File under outrageous injustice—a day late and a dollar short. 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.
In 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.
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 hometown 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.
The young Moore family in happier times, about when they became involved with the NAACP.
Mims was a small citrus town outside the county seat of Titusville where Henry continued to work as a principal 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.
In 1934 the Moores founded the Brevard County chapter of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and then Harry 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 on 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 statewide 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 in the infamous Groveland Case certainly was.
Three of the surviving Groveland Four in custody before their re-trial on rape and murder charges.
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, 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 and 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 NAACP 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 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 of them in cold blood. Both men were found on the ground outside of the sheriff’s car still handcuffed together.
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.
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 at 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 in 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 ringleader 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 competition. 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.
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 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.
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.
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
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