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| Afterword | 248 | (9) | |||
| Notes | 257 | (38) | |||
| Acknowledgments | 295 | (4) | |||
| Index | 299 |
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Chapter One
"And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men."
Luke 2:13-14
It is Christmas 1951.
Two years before the H-bomb. Three years before the Brown decision. A dozen years before "I Have a Dream" and the first unfathomable assassination. Before Sputnik, Elvis, Vietnam, Watergate, or the Pill. Before the Berlin Wall rose...or fell. Before Watts or South Central L.A. Before AIDS. In short, a long, long time ago.
Come back to that time, for a moment, to the little town of Mims, Florida. We are a long way from Bethlehem. No shepherds are abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks. Indeed, there are few fields or flocks of any kind, save for swamps and mosquitoes. Four miles due east, across the placid waters of the Indian River, lies a long silvery thread of sand called Cape Canaveral and, beyond that, the dark rolling majesty of the Atlantic.
Mims hardly qualifies as a town at all; it's just a crossroads on U.S. 1, the Dixie Highway, with not a single traffic light and only Duffy's Food Palace to lure the Yankees speeding south to Palm Beach or Miami. There are two truck stops and one motel, a dingy seven-roomer with its "Vacancy" light still on; there is room at the inn this Christmas, but no takers.
Turn east off U.S. 1, and we're on the unnamed and unpaved streets of Mims's "colored quarters," as it's called. Tonight the shotgun houses are lit up gaily, with shadows dancing in the glare of bare fifty-watt bulbs. Here and there, a strand of Christmas lights is strung across a front porch or in the bougainvilleas growing below it. At one end of the quarter, "Pretty Boy" Wooten's jook emanates with muted blue notes and the throaty laughter of early celebrants. Two blocks away, the whitewashed spire of St. Mary's Missionary Baptist Church rises stolidly against the evening sky.
Turn west on U.S. 1, cross the Florida East Coast railroad tracks, and we're in Mims's white neighborhood. Modest cracker-style houses with tin roofs and wraparound porches are nestled on sprawling lots, with flowering hibiscus entwined among the cabbage palms and live oaks. A sparse nativity scene adorns the front of the First Baptist Church.
South of town, looming just off the highway, is the one link between the two communities: the hulking superstructure of the Nevins Packing House, which is lit up even on Christmas, this being the height of the packing season. Semitractor trailers are backed up to the loading docks, filled with the trademark Indian River oranges, the most famous in the world. Spreading out from the plant in every direction to the horizon are lush groves of oranges and grapefruits that support, however meagerly, Mims's one thousand inhabitants.
It is early evening on Christmas Day, a Tuesday. Presents have long since been opened and admired, tried on, played with, ridden, bounced, broken, or otherwise abused. Here, as in every other town in America, in every metropolitan borough or backwater hamlet, families have gathered for Christmas dinner. Plates have been heaped high with smoked ham or turkey and cornbread dressing, with gravy ladled across the top and a half-hearted spoonful of cranberries on the side, for tradition. In kitchens, on stovetops, pecan pies wait, still warm; and fruitcakes sit untouched on counters, like old used bricks.
In the western sky, the crimson shards of light that linger after dusk, casting a soft pink glow across the Indian River -- a lonesome sentry between the mainland and the Cape -- have faded to black. Along the sand flats of the lagoon, kingfishers, ibises, and herons are settling into their mangrove roosts, while the night feeders -- spotted owls, red-tailed hawks, and the ever-present alligators, their eyes yellow and luminous -- punch in for another night's work. To the east, out over the Ocean, the winter sky is a brilliant panoply of stars and comets, beckoning to adventurers, wise and foolish alike, who seek to divine its mysteries. At the south end of the Cape, the newly erected gangplanks of America's fledgling missile testing base stand in silent witness to that call.
As nightfall descends on Mims, there is an ominous change in the weather: a thick fog, so dense that it's wet to the touch, begins rolling in off the sea, hugging the ground like a stray dog, poring over every street and alleyway, every roadside ditch and holler. The stars disappear. Visibility begins to drop; in another two hours, a driver will have to lean out the window of his car to see.
From our vantage, however, forty-eight years removed, we can make out the headlights of a car, still visible through the fog, approaching Mims at high speed. Unlike the magi, this solitary vehicle is coming from the west, with no star to guide its way, from Orlando or Sanford, on State Road 46, the most deserted approach into town. Just before it reaches U.S. 1, the car veers sharply to the right, turning south on the Old Dixie Highway, which parallels its new namesake. On Christmas evening, Old Dixie is deserted and forsaken.
A half-mile down the road, on the right, a rutted driveway disappears into an orange grove. The driver of the car cuts his headlights, pulls onto the shoulder of the hard road, and turns around, facing the way he came. Hurriedly, two men emerge from the car. The taller man opens the trunk and shines a flashlight into it. With practiced efficiency, his burly partner removes a package and, with a nod to his partner, crosses Old Dixie and hurries up the rutted drive.
Even in the darkness and fog, the man knows where he is going; he has been here before. The white sand driveway is a beacon under his feet, leading him into the heart of the grove. Five hundred yards ahead, the grove opens onto a small clearing. A house stands all alone. It is a simple one-story frame house, raised off the ground on cinder blocks. No lights are on. The family car is gone. No one is home.
The man crosses the open yard, ducks around the northeast corner of the porch, and crawls under the house. In a matter of minutes -- five or ten, for a practiced hand -- he leaves his package, then scrambles out from under the house. Quickly now, his adrenaline pumping, he backtracks through the grove, pausing behind a young grapefruit tree for a moment to double-check himself, then running wildly, finally stopping behind an orange tree two hundred yards away. From here, he paces nervously back and forth, waiting and watching.
Two obvious questions arise: who are these men who have journeyed here on Christmas night, and what mysterious present have they brought? This much is certain: they are no magi bearing frankincense or myrrh, for what they have brought to this family is the most horrible Christmas present imaginable.
What a clash of opposing images, of troubling paradox. Straight-way across the lagoon, almost within view on a clear day, are the cold steel harbingers of a new era in American history. Great God, the Space Age! Buck Rogers and Jules Verne are within our grasp. From here, in another few years, spaceships will be rocketed to the moon, and people will drive all day and camp out all night to witness it from this very spot!
The Cape represents the transcendent hope of America's future, but here, in this clearing in the grove, is a harsh reminder of America's past. And sadly, prophetically, a portent of the future as well, which neither men on the moon nor technological gadgetry nor forty years of stormy history will yet solve. For the present these men have left on this foggy Christmas night is a high-powered explosive, a hate bomb, now fastened to the floor joists under the front bedroom.
Now the wait begins -- the Christmas countdown, which every anxious child must endure. And we must wait too, along with the nervous man behind the orange tree and his cohort parked along Old Dixie.
Time passes. The fog thickens.
But look now, we see the headlights of a car approaching, coming up the driveway from the depths of the grove. The low-beam headlights dip and ricochet skyward as it labors up the rutted path. The driver is cautious and methodical, taking his time in the fog. He stops the car -- a navy blue Ford sedan with sloping fenders and a jutting prow -- in a familiar location, where its tires have worn strips in the lawn.
The family is home.
First out of the car is a slightly built man, ebony skinned, with a high, arching forehead and a narrow face. At forty-six years old, his graying temples are the first signs of approaching middle age. He wears a conservative suit and tie and carries himself with a dignified reserve.
This is Harry T. Moore, the most hated black man in the state of Florida. By tomorrow morning, and for a brief span in America's fickle consciousness of race, he will be the most famous black man in America. In another five years, however, as the groundswell of change takes hold in Montgomery, and then in Little Rock, Birmingham, and Nashville, he will be largely forgotten. And forty years later, few people will have ever heard his name.
Harry Moore is the Florida coordinator of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which in 1951 is the only viable civil rights organization in the country. For seventeen years, he has criss-crossed the backroads of Florida, wearing out three cars, traveling alone usually, and at night, through small towns where no restaurant would serve him, no motel would house him, and some gas stations wouldn't let him fill his tank, empty his bladder, or even use the phone. He has launched his own investigations of brutal lynchings and unspeakable acts of mob violence, in an age when a sixteen-year-old black boy is killed merely for sending a Christmas card to a white girl -- forced to jump into the Suwannee River, hog-tied and at gunpoint, in front of his own father, where he drowned.
Harry Moore has worn out countless typewriter ribbons writing eloquent protests against such brutality, in the face of outright hostility or indifference from white officials. On a hand-cranked Ditto machine set up on his dining room table, he has churned out thousands of circulars attacking lynchings, segregated schools, and unequal salaries for black teachers.
Wearing his second hat, as the executive secretary of the Progressive Voters' League, which he cofounded in 1944, he has been the singular driving force in the registration of 100,000 new black voters in the past six years, and has aggressively brokered the power of that emerging bloc vote.
He has done all this -- always in his measured, resolute fashion -- at a time when most African Americans are still afraid to challenge the Jim Crow system head-on. Time after time, black victims of white terror have been too frightened to testify; eyewitnesses have been overcome with sudden bouts of amnesia; African American preachers and political leaders, many of them lifelong Republicans, have urged Moore to "go along to get along"; and the greatest accomplishment of many NAACP branches is their Annual Coronation Ball and Beauty Pageant.
"What about Harry T. Moore?" an aide to Governor Millard Caldwell wrote in 1946, inquiring of a commissioner in Moore's home county. "He is a negro, is he not? Give me the dope on him."
"He is a trouble maker and negro organizer," the commissioner bluntly replied.
That he is.
Over the years, Moore's primary support has come from a network of dedicated allies -- some of them friends of his since high school -- who hold secret meetings to plan their next campaign or legal maneuver and depend on each other while traveling for their next meal or a safe haven to sleep. Backing him up in New York has been the legal arm of the NAACP, embodied in the formidable person of Thurgood Marshall, its brilliant and fearless chief counsel, who has worked on cases with Moore since 1937 and has slept in this very house.
Harry T. Moore, this methodical, soft-spoken man -- a schoolteacher by profession, fired after twenty years for his political activities -- has been fighting against racial injustice long before there was a civil rights movement. In December 1951, the inferno that will nearly consume America in the coming decade still lies dormant, and the movement's most famous leaders -- and martyrs -- have yet to embrace the cause.
At Boston University, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in philosophy named Mike King is cultivating the refined style of an intellectual: he smokes a pipe, dresses in tailored suits, and has developed "the far-off look of a philosopher." Absorbed in the study of Spinoza, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mahayana Buddhism, he maintains a steadfast aloofness from racial issues, even in his student papers. His only leadership role among other African American students has been to organize the Dialectical Society, which meets weekly to discuss rarefied issues of philosophy and religion. In a few years, Mike King will be better known by his legal name, Martin.
Just across the river from BU, in the Charlestown State Prison, a former pimp and drug addict known as Detroit Red is serving a ten-year sentence for robbery. While in prison, he has become a voracious reader and a follower of Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad. Following his parole, in August 1952, he will move back to Detroit and change his name to Malcolm X.
And on this very night, a senior student from Alcorn A&M College is on his honeymoon in Jackson, Mississippi, with his bride, Myrlie. After graduating this spring with a major in business administration, he will take a job selling insurance in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Next summer, angry over the mistreatment of black sharecroppers, Medgar Evers will join the NAACP for the first time.
The Moore family unloads from the blue Ford. Harry helps his mother, Rosa Moore, who is visiting from Jacksonville, up the walkway to the house. Two other women emerge: his wife, Harriette, also a schoolteacher, who is two years older than her husband and even more reserved than he; and their eldest daughter, Annie Rosalea, nicknamed Peaches, who is twenty-three and home for the holidays from Ocala, where she teaches school as well. The only missing member of the family is their youngest daughter, Evangeline, twenty-one, who works for the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., and is scheduled to board a train tomorrow morning for the twenty-six-hour ride home.
Harry Moore unlocks the door to the house, which he and Harriette built soon after their marriage on Christmas Day 1926. Yes, today is their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Here in this desolate place, among the sawgrass, sandspurs, and moss-draped hammocks of Brevard County -- a stultifying incubator originally named Mosquito County -- they have raised two fine daughters and put them both through college on their meager teacher salaries and Harry's irregular paychecks from the NAACP.
Harry Moore is serious and sober minded, not given to frivolities, but this is a special day. Since four-thirty this afternoon, the Moores have been celebrating Christmas dinner at Harriette's mother's house, eight hundred yards away, where the rutted driveway ends. After the dinner plates were cleared away, Harry and Elmer Silas, one of his oldest friends, sat in the living room and talked politics. It's the one driving obsession in his life, and even on Christmas and his anniversary, Harry can't avoid it. And for good reason. In the past year, he has been engaged in the two fiercest political battles of his life: one involving the most notorious sheriff in the country and the most sensational rape trial since Scottsboro; and the other, even more stressful, perhaps, against the organization to which he has devoted his life, the NAACP.
On top of that, some terrifying insanity is aloose in Florida in 1951. The entire state is being blown apart in a gale of race hatred and senseless acts of violence. Just since August, there have been a dozen dynamitings -- at an African American housing project, Jewish synagogues, and Catholic churches in Miami; and at a new black high school and a white-owned ice cream parlor in Orlando. With 100,000 hungry black voters on the Democratic party rolls and Moore's Progressive Voters' League threatening to unleash a flood of political change, the Ku Klux Klan is using dynamite to hold back the tide.
"The Florida Terror," as it is now called, has reached the critical point that will always get the attention of Florida's leaders: it's hurting tourism. Even Governor Fuller Warren, a silver-tongued orator who has heretofore responded to the crisis with glib denials, is finally taking it seriously.
The madness is taking a toll on Harry Moore as well. Over the years, Moore has grown accustomed to threats of violence and has accepted those as part of his job. When one NAACP friend cautioned that he was "pushing too fast," Moore replied, "I'm going to keep doing it, even if it costs me my life." Recently, however, with these lunatic "boom-stick boys" at work in the state, he has started carrying a gun -- a .32 caliber pistol -- which he keeps in the glove compartment of his car when he's on the road and in a paper sack by his bed at night. "I'll take a few of them with me if it comes to that," he tells his family.
Harry steps into the living room and turns on the lights. The family's Christmas presents lie unopened in the corner, awaiting Evangeline's arrival. From the outside, the Moores' house looks much the same as those of Mims's grove workers, but the inside reflects Harry and Harriette's tenacious commitment to education. The glass-enclosed bookshelves are overflowing with tomes on political science and history (particularly black history, with texts by anthropologist Kelly Miller and Carter G. Woodsun), and anthologies of poetry and literature. There is an upright piano, which Harriette plays; a Silvertone radio, on which Harry listens to the news and, on Sunday mornings, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; and a wind-up Victrola with an eclectic collection of records -- blues, jazz, spirituals, and classical.
The dining room is stylishly decorated with a large oak table, a buffet and matching server, lace curtains on the windows, and paintings on the lath walls. In one corner, out of the way for now, are Harry's manual typewriter and well-used Ditto machine, along with stacks of old press releases, letters, circulars, and broadsides he has written.
By the time they settle in, it's nearly nine o'clock. Harriette announces that she's tired and is going to bed, but Harry doesn't want the evening to end. He suggests that they have some cake to celebrate their anniversary.
A fruitcake is brought out of the kitchen. Now Harry makes an even bolder suggestion: that he and Harriette cut the cake together, as they did at their wedding. Harriette protests, but Harry insists. And so they stand together, hand in hand, with the memories flooding back after twenty-five years. Then Harry makes a little speech about their wedding and the love they have shared, and they all sit down at the dining room table to eat. It's a touching, sentimental moment, which ends soon enough, as such moments do. The cake is finished and Harriette says good-night and goes to bed. Peaches, a bookworm like her father, lies down on the couch to read and quickly dozes off.
Now it's just Harry and his mother, Rosa, sitting at the table, talking quietly. He is her only child and since his father's death, in 1914, it has been just the two of them. Harry was only nine years old at the time, a frail and sickly boy, and Rosa has always been protective of him. She still is. She worries about the dangers of his NAACP work and begs him once again to quit. "Every advancement comes by way of sacrifice," he tells her. "What I am doing is for the benefit of my race."
By now it is after ten o'clock. Harry and Rosa say goodnight, and she makes her way to the guest room at the back of the house. Harry wakes up Peaches, asleep on the couch, then turns off the lights and disappears into the front bedroom.
A few minutes later, Rosa Moore hears footsteps padding down the hallway to the bathroom. "Is that you, Harry?" she calls out in the dark.
"Yes, Mama, it's me," he replies in his soft, modulated tones. He finishes in the bathroom and returns to his room, where he slips into bed beside the only woman he has ever loved.
Outside, the fog has engulfed the grove, leaving Harry Moore's young orange trees, which he hopes to live off in his retirement, shapeless hulks in the night. It is dead quiet. The quiet that comes in Florida only in winter, when the cicadas and rain frogs cease their nightly tempest. It is the stillness of the rural south. The peacefulness of Christmas.
And then, at 10:20 P.M., a terrific explosion rocks the house. The sound is heard four miles away in Titusville, and the concussion awakens sleeping neighbors a half-mile away. One father is reading a bedtime story to his children, who are so frightened that they throw their arms around him and quiver with fear. Some terrified residents run outside, afraid that a propane tank has exploded in their backyards. Others surmise that a tanker truck has blown up at the Spar Truck Stop or that the Nevins Packing House has exploded. One man even imagines that a missile has blown up at the Cape.
By tomorrow morning, and in the weeks to come, the tremors of this dreadful blast will echo far beyond Mims, Florida. In Washington, D.C., an aspiring young congressman named John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who is about to announce his candidacy for the U.S. Senate and has his sights set on the White House, will introduce a resolution calling on President Harry Truman to investigate. Fifteen thousand miles away, in North Korea, African American prisoners of war will be reminded of it, over and over, as a brainwashing technique, by their North Korean captors. The bombing will be front-page news in London, Paris, and Moscow, and across Asia and Africa; will inspire editorials as far away as Rio de Janeiro, Manila, and Jerusalem; and will provoke heated exchanges in the U.N. General Assembly between Soviet ambassador Andre Vishinsky and his U.S. counterpart, Eleanor Roosevelt, who will admit ruefully that "the harm it will do us among the people of the world is untold." One U.S. newspaper will label it "a point of no return in American race relations"; another will call it the "most explosive bomb since Hiroshima" and will say it sparked more protests than any other racial episode in a decade. Those protests will be led by the most important black leaders of the time: Thurgood Marshall, Walter White, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell, Jackie Robinson, and the poet Langston Hughes, who will memorialize it in song.
Rosa Moore learns the terrible truth of the blast before any of those, however, when she awakens to the anguished cries of her granddaughter Peaches, who is running through the house, screaming over and over the words that both women will remember long after the world has forgotten this night and this man. "Something has happened to Daddy!!" Peaches cries. "Something has happened to Daddy!!"
Yes, something has. Something worth remembering, even now.
Before dawn on the morning of December 26, a ragged column of figures, ghostlike apparitions in the fog, trudges along the Dixie Highway, drawn inexorably to Mims to witness the outrage for themselves. Overnight, a cold front has blown in from the north, and the marchers are hunched over to ward off the cold.
Word of the bombing is already being Teletyped around the world by the Associated Press and UPI wire services, but in Brevard County the news has been spread by a more primitive, but equally effective, method: in Titusville's black neighborhoods, along Hopkins Avenue and the Seaboard railroad tracks, angry men were out in the streets before dawn, hollering like old-fashioned town criers: "They bombed Professor Moore! They bombed Professor Moore!"
Men and women still in their nightclothes, their hair disheveled and akimbo, poured out of their houses and into the streets, as they had in the wartime air raids that were common on this militarized coast. All of them knew Harry Moore personally. Most of those thirty-five and younger he has taught in school, and the rest he has enlisted in the NAACP or registered to vote.
Without any discussion, the impromptu pilgrimage to Mims is formed. Those with cars drive and those without go on foot, walking the four miles down Old Dixie, where they arrive to find an all-night vigil taking place in the front yard of Moore's bombed-out house, now barricaded with a crude, hand-lettered sign:
Keep Out -- Orders by the Sheriff
The morning sun rises meekly behind the clouds, shrouding the day with a diffused, veiled light. The crowd keeps growing. By midmorning, hundreds of people are there (an estimated twelve hundred people would visit the site by afternoon). They huddle around a bonfire fueled by shattered boards strewn across the lawn by the blast. Trampled underfoot in the wet sand are the Moores' Christmas cards and copies of Harry's letters, flyers, and various NAACP pamphlets: Better Social Security, Handbook of the NAACP Convention, and FEPC Now.
In hushed whispers, the mourners talk about Moore's life and speculate about the bombing and who might have done it. There is no shortage of suspects to choose from: the Ku Klux Klan in neighboring Orange and Seminole counties has been openly flaunting its power and boasts dozens of prominent politicians, law officers, doctors, and lawyers among its ranks. On Christmas Day, in fact, the Klan held a barbecue at nearby Lake Jessup, only fifteen miles from Mims, that was attended by some of the most notorious "head-knockers" in the Klan's wrecking crew. And just a few weeks earlier, an NAACP associate had warned Harry Moore that a prominent white grove owner, the head of the Mires Citrus Exchange, had complained that Moore was "putting notions in niggers' heads" and "his neck ought to be broken."
For those standing in the fog, however, whenever the question is asked, "Why did this happen?" those who knew Moore best answer with one voice: he was killed because of Groveland. And when anyone mentions the Groveland case, one name inevitably comes to mind: Sheriff Willis McCall.
Just as long as you got a little handful of [blacks] together, you gonna have a little bolita, a little moonshine, and a whole lot of sex. Anybody that don't know that, don't understand 'em, and that's all there is to it. The Wisdom of Willis McCall He was a pioneer of sorts: the prototype of the racist southern sheriff. A dozen years before Bull Connor in Birmingham or Jim Clark in Selma would come to national prominence, there was Willis V. McCall of Lake County, Florida, who on Christmas Day 1951 is indisputably the most feared and vilified sheriff in the country.
At six feet, one inch and 240 pounds, dressed in his trademark ten-gallon Stetson and size thirteen cowboy boots, McCall is a quintessential good old boy and a consummate politician, equally adept at charming the womenfolk or regaling the men with stories of moonshine raids and bolita rings. When first elected, in 1944, McCall was just an obscure fruit inspector, bur the Groveland case catapulted him into the national spotlight. Once there, he never left it.
In July 1949, a seventeen-year-old white farm wife from the packinghouse town of Groveland, in southern Lake County, accused four young black men of abducting and raping her. That accusation set off four days of rioting by unruly white mobs, which burned down several black-owned homes and shot up black neighborhoods, forcing McCall to ask Governor Fuller Warren to call out the National Guard.
By the time the Groveland Boys, as they became known, went to trial, the Groveland case had been dubbed "Florida's Little Scottsboro" and had become a national cause ceélèbre. In the intervening two years, McCall has been engaged in a ferocious running battle with Harry T. Moore and the national NAACP, which climaxed on November 6, 1951, only six weeks ago, when McCall shot two of the Groveland defendants while transporting them to a hearing. The sheriff claimed the two handcuffed prisoners had tried to escape; the one surviving defendant said McCall had yanked them out of his patrol car and started firing.
The shooting set off a national outcry, spawning dozens of newspaper editorials, hundreds of protest letters, and a half-dozen separate investigations. For weeks, Harry Moore has been traveling the state, calling for McCall's suspension and indictment for murder. So it is not surprising that Moore's friends and family, standing in front of his home on this wretched morning, would point to Groveland and McCall as the motive for the bombing.
He was the first civil rights leader to be assassinated. But you don't know his name. And that's part of the problem. Miami Herald, February 16, 1992 "Take off your shoes from your feet!" the gray-haired preacher thunders.
"Amen!" the audience responds in unison.
"Take off your shoes, for the place where you stand is holy ground!" The preacher is rolling now, his voice rising in the familiar undulating cadence of black preachers.
"Amen!"
"A man and his wife gave their lives so you and I might live! Are you with me today?"
"Yes, sir!" The audience is following the preacher's lead.
"The shed blood, the broken bones and the bomb-ridden bodies of Harry and Harriette Moore have made this a sacred spot."
"Amen!"
It is December 26, 1991. Almost forty years to the day since the Moore bombing. Over 350 people are jammed into the tiny auditorium of the Cuyler Recreation Center in Mims, on the newly dedicated Harry T. Moore Avenue. They have traveled to Mims by car or bus from all over Florida for a memorial service sponsored by the Florida NAACP. There have been other memorial services over the years -- in 1977 and 1985 -- but this is the most significant. After decades of ignorance and neglect, even from civil rights organizations, Harry Moore is back in the spotlight. In August 1991, after new evidence surfaced, Governor Lawton Chiles ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to reinvestigate the Moore bombing. Incredibly, forty years after it happened, the Moore case is reopened.
It could not have come at a better time. In 1991, race is the hottest topic in the country. The year began with the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles, and the grainy images of the King videotape, replayed again and again on national TV, have become a totem for America's greatest unsolved problem.
And the King beating was just the beginning. On its heels came David Duke's campaign for governor of Louisiana; Byron de la Beckwith's reindictment for the 1965 murder of Medgar Evers; the violent eruption of Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, which was turned into a veritable war zone after confrontations between African Americans and Hasidic Jews; and finally, in August, the televised hearings on Clarence Thomas's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, which pitted Thomas against Anita Hill and divided men against women and the black community against itself in a grueling, high-stakes referendum on race and sex.
In that supercharged atmosphere, the Moore case has brought a rush of state and national publicity. There have been articles in the New York Times, the Village Voice, and every major Florida newspaper. The St. Petersburg Times has called Moore's death an "atrocity" as significant as the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. The president of the Florida State Conference of the NAACP has predicted that solving the case "could do more for race relations in the state of Florida than any other single event."
And so they have gathered, 350 strong, in Mims for this fortieth memorial service. "Forty Years Without Justice," the banners read. Memorial T-shirts are on sale in the lobby; television crews are jostling for Position; reporters from People magazine, the Miami Herald, and other papers are furiously scribbling notes. The preacher thundering from the pulpit is Dr. Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP. Behind him sits Evangeline Moore, sixty-one, the only surviving member of the Moore family.
One after another, speakers mount the podium to talk about Harry Moore's work and sacrifice. They speak passionately of his fight to equalize salaries of black teachers, his statewide voter registration drives, his fight for justice in the Groveland case. And they speak -- angrily now -- of the bombing that has never been solved. There are charges of half-hearted, slipshod investigations by local and state officials; a cover-up by the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover; and most incendiary of all, allegations of law enforcement complicity in the bombing. And even after forty years, the name still on everyone's lips is Willis McCall.
Now eighty-one years old, McCall has been out of office for over twenty years, but a cloud of controversy and scandal still follows him, with race at the heart of it. There have been dozens of allegations over the years: charges of beating black prisoners, faking critical evidence, sending innocent men to death row or to the state mental hospital, and on and on.
Yet McCall has never backed down from any of it. He still brags about the forty-nine times he was investigated and the five different governors who tried to remove him. "I've been accused of everything but taking a bath and called everything but a child of God," he likes to say.
Throughout his twenty-eight-year career, "Ole Willis" kept blaming his problems on the NAACP or the communists or the "nappy-headed reporters" who were out to get him, and he kept getting reelected, seven times in all, until 1972, when he was finally suspended after being charged with second-degree murder for allegedly kicking a black prisoner to death.
He is the inspiration for many stories and legends, one of which is still repeated in Lake County today: "The orange groves are fertilized with niggers that Willis McCall had killed."
And so these two men -- Harry Moore and Willis McCall -- one the grandson of slaves and the other the son of a dirt farmer, stand as Faulknerian archetypes of the South, linked forever in this tragic tale.
Copyright © 1999 Ben Green. All rights reserved.
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