I suspect less than half of Black Americans have ever heard of Harold and Harriette Moore, and it’s likely only a minuscule percentage of White Americans have. Brevard County in Florida is taking a cue from Governor Ron DeSantis in trying to control what is taught and discussed at a site commemorating two civil rights martyrs. Before describing the actions of Brevard County officials, let me tell you who Harry T and Harriette V Moore were.
Christmas had special meaning to Harriette V. and Harry T. Moore. After all, it was on Christmas Day, 1926, when they married. For twenty-four years, they peacefully celebrated the Christmas holiday and their anniversary on the same day. In 1951, on their twenty-fifth anniversary, the Moores settled in for the night in their home. Their daughter Rosalee (Annie Roselea) was in her bedroom, and Harriette’s mother was in another. Their other daughter Evangeline was going to Moore’s home in Mims, Florida but had not yet arrived. Someone planted a bomb directly underneath Harry and Harriette’s bed. Rosalee was unharmed in her room and rushed to find her parents alive but badly injured. Harriette’s brother, who lived 800 yards away, rushed over to give aid and help transport the couple to the hospital.
Mims is located in Brevard County in Florida. The nearest hospital was only five miles away in Titusville, but that hospital didn’t serve Black people. The nearest Black hospital was in Sanford, Florida, thirty miles away. During the frantic drive to the hospital, Harry T Moore died of his wounds. Harriette was admitted but died nine days later of a blood clot. She had been improving but left the hospital briefly against her doctor’s wishes to attend Harry’s funeral. The flowers surrounding Harry’s casket were delivered from Miami because local florists wouldn’t service a Black funeral. Harriette returned to the hospital and died two days later.
The Klan killed the Moores; it took multiple investigations to declare that four Klansmen were their killers, only after all of them had died. They never saw justice. I’ll return to the investigations, but first, I’ll discuss some of the reasons Klan members targeted Harry and Henrietta.
Before Stacey Abrams became a champion for voting rights in Georgia, Harry T. Moore had made similar strides in Florida. In 1934 Harry and Harriette founded the Brevard County branch of the NAACP and started registering voters. This was fourteen years after the Ocoee Massacre in Florida, where the Klan murdered as many as a hundred Black people, setting fires and terrorizing the Black community after two Black men tried to cast their ballots.
The Moores crisscrossed the state, starting new NAACP chapters. Harry’s name is mentioned more often, but they were a team. Harriette always accompanied Harry; she wanted to be there in case something happened to him. The figure may sound low by today’s standards, but Black voter registration reached 31% as a direct result of their leadership, the highest percentage in the South. Black registered voters more than doubled statewide between 1947–1950. Harry Moore knew the work was dangerous and that it might get him killed.
“He said time after time that he knew someone would kill him, but in the face of this impending tragedy, he went on with his work fearlessly.” Harriette Moore
In 1938, Harry filed a lawsuit against the State of Florida, protesting the difference in pay between white and Black teachers. That lawsuit failed, but it led to another that had more success. In 1941 he became President of the Florida NAACP, using his position to fight against the all-white primary system in the Democratic Party, which was eliminated in 1944. Harry helped organize the Florida Progressive Voters League, which registered Black voters and fought against voter suppression. In 1947, the all-white Brevard County School Board fired Harry and Harriette from their jobs as principal and teacher.
It might have been their work on the Groveland Four case that angered the Klan the most, as documented in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Devil in the Grove” by Gilbert King. Harry Moore raised the money that made it possible for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to fight that battle in court. Marshall often stayed in the Moore home as it wasn’t safe to stay in nearby Lake County. The case involved four Black boys falsely accused of raping a White woman. One was shot dozens of times during his capture. The other three were taken alive with Marshall’s primary goal to avoid the death penalty. The all-white jury wasn’t going to consider the possibility of innocence.
DeLaura Junior High School in Satellite Beach, Florida, did a project they published in 1995 which said this:
“One of the police brutalities that Mr. Moore investigated in 1949 concerned a 17-year-old White woman who accused four young Black men of raping her after her car stalled on a rural road, in Groveland, which is in Lake County, under the control of Sheriff McCall. Sheriff McCall led a huge posse along with sheriffs from three adjacent counties who chased one suspect, Mr. Ernest Thomas, to a field, where they riddled him with bullets until he died. The other three suspects were put on trial.
The case became known nationwide as Florida’s Little Scottsboro because of the infamous Alabama case in which young Black men were falsely charged with rape. During the trial of the three Florida men, there was no medical testimony to prove that a rape had even been committed. The defense was not permitted to present testimony that the suspects were badly beaten by Sheriff McCall’s deputies, and they were even denied counsel for 26 days. It took 90 minutes for the all-White jury to convict the three young Black men, one of whom was only 16 years old.
It took two years and four months of hard work before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s convictions and ordered a new trial because Blacks had been excluded from the jury. Sheriff McCall, who was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of White People and president of the Florida Sheriff’s Association, drove on the night of November 6, 1951, two of the Black men who had been ordered a new trial by the U.S. Supreme Court, from the state penitentiary in Raiford to Lake County where they were to face a new jury. The two Black men were manacled in the back seat of the police car.
Sheriff McCall claimed that he stopped to check what he thought was a flat tire on the police car that he was driving on a particularly lonesome stretch of road and let the Black prisoners out to go to the bathroom, and one of them hit him with a flashlight. So Sheriff McCall opened fire with his .38-caliber Smith and Wesson pistol. One of the Black men survived by playing dead. The surviving man reported that minutes later, Sheriff McCall’s deputy arrived and discovered that he was not dead and shot him again, this time in the neck.
These shootings brought a mob of reporters to Lake County as the NAACP demanded that Sheriff McCall and his deputy be removed from office and charged with murder and attempted murder. Mr. Moore was the most vocal in leading the campaign to raise money for the defendants and had monitored the case from the beginning. In speeches at protest meetings along Florida’s East Coast, Mr. Moore demanded that Sheriff McCall and his deputies be prosecuted.”
It could be the demands that McCall be prosecuted that got the Moores killed. Harry Moore wrote to Governor Fuller Warren, who acknowledged being a “former member of the KKK,” to demand justice. Moore spoke to the papers about this case and others involving police brutality and murder. Sheriff McCall admitted having attended a Klan meeting just before the Moore bombing. Later he denied being in the Klan but acknowledged he might have attended a Klan meeting by mistake.
Back to those investigations after the bombing of the Moore home. Within six days of Moore’s death, the FBI had identified three of the four suspects ultimately determined to be behind the murders. The bombings made news all over the world. The First Lady felt compelled to speak out:
“The harm it will do us among the people of the world is untold.” Eleanor Roosevelt
Despite an abundance of evidence, no charges were made. During his “accidental visit” to a Klan meeting, Sheriff McCall told the members they didn’t have to speak to the FBI, and almost none did. One of the four men eventually spoke to the FBI when he died of cancer, blaming another man who died of a questionable suicide a year after the bombings. It was said he took $5,000 from the Klan to carry out the plot to pay off his mortgage. There is no evidence his mortgage was paid off. The first case was closed for lack of “prosecutorial evidence.”
Six Klansmen were indicted for perjury in their grand jury testimony but not prosecuted. In 1978, Raymond Henry, Jr made a taped confession to the FBI. He admitted to building the bomb and implicated Sheriff McCall and others. No action was taken; the FBI refused to release the tape because there wasn’t “sufficient public interest.” It was over fifty years after the deaths of Harry and Harriette Moore that their “likely” killers were named though all were long since deceased.
At the end of their project, the students at DeLaura Junior High School wrote the following:
“We, the students at DeLaura Junior High School, therefore, dedicate this supplementary history book to Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore. The Moores were not violent people but people who did not let the fear of financial or bodily harm control their lives. The fear that kept them going was that if they did not stand up and speak out that nothing would ever change. Because of their valiant efforts, changes have been made for the better. They are true heroes and an inspiration to us all.”
My wife and I visited the memorial site while returning home from Miami. We got off Interstate-95 and made our way there. The Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Memorial Park and Museum was built in collaboration with the county in 2003 to honor Harry T. Moore’s tireless efforts toward racial equality, decades before Brown v. Board of Education. The facility sits on a 12-acre plot in Mims, where the Moores’ home stood before the 1951 bombing that took their lives.
The community-based Board of Directors has always operated the facility in partnership with Brevard County. The Board raised funds for the replica house and the gazebo. Dozens of weddings have been held under the gazebo, with the Parks and Recreation Department charging for the service. The facility has a small staff paid by the County who collects a nominal entry fee but won’t handle any sales from the gift shop, leaving it to the Board to find volunteers to sell souvenirs.
The Board of Directors is comprised of primarily elderly Black volunteers looking to preserve the memory of slain civil rights activists. They see education as part of their mission. However, the County increasingly fought them, coincidentally, while the presidential aspirations of Ron DeSantis were partially based on destroying “wokeness” and rewriting Black History.
The Board of Directors got their first clue there was a problem when the County demanded they pay rent to meet in the building they are arguably responsible for existing. The Board has always operated under a contract with the county, and until recently, there has been little contention.
The County refused to sign off on or has outright canceled board-sponsored activities, forcing some to be moved off-site, including a panel on hate speech and microaggressions in 2020.
The County had no problem hosting an annual collectible car show at the complex, which must somehow align with a civil rights mission.
It was still a shock when board president Bill Gary arrived to open the gift shop to deliver a box of t-shirts to a group and found the locks had been changed, locking himself and other board members out. Gary says he received no advance notice.
Brevard County communications director Don Walker said little in response.
Walker did go on to say there was no connection between what may be happening at the state level and the situation with the Moore Center, calling any notion to that effect “far-fetched” and “false.”
In Florida, elected and appointed officials have bent to the will of Governor DeSantis to aid him in carrying out his culture war. The Board has scheduled educational programs that don’t align with the Governor’s insistence that anything potentially related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or Critical Race Theory (CRT). Any discussion of race is now persecuted in Florida, and locking out this Board of directors is an example. Harry and Harriette Moore are intrinsically linked with the NAACP, which has just issued a travel advisory warning Black visitors to Florida. Hispanic and LGBTQ groups have also issued advisories.
Brevard County, FL, is a highly conservative county that usually has five commissioners who happen to be all-white. There is a current vacancy as one commissioner resigned to take another position in the County. The volunteer board of directors of the Moore Cultural Complex might be the most input Black citizens of Brevard County have, and now they’ve been locked out while the County negotiates demands. I’ll let them have the last word.
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This post was previously published on Momentum.
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