 |
Teachers and activists Harriette and Harry T. Moore were killed in a Ku Klux Klan terror bombing.
|
File
under outrageous injustice—a day late and a dollar short. Fifteen years
ago on August 16, 2006 Florida Attorney
General Charlie Christ, a Republican
who later served a term as Governor and
who ultimately became a Democrat after
endorsing President Barack Obama for
re-election, announced that four white
men had been identified as likely responsible
for the house bombing that killed Civil Rights champions Harry and Harriette Moore on Christmas
1951. All four men were conveniently
already dead.
Their
identities were hardly an impenetrable mystery for all of those years. One man, Joseph
Cox, committed suicide in 1952
the day after FBI agents interviewed
him in the case. Another, Edward L. Spivey, made a death bed confession in 1978. The supposed orchestrator of the bombing plot was Earl J. Brooklyn, was considered a violent rogue by even some Ku
Klux Klan members and had been expelled
from a Georgia Klavern for “engaging
in unsanctioned acts of violence.” Tillman H. “Curley” Belvin was a close
friend of Brooklyn. The latter two came
up in the three investigations prior
to the one conducted by the Florida Attorney
General’s Office of Civil Rights.
Many
believe that the four men may have been acting on behalf of a long-time Sheriff Willis McCall of Lake County who shot two defendants in the infamous Groveland Case while transporting them for a new trial.
Harry Moore had been deeply involved in protesting the case and
advocating for an investigation of McCall.
More on this below.
 |
The wreckage of the Moore home in Mims, Florida.
|
n
his remarks to reporters at the time Christ said “Over the years, a number of
motives have been suggested for the Moore murders. All of them share a common
theme—retribution against Harry Moore for his civil rights activities.” No shit, Charlie!
Chances
are unless you are from Florida or a scholar
of Black History you have never
heard of the victims of the racist conspiracy. So who were Harry and Harriette Moore? Among other things they were the first
important leaders of the post-World War
II Civil Rights Movement to be assassinated. They would not be the last.
Harry Tyson Moore was born on
November 18, 1905, in Houston, Florida, a tiny farm community in Suwanee
County. His father tended the water
tanks for the Seaboard Air Line
Railroad and ran a small store who
died when Harry was 9 years old 1914. His mother Rosa, tried to manage alone,
working in the cotton fields and
running the small store on weekends.
In
1916 Harry was sent to Jacksonville to
live with his aunts. 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.
Under their nurturing guidance, Moore's natural inquisitiveness and love
of learning were reinforced.
He
was a much more confident and sophisticated boy when returned home to Suwanee
County in 1919 and enrolled in the high
school program of Florida Memorial
College. He excelled in his studies
and he was nicknamed Doc by his
classmates. In May 1925, at age 19, he
graduated from Florida Memorial College
with a normal degree for teaching in
the elementary grades and accepted a
teaching job in Cocoa, Florida—in
the watery wilderness of Brevard County.
In
his first year in Cocoa he met Harriette
Vyda Simms, herself a former teacher two years older than 20 year old Harry
who was then selling insurance for Atlanta Life Insurance Company, a major
black-owned business.
Harriette,
born in West Palm Beach on June 19,
1902, had wider experience in the world than her new young beau. Her family relocated to Mims but a teen spent
summers working up north in Massillon, Ohio with her father. She
attended the segregated Daytona Normal
Industrial Institute in Daytona
Beach before launching her teaching career.
 |
The Moore's home was in tiny unincorporated Mims near Titusville.
|
In
1926 Harry was principal of the Titusville
Colored School and she had returned to teaching on Merrit Island nearby
when they married on Christmas Day. The
couple went on to have two daughters—Annie
Rosalea, known as Peaches in
1928 and Evangeline in 1932.
The
young couple continued to teach in Brevard County with time out to earn their education degrees at historically Black Bethune Cookman College Daytona. They then returned to Harriette’s home town
of Mims where they took up residence with her mother. The small town would be their primary home
and center of their extensive activities for the rest of their lives.
Mims
was a small citrus town outside the county seat of Titusville where Harry continued to work as a principle overseeing
6 teachers in the fourth through ninth grade school and personally teaching the
ninth grade. They soon built their own
small home adjacent to Harriette’s mother.
 |
The young Moore family in happier times, about when they became involved with the NAACP.
|
In
1934 the Moores founded the Brevard County chapter of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and then Henry also
helped organize the statewide NAACP organization.
A
word now on Brevard County in the 1930’s and after. Although now known as the main part of the Space Coast centering on the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, and Cocoa Beach with an 80% white majority,
many of them highly educated, Brevard County was then relatively sparsely populated, isolated, and poor with a much higher percentage of African-American
residents. It was an unreconstructed part of Confederate Florida. At the end of reconstruction—which was barely
felt in the area—night riders and
the Ku Klux Klan brutally enforced Jim
Crowe laws. Lynching was common. After World War I the return of “uppity” black veterans to the region
sparked wide-spread enrolment in the
resurrected Klan. Many local officials were either members or under the influence of the
Klan. Brevard County was more like
places in rural Mississippi, Alabama, and
Georgia than the areas around Miami which were already experiencing
an influx of Northerners. It was not a
safe place to be Black—or to be public in opposition to white domination.
But
Harry was unafraid. In the mid 30’s he
concentrated concentrate in recruiting greatly increased the number of NAACP
members. The new members were attracted
by the strong public stands he took on issues of housing and education.
He investigated lynchings, filed lawsuits against voter registration barriers and white primaries, and with Harriette worked for equal pay for Black teachers in the segregated public schools.
They
promoted teacher unionism, making
them labor as well as a Civil Rights
leaders. In 1946 the long campaign for
teacher pay parity came to a head
and both
the Moores were fired from their
teaching jobs because of their activism
The
firing freed Harry to accept a paid position
as Executive Director of the Florida
NAACP which not only kept his family financially
afloat, but allowed more time to fight for Black rights state wide in order to survive
economically.
He
had already achieved notability for
his work on several fronts. He also led
the Progressive Voters League.
Following a Supreme Court ruling
against white-only primaries as unconstitutional between 1944 and 1950,
Moore succeeded in increasing the registration of Black voters in Florida to 31
% of those eligible to vote, significantly higher
than in any other Southern state.
Needless to say, entrenched White
Democrats were enraged.
If
all of this was not enough to make the Moores targets, Henry’s involvement it
the infamous Groveland Case
certainly was.
 |
Three of the surviving Groveland Four in custody before their re-trial on rape and murder charges.
|
n
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, his body
riddled with 400 bullets. The other
three suspects were arrested and beaten while in custody, coercing
two of them to confess. A mob of more than 400 demanded that Lake
County Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who had hidden the prisoners in the basement
of his Eustis home, hand the
prisoners over for lynching. The mob left the jail and went on a rampage, burning buildings in the black
district of town. McCall transferred the prisoners to Raiford State Prison for their safety asked the Governor to send in the National Guard. It took six days to restore order.
The
three young men, including 16-year-old Charles Greenlee were found guilty by an
all-white jury. Greenlee was
sentenced to life in prison while Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin got the death penalty.
Harry
Moore organized a campaign against what he saw as the wrongful convictions of the three men. Appeals were pursued and in April 1951, a
legal team headed by NAACMP Counsel Thurgood
Marshall won the overturning of Shepherd and Irvin’s convictions before the
U.S. Supreme Court. A new trial was scheduled.
Sheriff
McCall was responsible for transporting Shepherd and Irvin to the new trial venue in November 1951. He
claimed that the two men, both handcuffed,
attacked him in an escape attempt. He
had pulled on to an isolated country
road, claiming tire trouble. He
swore in a deposition that Shepherd
and Irvin attacked him in an escape
attempt, and that he shot them
both in self-defense. Shepherd died
at the scene. Irvin survived with three
wounds and was shot a fourth time by a deputy
who had pulled up to the scene.
Irvin later told NAACP investigators and the FBI officials that the sheriff shot both them in cold blood. Both
men were found on the ground outside of the sheriff’s car still handcuffed
together.
 |
Sherriff Willis McCall stands over the body of Sam Shepherd and gravely injured Walter Irvin who were still handcuffed together. The Sherriff claimed self-defense in an attempted escape.
|
Moore demanded an indictment of Sheriff McCall for murder and called on Florida Governor
Fuller Warren to suspend McCall
from office.
Ultimately
a coroner’s inquest found, no
surprise ruled Shepherds murder justified. A judge refused to empanel a grand jury to investigate the
case. After Irvin recovered from the
shooting, his re-trial was moved to Marion
County just north of Lake County, in February 1952. Irwin was offered a plea bargain but refused to plead guilty, and maintained his innocence. The jury found Irvin guilty, and the judge sentenced him
to death again. The case was appealed, but the conviction was upheld by the Florida State Supreme Court. In early
1954, U.S. the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case.
 |
Harry Moore worked with NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall, seen here with Walter Irvin and Charles Greenlee, on the Groveland case and was killed weeks after demanding that Sheriff McCall be relieved of office and indicted for murder.
|
Supporters
of Irvin appealed to the governor
for clemency. After reviewing the
material personally, newly elected
Governor LeRoy Collins in 1955 commuted Irvin’s sentence to life in prison, saying that he did not
believe the State established guilt
beyond a reasonable doubt. Greenlee,
who did not appeal his case, was paroled
in 1962, and Irvin in 1968. Irvin died in 1969 while visiting Lake County.
Greenlee moved with his wife and daughter to Tennessee, and lived until 2012.
But
those outcomes were in the future. Neither
Henry nor Henriette Moore lived to see the case play out. Just six weeks after Moore called for Sheriff
McCall’s removal from office the couple’s home was bombed.
On
Christmas night in 1951, Harry and his immediate family had dinner at his brother-in-law’s to celebrate their wedding anniversary before returning
home about 9 pm. At 10:20 pm, a bomb placed below Harry and Harriette’s bedroom went off. The children and their grandmother in other rooms were alright. They found the couple in
their bedroom covered with debris. The family rushed them to a medical facility
in Sanford, Harry’s head bleeding
into his mother’s lap.
Harry
was declared dead on arrival.
Harriette recovered enough to visit her husband’s body at the funeral home, and then succumbed
herself. Before she died she told an Orlando
Sentinel reporter, “There
isn’t much left to fight back for” and “My home is wrecked. My children are
grown up. They don’t need me. Others can carry on.”
Investigations
would later show that Earl Brooklyn was
the ring leader of the plot and
induced his pal Tillman H. Belvin to hunt up two patsies to actually plant the
bomb—Cox and Spivey. Brooklyn somehow
obtained floor plans of the Moore
home. Belvin scouted the residence so that the exact placement of the bomb was
sure to kill its target. Brooklyn apparently obtained explosives and made the
bomb. Blevins delivered it to Cox and
Spivey. Cox committed suicide after
being interviewed by the FBI and was fingered by Spivey as the only one who
planted the bomb in his deathbed confession.
Likely both men were directly involved.
Almost
immediately there was speculation that Sherriff McCall, who moved in the same
Klan circles as Brooklyn, personally encouraged the bombing or at least gave wink-and-nod encouragement.
But
if so, McCall never paid for it. He
became something of a folk hero in
Florida and across the Deep South. He even wrote an autobiography, The Wisdom of Willis McCall in which
he defended segregation in all forms
and his actions as Sheriff. He boasted that he had been investigated 49 times and that five
different governors tried to remove him. “I've been accused of everything but
taking a bath and called everything but a child of God.” He enjoyed his reputation as the toughest white supremacist sheriff in the South—a
title for which there was heavy completion.
He was re-elected six more
times.
But
in 1972 McCall was indicted for second-degree
murder by a state grand jury for the death of Tommy J. Vickers, a mentally
disabled Black prisoner, while in his custody. Vickers died in the hospital
in April 1972 of acute peritonitis
due to a blow to the lower abdomen. McCall was accused of kicking and beating
Vickers to death for throwing his food on the floor.
Governor
Reubin Askew suspended McCall the
day of the indictment. McCall was acquitted by an all-white jury in Ocala in neighboring Marion County after a lengthy trial.
McCall was returned to office. But the demographics of Lake County had changed
with an influx of Northerners. Days
after his trial for manslaughter of
he narrowly lost his re-election bid in November 1972 to Republican Guy Bliss. He retired to his home in Umatilla where he lived until his death
at age 84 in 1994.
The
immediate aftermath of the Moores death did not register much national attention. Not only was it lost during the holiday season but amid news—most of it bad—from the War in Korea and episodes in the
on-going great post-war Red Scare.
But
it could hardly go unnoticed in Florida.
The day after the bombing Black residents from across Brevard County,
many of whom had personally known the Moores and been touched by them as teachers,
mentors, and champions, descended on Mims and on the County Seat demanding
justice.
Nationally
the NAACP organized protests in support of the organization’s first martyrs including a Madison Square Garden rally during
which Harry was posthumously awarded
the organization’s Spingarn Medal
for outstanding achievement by an
African American. At the rally Langston Hughes read his new poem The
Ballad of Harry Moore.
The
uproar eventually caused President Harry
Truman to order an FBI investigation of the case when it became apparent
that no justice would be found in Florida courts. Director
J. Edgar Hoover complied and agents assembled significant documentation on
the case including the identities of the prime
suspects. The agency suspended its
investigation in 1953 and the Justice
Department failed to bring any charges.
The
bombing was the first, or one of the first, of a wave of terror bombings. The homes of 40 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.” Bombing was
becoming the new lynching.
During
the Civil Rights Movement the homes of Birmingham,
Alabama NAACP leader the Reverend Fred
Shuttleworth and
of Martin Luther King, Jr among
other were targets of Klan bombs and four
Black girls were killed in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963.
 |
Daughter Evangeline hold portraits of her parents in 2012.She survived the bombing.
|
Still,
the story of Henry and Henriette Moore remained obscure. Gov. Christ’s announcement helped revive
interest and there have been books, magazine articles, and documentaries made about the case. In 1999, the state of Florida designated of
the Moores’ home site as a Florida Heritage Landmark and Brevard County
started restoring the site. By 2004, the
County had created the Harry T. and
Harriette Moore Memorial Park and Interpretive Center in Mims. Later the County named its Justice Center after the Moores and
included material there about their lives and work.
 |
The Florida state historical marker at the Moore homesite.
|
In 2012, the Florida Legislature designated State
Road 46 in Brevard County as the Harry
T. and Harriette V. Moore Memorial Highway.
A year later in 2013, the Harry
T. and Harriette V. Moore Post Office in Cocoa, Florida was named in their
honor and both were inducted into the Florida
Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
Their
story has now been told many times, but perhaps never so movingly as in that
poem by Langston Hughes which much later was set to music by Sweet Honey and the Rock.
 |
Langston Hughes about the time he wrote and read the Ballad of Harry Moore
|
Ballad of Harry
Moore
(Killed at Mims,
Florida, on Christmas night, 1951)
Florida means
land of flowers.
It was on
Christmas night
In the state
named for the flowers
Men came bearing
dynamite.
Men came
stealing through the orange groves
Bearing hate
instead of love,
While the Star
of Bethlehem
Was in the sky
above.
Oh, memories of
a Christmas evening
When Wise Men
traveled from afar
Seeking out a
lowly manger
Guided by a Holy
Star!
Oh, memories of
a Christmas evening
When to
Bethlehem there came
“Peace on earth,
good will to men”—
Jesus was His
name.
But they must’ve
forgotten Jesus
Down in Florida
that night
Stealing through
the orange groves
Bearing hate and
dynamite.
It was a little
cottage,
A family, name
of Moore.
In the windows
wreaths of holly,
And a pine
wreath on the door.
Christmas, 1951,
The family
prayers were said
When father,
mother, daughter,
And grandmother
went to bed.
The father's
name was Harry Moore.
The N.A.A.C.P.
Told him to
carry out its work
That Negroes
might be free.
So it was that
Harry Moore
(So deeply did
he care)
Sought the right
for men to live
With their heads
up everywhere.
Because of that,
white killers,
Who like Negroes
“in their place,”
Came stealing
through the orange groves
On that night of
dark disgrace.
It could not be
in Jesus’ name,
Beneath the
bedroom floor,
On Christmas
night the killers
Hid the bomb for
Harry Moore.
It could not be
in Jesus’ name
The killers took
his life,
Blew his home to
pieces
And killed his
faithful wife.
It could not be
for the sake of love
They did this
awful thing—
For when the
bomb exploded
No hearts were
heard to sing.
And certainly no
angels cried,
“Peace on earth,
good will to men”—
But around the
world an echo hurled
A question:
When?...When?....When?
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!
I will not stop!
I will not stop--
For freedom
never dies!
I will not stop!
I will not stop!
Freedom never
dies!
So should you
see our Harry Moore
Walking on a
Christmas night,
Don't run and
hide, you killers,
He has no
dynamite.
In his heart is
only love
For all the
human race,
And all he wants
is for every man
To have his
rightful place.
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!
Freedom never
dies, I say!
Freedom never
dies!
—Langston Hughes
Powerful writing.
ReplyDelete