Harry T. Moore - Murder

Murder

On Christmas night, 1951, Moore and his wife were fatally injured at home by a bomb that went off beneath their house. It was the Moores' twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Moore died on the way to the hospital in Sanford, Florida. His wife died from her injuries nine days later.

Moore has been called the first martyr in the Civil Rights Movement. He was the first NAACP official murdered in the civil rights struggle. The murders caused a national and international outcry, with protests registered at the United Nations against violence in the South. The NAACP held a huge rally in New York, where the renowned poet Langston Hughes read a poem written in memory of Moore.

The state of Florida called the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help with the investigation, but no indictments were brought against the suspects. (In 2005, the Florida Attorney General's office re-opened the case; see below).

There were eleven other bombings against black families in Florida in 1951, the year the Moores were killed. The risk to activists and any blacks in the South was high and continued to be so. According to a later report from the NAACP's Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the homes of forty 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." For example, bombing was prevalent in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s, used by independent KKK groups to intimidate middle-class blacks moving into new neighborhoods.