EP32: Harry & Harriette Moore

 HANDS OFF MY PODCAST: TRUE CRIME

Harry & Harriette Moore

EP32/ HOM PODCAST RECORDING / JASMINE CASTILLO 

When it comes to Black activism, there are many historical figures whose accomplishments are glossed over. Their names were almost erased from history and the controversy of critical race theory lies in the balance. Before Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. this man along with his spouse was America’s First Civil Rights Martyr. This is the story of Harry T. and Harriette Moore.

Who are Harry & Harriette?

Harry Tyson Moore was born on November 18, 1905, in the small farming community of Houston, Florida. He was the only child of Johnny and Rosa Moore. Johnny, who tended to water tanks and ran a small store, died of health issues in 1914, when Harry was only nine years old.

Rosa tried to make ends meet as a single mother by working various jobs, but eventually sent Harry to live with relatives. In 1916, Harry went to live with his three aunts — two educators and one nurse — in Jacksonville, Florida. Harry thrived here in this predominantly Black community and his aunts encouraged his love of learning.

Harry returned to Suwanee County, Florida in 1919 and attended the high school program at Florida Memorial College. He excelled in school and was even nicknamed "Doc" by classmates for his intelligence and grades. He graduated in 1925 and subsequently accepted a teaching job in Cocoa, Florida.

Harriette Vyda Simms Moore was born on June 19, 1902 to parents David and Annie in West Palm Beach, Florida. She had two sisters and three brothers. Her family eventually moved to Mims, Florida.

Harriette attended high school at the Daytona Normal Industrial Institute in Daytona Beach, Florida, and subsequently enrolled in Bethune-Cookman College nearby. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1924, then began working as an elementary school teacher in various schools across Florida.

Harry and Harriette met while he was working as a teacher and she was selling life insurance. They married in 1926. Together, they had two daughters: Annie "Peaches" Moore (1928-1972) and Juanita Evangeline Moore (1930-2015).

About Moore’s Family:

The Moores' activism really took off in 1934, when they founded a chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in Brevard County, Florida. They advocated for equal pay for Black teachers, fought against barriers preventing Black citizens from voting, and investigated lynchings.

As a result of their activism, Harry and Harriette were fired from their teaching jobs. Harry became a paid NAACP organizer and was eventually appointed executive secretary for the Florida chapter of the NAACP. During his time as secretary, statewide membership grew to a peak of 10,000 members in 63 branches.

While the Moores contributed to many causes, they were especially passionate about Black voting rights. After the 1944 Supreme Court verdict that declared all-white primary elections unconstitutional (Smith v. Allwright), the Moores organized the Progressive Voters League of Florida. They helped register 31 percent of eligible Black voters in Florida, which was over 116,000 people! Their work proved instrumental — by the time of the Moores' deaths, Florida had the highest number of registered Black voters.

The Moores also fought for equal salaries for Black teachers in public schools. In 1937, Harry and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall filed the first lawsuit in the South calling for equal pay. Although it failed in state court, it helped pave the way for numerous other federal lawsuits, which eventually led to equal salaries for Black teachers in Florida.

Unfortunately, the Moores gained enemies through their activism. In particular, Harry's passionate involvement in overturning the wrongful convictions in the 1949 Groveland case — in which three young Black men, and one Black boy, were accused of raping Norma Padgett, a white woman. They are known as the Groveland Four. On July 16th, 1949, two of the Black men, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin, and the one boy, 16-year-old Charles Greenlee, were arrested and brought to Lake County jail. They were tortured by police while imprisoned. Soon after, an angry mob of white residents in the area stormed the police facility, demanding that the authorities hand over Mr. Shepherd, Mr. Irvin, and Mr. Greenlee. When the mob was unable to secure their targets, they continued on to Groveland’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, and murdered Black residents while also burning their homes. Hundreds fled in terror.

It was Moore’s campaign on behalf of the Groveland Four, four black youths accused under murky circumstances of raping a white woman in Lake County in July 1949, that made him known throughout the state. The last of the three men, Ernest Thomas, was tracked down by over 1,000 racist white men sanctioned by the sheriff, and shot over 400 times in Madison County, Florida. Just a few days after the murder, a coroner's jury ruled Thomas’ death a “justifiable homicide.”

After being beaten into giving false confessions, Mr. Irvin, Mr. Shepherd, and Mr. Greenlee were convicted by an all-white jury. The two adults were sentenced to death, while the young boy was given life in prison.

Harry managed to lead a successful campaign to overturn the mens' convictions — in 1951, the Supreme Court granted the appeal and ordered a new trial for the case. However, the hopefulness was short-lived. When the notorious Sheriff Willis McCall of Lake County drove two of the defendants — Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Irvin — to a pre-trial hearing, he shot them. This killed Mr. Shepherd and critically injured Mr. Irvin, who was denied an ambulance because he was Black. Mr. Irvin survived, and would later be sentenced to death once again (though his conviction was later commuted to life imprisonment).

While the Groveland case dragged on, Moore found himself unexpectedly betrayed by his own organization, the NAACP. The NAACP wanted to raise dues. Moore warned blacks could not afford higher dues and would simply abandon the organization. The NAACP went ahead anyway, and Moore was proved right. His reward was to be stripped of his position as state secretary and taken off the official mailing list of the organization.

During this era, a landscape where trees are hung with the strange fruit of lynchings, where the Ku Klux Klan holds festive daylight rallies and barbecues in Orange County, where black defendants are railroaded to Raiford for alleged rape and shot by the sheriff beside a lonely highway at night, while en route from the prison for a new trial.

A former schoolteacher, a quiet, an earnest, persevering man who was not a spellbinding orator, but who wore out automobile tires and shoe leather traveling the state on behalf of the NAACP, Moore was tireless in pursuit of equal justice for blacks.

What Leads Up to the Murder?

Whipsawed by friends and enemies alike, Moore kept on working quietly, organizing and traveling, writing letters, protesting.

On Christmas Day 1951 and their 25th wedding anniversary, the couple retired to their bedroom, a bomb made of dynamite was placed directly underneath Harry and Harriette's bedroom.

. Because they were Black, the Moores' family knew they would not be able to secure an ambulance or a local hospital that would tend to them (which may have saved their lives). Instead, their relatives took the couple to the hospital. The trip was 30 miles, and Harry was pronounced dead when he reached the hospital.

Harriette died nine days later in the hospital. “There isn't much left to fight for," she reportedly told a journalist in a bedside before she passed away. "My home is wrecked. My children are grown up. They don't need me. Others can carry on. The couple's older daughter, Annie, was in the house when the explosion occurred, but was unharmed. Their younger daughter was on her way home.

The Moores' death made national headlines, and Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt made a public statement at the time.

"It makes one sad to read the story of the bomb-killing of Harry T. Moore, the state coordinator for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People," she wrote. "That is the kind of violent incident that will be spread all over every country in the world and the harm it will do us among the people of the world is untold."

In 1952, the NAACP arranged a fundraiser for the family in New York City. Langston Hughes wrote the “Ballad of Harry T. Moore" for the event, a poem that has since been used as a testament to Black perseverance.

Despite an exhaustive FBI investigation that lasted months, no one was ever arrested for the murders. But Green has painstakingly examined the evidence and has found the probable killer and the probable motive.

The historically problematic (to say the least) FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover claimed the bureau would get to the bottom of the murders.

The five investigations produced evidence that four suspects, all of whom were high-ranking Ku Klux Klan members in Florida, were involved in the Moores' deaths: Earl J. Brooklyn, Tillman H. “Curley” Belvin, Joseph Cox, and Edward L. Spivey.

The man who arranged Moore’s murder was most probably Joseph Neville Cox, the secretary of the Orlando chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, who organized a handful of Klan head-knockers, as they were called, arranged to purchase dynamite (which in those days was sold in many hardware stores in Florida) and have it placed beneath Moore’s bedroom. Cox committed suicide the day after being closely questioned by the FBI. An associate revealed Cox’s role in the murder years later, on his deathbed.

In total, five separate investigations of the Moores' murder have been conducted.

The fifth and final investigation of the case was conducted by the FBI's cold case division, with the investigation beginning in 2008 and officially closing in 2011. The purpose of this investigation, motivated by the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007, was to investigate violations of criminal Civil Rights statutes that occurred prior to 1970 and resulted in death.

After reviewing the previous investigations, the FBI ended up with a total of 10 potential witnesses. However, eight of those witnesses were deceased and two were unable to be located. With no new leads, the investigation once again concluded that Brooklyn, Belvin, Cox, and Spivey were most likely responsible for the bombing. Since all the suspects had died by this point, the case was closed.

With all four suspects in the case deceased, and no arrests made, there will never truly be justice for the Moores. The Moores' murders and the subsequent lack of convictions sparked a national outcry at the time of their deaths, and resulted in dozens of protests.

Any Updates?

Before her death in 2015, Juanita Evangeline Moore spoke about her parents' contributions to the movement and fought to keep their legacy alive.

"This is a man who devoted his entire life, I mean his whole life, even our family life hinged around his activities with the NAACP and The Progressive Voters League... they all talk about Dr. King, that's great, but Daddy did the same thing," Juanita Evangeline said of her father. "In fact, he started it, the movement. In fact, he had no lieutenants or bodyguards, or no one to fly him to this place or the other. He had absolutely nobody but us, and yet he accomplished all of those things- the voting, the teacher salaries, all of the lynchings that he investigated. That's very important, a very important part of history."

The Equal Justice Initiative on April 29, 2019 Monday will dedicate the new monument at the Peace and Justice Memorial Center in Montgomery.

The monument will commemorate 24 people slain in racially motivated killings during the 1950s, including Emmett Till and voting rights activists Harry and Harriette Moore.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened last year in Montgomery to remember and share stories about some of the 4,400 African Americans slain in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950.

The names of those killed, if they are known, are engraved on 800 steel columns with the location where lynchings happened.

The dedication and an evening concert also mark the first anniversary of the opening of the lynching memorial and a related museum, the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.

The Equal Justice Initiative estimates that 400,000 people have visited the sites since they opened in April 2018.

Yet the memory of Moore’s remarkable life and violent death gradually faded over the near half-century since his murder. In a state filled with newcomers, few know who Moore was, what he achieved, how he died. His name does not appear on the monumental civil rights fountain in Montgomery, Ala., where Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and other martyrs are honored. Scarcely any civil rights histories mention him.

All that is changing now because of a new book by Tallahassee scholar Ben Green called Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America's First Civil Rights Martyr. and a new PBS documentary on Moore’s life to be broadcast PBS stations nationwide on Friday, January 12, 2001, narrated by Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. A monument to Moore has been set up in Mims, and two government buildings in Brevard County have been named for him.