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Loading... Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America's First Civil Rights Martyrby Ben Green
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Although reserved and studious, Harry T. Moore led a life devoted to activism in the name of social and political justice. Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriet Vyda Sims were both teachers who taught in segregated schools in Florida. Harry T. Moore fought for equal pay for Black teachers. Moore traveled around the state to organized Black teachers to demand equal pay and better working conditions. After Moore was fired for his activism on behalf of teachers, he joined the NAACP and became the first executive director of the Florida NAACP. Moore continued to travel around the state, organizing new NAACP chapters. Moore was also involved in political activism. The Democratic Party in Florida held closed primaries, which excluled Black voters. In response, Moore organized the Progressive Voters' League. Through the PVL, Over a six year period Moore registered over 100,000 Black voters. The author, Ben Green, does an excellent job of providing details about Moore's life and his assassination on December 25, 1951. Green's analysis of the conflict that arose between Moore and the NAACP over Moore's political activism is also explored and adds another dimension to the story of the challenges Moore faced. But occasionally Green offers speculation about events and attempts to expand the narrative with a sort of "you are there" descriptions that detract from the story of Harry T. Moore, the first modern civil rights leader to be assassinated. ( ) no reviews | add a review
Fifty years ago - before Martin Luther King, Jr., began to preach from his pulpit in Montgomery, Alabama, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, or Rosa Parks's famous bus ridea man named Harry T. Moore toiled in Jim Crow Florida on behalf of the NAACP and the Progressive Voters' League. For seventeen years, in an era of official indifference and outright hostility, the soft-spoken but resolute Moore traveled the backroads of the state on a mission to educate, evangelize, and organize. But on Christmas night in 1951, in a small orange grove in tiny Mims, Florida, a bomb placed under a bed ended Harry Moore's life. Although his daughters, Peaches and Evangeline, survived, his wife, Harriette, died of her wounds a week later.
Unjustly neglected until now, Moore's death stands as the first in what was to be a long and tragic line of assassinations in the civil rights movement.
It was Moore's defense of the Groveland Four - black youths accused, under murky circumstances, of raping a white woman in Lake County - that drew the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan and pitted him against one of the most feared and vilified sheriffs in the country. Two of the Groveland Four were shot - one fatally - in the custody of Sheriff Willis McCall, who despite fifty investigations and a litany of racial scandals would remain in office for nearly thirty years. Ben Green revisits the people and circumstances surrounding Harry Moore's death, and brings alive a cast of characters worthy of Harper Lee or Flannery O'Connor.
The governor of Florida reopened the case of Harry Moore's murder in 1991. Although the investigation revealed for the first time that the Klan was almost certainly responsible for Moore's death, no one was put behind bars. Bringing a fresh eye to the newly available FBI files. Green offers a reckoning of the good and the bad, the villainous and the virtuous. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)364.15Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Criminology Crimes and Offenses Offenses against personsLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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