Harry T. Moore

Harry T. Moore

Undated photo of Harry T. Moore
Born (1905-11-18)November 18, 1905
Houston, Suwannee County, Florida, United States
Died December 25, 1951(1951-12-25) (aged 46)
Seminole County, Florida, United States
Occupation Educator, civil rights pioneer
Spouse(s) Harriet Vyda Simms Moore
Website Harry Moore on pbs.org

Harry Tyson Moore (November 18, 1905 – December 25, 1951) was an African-American educator, a pioneer leader of the Civil Rights Movement, and founder of the first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Brevard County, Florida.

Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette Vyda Simms Moore, also an educator, were the victims of a bombing of their home in Mims, Florida on Christmas night 1951. He died in an ambulance on the way to a hospital in Seminole County while she died January 3, 1952 at the hospital in Sanford, Florida. Forensic work in 2005-6 resulted in the naming of the probable perpetrators as four Ku Klux Klan members, all long dead by the time of the investigation.[1] The Moores were the first NAACP members to be murdered for civil rights activism; Moore has been called the first martyr of the early stage of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the early 1930s Moore had become state secretary for the Florida chapter of the NAACP. Through his registration activities, he greatly increased the number of members, and he worked on issues of housing and education. He investigated lynchings, filed lawsuits against voter registration barriers and white primaries, and worked for equal pay for black teachers in public schools.

Moore also led the Progressive Voters League. Following a 1944 US Supreme Court ruling against white primaries, between 1944 and 1950, he succeeded in increasing the registration of black voters in Florida to 31 percent of those eligible to vote, markedly higher than in any other Southern state. In 1946 he and his wife were fired from the public school system because of his activism; he worked full-time for the NAACP.

Early Life and Family

Harry Tyson Moore was born on November 18, 1905, in Houston (pronounced "HOUSE-ton"), Florida, a tiny farming community in Suwanee County, on the Florida Panhandle. He was the only child of Johnny and Rosa Moore. His father tended the water tanks for the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and ran a small store in front of the house. Johnny Moore's health faltered when Harry was nine years old, and he died in 1914. Rosa tried to manage alone, working in the cotton fields and running her little store on weekends, but in 1915, she sent Harry to live with one of her sisters in Daytona Beach. The following year, he moved to Jacksonville, where he spent the next three years living with three other aunts: Jesse, Adrianna, and Masie Tyson.

This would prove to be the most important period in his formative years. Jacksonville had a large and vibrant African American community, with a proud tradition of independence and intellectual achievement. Moore's aunts were educated, well-informed women (two were educators and one was a nurse), who took this spindly, intelligent boy into their house on Louisiana Street and treated him like the son they'd never had. Under their nurturing guidance, Moore's natural inquisitiveness and love of learning were reinforced.

After three years in Jacksonville, he returned home to Suwanee County, in 1919, and enrolled in the high school program of Florida Memorial College. Over the next four years, Moore excelled in his studies, earning straight As, except for one B+; he was even nicknamed "Doc" by his classmates. In May 1925, at age 19, he graduated from Florida Memorial College with a "normal degree" and accepted a teaching job in Cocoa, Florida - in the watery wilderness of Brevard County.

Moore spent the next two years teaching fourth grade at Cocoa's only black elementary school. During his first year in Brevard County, he met an attractive older woman (she was 23, while he was barely 20), named Harriette Vyda Simms. She had taught school herself, but was currently selling insurance for the Atlanta Life Insurance Company; they married on Christmas Day, 1926. Her family lived in Mims, a small citrus town outside of Titusville. The newlyweds moved in with Harriette's parents until they built their own house on an adjoining acre of land. Meanwhile, Harry had been promoted to principal of the Titusville Colored School, which went from fourth through ninth grades. He taught ninth grade and supervised a staff of six teachers.

The Moores' also had two daughters. Their first daughter, Annie Rosalea, "Peaches" was born in March 1928 (died in 1972). When Peaches was six months old, Harriette began teaching at the Mims Colored School. On September 30, 1930, the Moores' had their second daughter, Juanita Evangeline..[2]


Civil rights activism

Soon after the birth of their daughters, the Moores founded the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP, in 1934. Moore also helped organize the statewide NAACP organization. He pursued a variety of efforts for civil rights, including equal pay for public school teachers, investigation of lynchings, legal challenges to the all-white primaries run by the Democratic Party, and voter registration practices under discriminatory state laws. From 1900-1930, Florida had the highest rate of lynchings in the Deep South.[2]

In 1937 Moore filed the first lawsuit in the Deep South to equalize salaries of black teachers with white teachers in public schools. Although this lawsuit failed, it led the way to other lawsuits that succeeded in gaining equal pay for black teachers. After 1943, Moore became involved in reviewing every lynching case in Florida that involved black people. He took affidavits from the families of victims; in some cases, he launched his own investigations.

In 1941, Moore was named president of Florida's NAACP. In 1944 the NAACP won a major victory when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Allwright that the Democratic Party's all-white primary in Texas and other states was unconstitutional. With the focus on voting, Moore led the Progressive Voters' League during the next six years in voter registration drives that succeeded in registering 116,000 black people, 31 percent of those eligible to vote in Florida. It was a major increase in black voters; 51 percent higher than the proportion of blacks registered to vote in any other southern state.[2]

In 1946, the public school system fired the Moores and blacklisted them because of Harry's political activism. Moore became a full-time NAACP activist, increasing the membership in the state to a peak of 10,000 in the next two years. He also pursued civil rights justice. NAACP membership in Florida fell sharply after the national office doubled the cost of individual dues to two dollars a year.[2][3] Later NAACP national president Walter White fired Moore from his state NAACP position because of disagreements over Moore's political activism and the falling dues payments.

Groveland case

Main article: Groveland Case

In July 1949 four black men were accused of raping a white woman in Groveland, Florida. Ernest Thomas fled the county and was killed by a posse; the other three were arrested and beaten while held in custody, forcing two to confess. Rumors accompanied the case against a background of post-war tensions resulting from problems in absorbing veterans into jobs and American society.[4] In Groveland a white mob of more than 400 demanded that the sheriff, Willis V. McCall, hand the prisoners over to them for lynching. McCall had hidden the prisoners to protect them. The mob left the jail and went on a rampage, burning buildings in the black district of town. McCall asked the governor to send in the National Guard, but they needed six days to restore order.

The three young men, one only 16, were found guilty by an all-white jury. The judge sentenced sixteen-year-old Charles Greenlee to life in prison; Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin were sentenced to death.

Executive Director of the Florida NAACP Harry T. Moore organized a campaign against what he saw as the wrongful convictions of the three men. With NAACP support, appeals were pursued. In April 1951 a legal team headed by Thurgood Marshall won the appeal of Shepherd and Irvin's convictions before the U.S. Supreme Court. A new trial was scheduled.

While transporting Shepherd and Irwin to the new trial venue in November 1951, Sheriff McCall claimed the two handcuffed men attacked him in an escape attempt. He shot them both, and Shepherd died at the scene. Irvin survived his wounds; he later claimed to NAACP and FBI officials that the sheriff shot both him and Shepherd in cold blood. Harry T. Moore called for an indictment against Sheriff McCall and called on Florida Governor Fuller Warren to suspend McCall from office.

Murder

Six weeks later on Christmas night, 1951, a bomb went off beneath the house of Moore and his wife in Mims, Florida. It was the Moores' twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. They were fatally injured; Moore died on the way to the hospital in Sanford, Florida. His wife died from her injuries nine days later at the hospital in Sanford.

Moore has been called the first martyr in the Civil Rights Movement. He was the first NAACP official murdered in the civil rights struggle. The murders caused a national and international outcry, with protests registered at the United Nations against violence in the South. The NAACP held a huge rally in New York, and in other cities, too. In many respects, the protests over the Moores' murders was a dress rehearsal for the civil rights movement. The NAACP sponsored a fundraising event at Madison Square Garden, where a song entitled "The Ballad of Harry Moore," with lyrics by the renowned poet Langston Hughes was performed.[5]

The State of Florida called the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to head the investigation, but the case was never solved. The FBI was convinced that the Ku Klux Klan had committed the bombing, and identified a number of local Klansmen as suspects, but was never able to find enough evidence to break the case.[6] Eventually, the FBI indicted seven Klansmen for lying about their involvement in other racial violence, hoping that the pressure of the indictments would force some of the Klansmen to crack and testify about the Moore case. But the ploy didn't work, and the indictments were eventually dismissed. The FBI eventually closed the Moore investigation in 1953. The case has been reopened three times: in 1978 by Brevard County, in 1991 by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), and in 2005 by then Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist. In October 2006, three weeks before he won the Republican primary for governor, Crist held a press conference in Mims and claimed to have "resolved" the case. Although he admitted that his investigation found no new evidence, Crist named four dead Klansmen as the likely perpetrators. In the next few weeks, however, the Crist investigation was roundly criticized by Moore scholars, FDLE investigators, and newspaper editorial boards, and was largely dismissed as a political attempt to win black votes (particularly after the Crist campaign admitted to filming a campaign TV ad with Evangeline Moore, although it was never used because of the controversy.) Over the years, there were rumors that Sheriff McCall was involved in the Moore bombing, but no evidence was ever found of that.

When the Moores were killed, the risk to civil rights activists and any blacks in the South was high and continued to be so. According to a later report from the NAACP's Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some, like Harry Moore, were activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who had refused to bow to racist convention, or were simply "innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random white terrorism."[7] For example, bombing was prevalent in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s, used by independent KKK groups to intimidate middle-class blacks moving into new neighborhoods.[8]

Legacy and honors

Langston Hughes read lines written in Moore's honor:

Florida means land of flowers
It was on a Christmas night.
In the state named for the flowers
Men came bearing dynamite...
It could not be in Jesus’ name
Beneath the bedroom floor
On Christmas night the killers
Hid the bomb for Harry Moore.[5]

21st century investigation

The state twice returned to the Moore murders but was unable to file charges, since most of the men whom it suspected in the crime had died. In 1999 journalist Ben Green published a book based on his research of the case: Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America's First Civil Rights Martyr. His research had gone deeply into FBI files. His book was followed in 2000 by a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) show about Moore's life, Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore.

In 2005 Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist re-opened a state investigation of Harry and Harriette Moore's deaths. The Moores' only surviving daughter, Juanita Evangeline Moore, encouraged Crist in the efforts to uncover the identity of her parents' killers.

Forensics teams combed the former site of the Moores' house for evidence; it is now within a memorial park. On August 16, 2006, Crist announced the results of the work of the state Office of Civil Rights and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Rumors linking Sheriff Willis V. McCall to the crime were proven false.[1] Based on extensive evidence, the state concluded that the Moores were victims of a conspiracy by members of a Central Florida Klavern of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

The report named the following four individuals, all of whom had reputations for violence, as directly involved:[1]

Citations

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Crist Announces Results of Harry T. Moore Murder Investigation", 16 Aug 2006, accessed 6 May 2008 Archived January 6, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.
  2. 1 2 3 4 The Legacy of Harry T. Moore, Official PBS Website, accessed 6 May 2008
  3. ↑ "NAACP History: Harry T. and Harriette Moore". NAACP. Retrieved 25 December 2013.
  4. ↑ "Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America". The Barnes & Noble Review.
  5. 1 2 3 "Michael Browning, Who Was Harry T. Moore?". hartford-hwp.com.
  6. ↑ Kelley, Katie (January 14, 2015). "Episode 40 Icons of Hate". A History of Central Florida Podcast. Retrieved February 7, 2016.
  7. ↑ John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, pp. 562-563
  8. ↑ Diane McWhorter, (2001). Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-1772-1
  9. ↑ "Harry T. Moore Homesite - Historical Marker - Mims, Florida". nbbd.com.
  10. ↑ "Harry T. Moore Homesite". nbbd.com.

References

External links

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