A early leader in the civil rights movement in Florida and the first NAACP official killed in the struggle for civil rights died on Dec. 25, 1951, when a bomb exploded under the floorboards of his bedroom. The murder, done by members of the Ku Klux Klan in retaliation for calls for action against a Southern white sheriff, was never officially solved.
Harry T. Moore was a teacher and principal in Brevard County, Florida, who got involved with the NAACP in an attempt to equalize white and black teachers’ salaries. He and his wife, Harriette, also a teacher, took up the cause of pay inequality. Along with NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, Moore sued to challenge the pay differential. While his case ultimately lost, he inspired others to take up the challenge.
The NAACP became Moore’s life’s work. He founded an NAACP chapter in Brevard County in 1934 and organized the group’s Florida State Conference. He first worked as an unpaid executive secretary. Moore eventually moved from the issue of teachers’ salaries to lynchings, police brutality, and voter registration. He led the South in registering NAACP members and registered some 116,000 black voters in Florida. He became NAACP state president in 1941.
In 1944 or 1946 (accounts vary), both Harry and Harriette Moore were fired from their teaching jobs because of their activism. Harry Moore became a full-time, paid organizer for the NAACP.
In 1949, Moore became involved in a case in Groveland, Florida, in Lake County, just west of Orlando, that cost him his life.
Four black men were accused of raping a white woman. One of the accused, Ernest Thomas, tried to flee after his arrest and was shot and killed by a white mob, which then went on a rampage in the black neighborhood of Groveland. The three remaining defendants—Walter Irvin, Sammy Shepherd, and 16-year-old Charles Greenlee—were arrested and severely beaten while in custody. Moore accused Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, a white lawman with a notorious reputation, of orchestrating the beatings. The three remaining defendants were convicted, and Irvin and Shepherd were sentenced to death. Their convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in the fall of 1951, and Lake County officials attempted to try them again.
On Nov. 6, 1951, Sheriff McCall was transporting Irvin and Shepherd, both in handcuffs, for a pretrial hearing. Instead of delivering them to the courtroom, he shot them both, killing Shepherd and wounding Irvin. McCall claimed that the handcuffed prisoners had attacked him while trying to escape. Irvin, however, said McCall had pulled both of them out of his car and started shooting. Moore called for McCall’s suspension and indictment for murder.
On Dec. 25, 1951, a bomb exploded underneath the Moores’ bed in their home in Mims, Florida, in Brevard County. The couple also had celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary that day. Harry died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and Harriette died nine days later.
After Moore’s death, there were nationwide and international protests, including one at the United Nations, against violence in the South. President Harry Truman and Florida Gov. Fuller Warren received thousands of protest letters and telegrams. An NAACP rally was held at Madison Square Garden in New York, with “The Ballad of Harry T. Moore” performed with lyrics by poet Langston Hughes.
Florida means land of flowers
It was on a Christmas night
In the state names 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
When will men for sake of peace
And for democracy
Learn no bombs a man can make
Keep men from being free?
And this he says, our Harry Moore,
As from the grave he cries:
No bomb can kill the dreams I hold,
For freedom never dies!
— from “Ballad of Harry T. Moore” by Langston Hughes
Despite multiple investigations, including one by the FBI, the murder case was never officially solved, and no one was ever charged in the Moores’ deaths. Forensic work in 2005-2006 found four possible perpetrators, all members of the Ku Klux Klan who were long dead by the time of the investigation.
Moore’s story is told in Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, by Ben Green, and referenced in The Warmth of Other Sons, a story of black migration from the South, by Isabel Wilkerson. A PBS documentary, Freedom Never Dies—the Legacy of Harry T. Moore, was produced in 2001. The couple’s daughter, Juanita Evangeline, has spent much of her life trying to find justice for her murdered parents. In 1952, Moore was posthumously awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP for outstanding achievement by an African American.
This news report from WESH-TV in Orlando near Brevard County was produced in 2015, 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, after an examination of voting records uncovered the original voter registrations of both Harry and Harriette Moore.
Today, Brevard County is home to the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Park and Cultural Center to honor the couple’s work. The center is a meeting place for community organizations. The park includes a replica of the Moores’ home, a pavilion, a gazebo, and a Walk of Freedom paved walkway with reflecting pools and a fountain.