to this voice?” But the voice is so commanding, authoritative, knowledgeable, and passionate that you can’t stop listening to what it is saying, and wondering, “What did Moore do?” “What makes his story any different from the hundreds of other Blacks, who were killed or lynched in the south?” Before you can complete your thought, the voice responds, “Harry T. Moore was fighting for the civil rights of Blacks long before The Civil Rights Movement began in Florida.”
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Book
Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Martyr
On Christmas night, 1951, a bomb exploded in Mims, Florida, under the home of civil rights activist and educator Harry T. Moore.
Harry and his wife Harriette both died from injuries sustained in the blast, making them the first martyrs of the contemporary civil rights movement. They were killed twelve years before Medgar Evers, fourteen years before Malcolm X, and seventeen years before Martin Luther King, Jr.
The sound of the bomb could be heard three miles away in the neighboring town of Titusville, but what resonates today is the memory of the important civil rights work accomplished by Moore.
This new edition of Ben Green s comprehensive biography of Harry T. Moore includes updated material about the investigations into the bombing, and additional photographs commemorating Moore s legacy. feel free to sample our books anytime by clicking the picture.
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Black Roots: A Beginners Guide To Tracing The African American Family Tree
Trace, document, record, and write your family’s history with this easy-to-read, step-by-step authoritative guide.
Finally, here is the fun, easy-to-use guide that African Americans have been waiting for since Alex Haley published Roots more than twenty-five years ago. Written by the leading African American professional genealogist in the United States who teaches and lectures widely, Black Roots highlights some of the special problems, solutions, and sources unique to African Americans. Based on solid genealogical principles and designed for those who have little or no experience researching their family’s past, but valuable to any genealogist, this book explains everything you need to get started, including: where to search close to home, where to write for records, how to make the best use of libraries and the Internet, and how to organize research, analyze historical documents, and write the family history.
This guide also includes:
-real case histories that illustrate the unique challenges posed to African Americans and how they were solved
-more than 100 illustrations and photographs of actual documents and records you’re likely to encounter when tracing your family tree
-samples of all the worksheets and forms you’ll need to keep your research in order
-a list of the traps even experienced researchers often fall into that hamper their research
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Harry T Moore A Civil Rights Activist Lost to Tragedy
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Book
The Bomb Heard Around the World
n 1951 American terrorism was homegrown. There were no battles fought on American soil, yet there were 12 bombings targeting black Americans, Catholics, and Jews in “Jim Crow” Florida. One of those bombs was, symbolically, heard around the world.
Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette, were murdered on Christmas night 1951 by racist terrorists. Ironically, Harry knew he was a target of the KKK but swore he would keep going, working on rights for African Americans.
WWll had just ended and apart from Pearl Harbor, Americans had never experienced the shock and tragedy of war on “home soil”. Americans, for a long time, paid little attention to the persecution of blacks and other minorities, despite the multitude of violent, racist episodes, not dissimilar from events in Nazi Germany.
This book explores the events leading up to the Moore assassinations and follows long after, with extensive investigations by the FBI, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, and the Dept. of Justice. What they uncovered was remarkable, and the corruption that accompanied the crime was shocking. The Bomb Heard Around the World reveals new information and facts which exposes both savage corruption and exceptional courage over decades in America.
The Moore assassinations became an international referendum on America and its values. At the end of WWII the world turned to America as the beacon of freedom and liberty, yet after the deaths of the Moore’s, world opinion shifted. This journey through their lives and deaths is a road trip through the history of America and while this is the story of the Moore’s, it is also a story for today. With many unjustified killings of blacks in America today, the racial divide has widened.
Decades after the assassinations, a Republican Attorney General, Charlie Crist, would take on this criminal case in an attempt to solve the assassinations once and for all. He faced enormous political pressures yet stayed the course.
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Freedom Never Dies – The Legacy of Harry T. Moore – PVW
Harry T. Moore paved the way for the 60s civil rights movement by championing equal pay for black teachers, organizing the black vote and publicly condemning racist attitudes and actions of local, state and national officials.
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Book
Before Selma: The Harry T. Moore Story
Against all odds and with death staring him in the face at every turn, the shy Harry T. Moore charged ahead, with his wife and children at his side, in his quest to make a difference in the quality of life for his people.
The impact of this brave, great civil rights martyr changed forever the course of history for people of color. His footprint will be felt for many years to come in America and around the world.
In the immortal words of Harry T. Moore, he summarized his life’s work as “this great struggle to secure for our people a fuller enjoyment of their Constitutional rights and privileges.” It is on the shoulders of Harry T. Moore that we all stand today.
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Before His Time — Harry T Moore, A Historical Documentary
A Historical Documentary of the Life and Legacy of Harry Tyson Moore entitled Before His Time.
Harry T. Moore was the first Martyr of the Civil Rights Movement when he and his wife Harriet were assassinated on Christmas Day 1951 in Mims, Florida.
His entire family are graduates of Bethune-Cookman University, Daytona Beach, Florida
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Book
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
“A must-read, cannot-put-down history.” (Thomas Friedman, New York Times)
Arguably the most important American lawyer of the 20th century, Thurgood Marshall was on the verge of bringing the landmark suit Brown v. Board of Education before the US Supreme Court when he became embroiled in a case that threatened to change the course of the civil rights movement and to cost him his life.
In 1949, Florida’s orange industry was booming, and citrus barons got rich on the backs of cheap Jim Crow labor with the help of Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who ruled Lake County with murderous resolve. When a White 17-year-old girl cried rape, McCall pursued four young Black men who dared envision a future for themselves beyond the groves. The Ku Klux Klan joined the hunt, hell-bent on lynching the men who came to be known as “the Groveland Boys”.
Associates thought it was suicidal for Marshall to wade into the “Florida Terror”, but the young lawyer would not shrink from the fight despite continuous death threats against him.
Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI’s unredacted Groveland case files, as well as unprecedented access to the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund files, Gilbert King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader.
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Grills
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Florida Frontiers TV – Episode 17 – Harry T. Moore
A look at the life of educator and activist Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette, the first martyrs of the contemporary civil rights movement.
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As we look at the life of Harry T Moore, let us remember that he was not alone. There were others doing as he did and fighting for freedom. We don’t hear about them because there seems to be an unwritten rule that anything that may be embarrassing for Europeans to face is left out of what is supposed to be our history. It is not taught, leaving us to try to make sense out of a world with an incomplete picture of reality. We must seek to find the truth and teach it or we don’t have an opportunity to learn from it.