December 25, 1951-Harry Tyson Moore, teacher and civil rights pioneer, and his wife were killed on their 25th wedding anniversary by a bomb that went off beneath their home in Mims, Florida. Moore was born November 18, 1905 in Houston, Florida and graduated from Florida Memorial College with a Normal degree in 1925. He worked as a teacher and principal at several schools from 1925 to 1946. The Moores founded the Brevard County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1934 and he filed the first lawsuit in the deep South to equalize salaries of Black teachers with White teachers in public schools in 1937. Moore also led the Progressive Voters League from 1944 to 1950 and during that time registered more than 100,000 Black people to vote. The public school system fired the Moores in 1946 and blacklisted them because of his political activism. Moore was posthumously awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1952. Florida designated the home site of the Moores a Florida Historical Heritage Landmark in 1999 and Brevard County created the Harry T. and Harriette Moore Memorial Park and Interpretive Center at the home site in 2004. The state of Florida concluded that the Moores were victims of a conspiracy by members of a Central Florida Klaven of the Ku Klux Klan in 2006 and four individuals, all deceased, were named. “Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Matyr,” was published in 1999.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 12:22:44 +0000
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