Lest we forget

Years before other civil rights leaders became household names, a forgotten black man in our state gave his life for that cause. A documentary now traces his life, his death and their indictment of the Florida in which he lived.

By ERIC DEGGANS

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 15, 2001

Evangeline Moore saw the press conferences led by Jesse Jackson and felt her gut tighten.

As black people in Florida faced the cameras, saying they had been intimidated at the polls and denied the vote on false charges that they were felons, Moore got so angry she couldn't sleep. Sometimes, she couldn't eat.

Why? Because it felt like a rerun of 1951, when her father, Harry T. Moore, became the first civil rights activist to be killed for his work -- often registering poor black people to vote in out-of-the-way, rural Florida towns such as Mims, Live Oak and Groveland.

Harry T. Moore, a former school principal and owner of a small orange grove, died when a bomb exploded under the family's home in Mims on Christmas night, 1951. His wife, Harriette, also was caught in the blast and died soon after.

For his daughter Evangeline, black Floridians' stories about present-day voting irregularities echoed tales of tactics used to keep people of color from voting 50 years ago.

"It was just a replay of what Daddy went through," said Ms. Moore, 70, who lives in Maryland. "A lot of us think we have arrived because we can go to white restaurants and movies . . . (but) we still have a long way to go. We need to realize what lengths (some) people will go through to oppress us."

To that end, producers at the University of Florida developed Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore, a 90-minute documentary on the life of a woefully underappreciated civil rights pioneer.

Despite Moore's status as the first NAACP leader to be killed for the cause, his name is missing from the list of martyrs at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala. (The roster goes back only to 1954 -- the year the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools and a date historians peg as the official flowering of the United States' civil rights movement.)

And though school children in Florida may hear about slain NAACP organizer Medgar Evers or legendary leader Martin Luther King Jr., few likely know the story of the strong-willed educator who bucked county police, state officials and even the NAACP itself in seeking justice for Florida's black citizens.

"I've always been fascinated by what makes an individual sacrifice everything for a principle," said Sandra Dickson, co-producer of the film with Churchill Robinson. They developed Freedom Never Dies through the Documentary Institute of the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications.

"Hokey as it sounds, we all need a hero," added Dickson, a telecommunications professor at the college. "I saw us playing a small role in restoring Harry Moore's place in history."

Developed over two years, the documentary pieces together archival photos and newspaper clippings with interviews of historians, journalists, NAACP members, family and friends. Evangeline Moore appears, along with St. Petersburg Times editorial board member John Hill, who is writing a book about a notoriously racist sheriff of that time, Lake County's Willis V. McCall.

There's even some star power on hand, with appearances by former NAACP chairpersons Myrlie Evers (widow of Medgar) and Julian Bond, along with narration by actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. (Davis reads Moore's letters throughout.)

Moore was born and raised in tiny Houston, Fla., and later lived in Jacksonville. Gifted with a love of learning, he was a teacher and principal at Titusville Colored School before becoming president of the Florida NAACP in 1941 and later its executive secretary.

It was a dangerous time to advocate rights for black people in Florida. Though history more readily associates Deep South states such as Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi with racial violence, Florida had more lynchings per capita than any other state from 1900 to 1930, according to the film.

Mass lynchings in Ocoee and Rosewood were 20 years distant, but the Ku Klux Klan and local officials friendly to their cause remained a powerful threat to black Floridians in the mid-'40s.

"I'm a white Southerner, and I was surprised to find the virulent racism that I associated with Georgia and Alabama so prevalent in Florida at the time," Dickson says. "That image of South Florida . . . that tourism image . . . has been in many people's minds the dominant image of Florida. There's a lot (about that time) that has gone unsaid."

Moore saw the Sunshine State's sinister side. This was a state where black orange pickers worked as near-indentured servants to white grove owners, black teachers' salaries weren't equal to those of their white counterparts, and horrific lynchings -- organized to stem the tide of black people registering to vote -- went unpunished.

"(Florida's) segregation statutes were as vicious as anyone could find in any state and . . . a lynching ratio six times that of South Carolina," said Ted Hemmingway, a professor of history at historically black Florida A&M University. "I guarantee . . . Nazis didn't treat the Jews any worse than some of these county sheriffs (treated black people)."

As executive secretary of the Florida NAACP, Moore pressed the issue by writing letters to the state's attorney general, governor and other officials to urge action on punishing lynchings and equalizing teacher pay.

When 15-year-old Willie James Howard was bound and thrown into the Suwannee River for passing a note to a white girl, Moore took statements from black people who witnessed the crime and challenged official attempts to ignore it. When rumors of a white woman's rape brought Klan-led mobs rampaging through the small citrus town of Groveland in 1949, Moore sent telegrams to the governor urging a proper investigation.

And when three black men were arrested in Lake County for the crime -- Sheriff McCall shot two of them he said were "trying to escape" after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned their convictions -- Moore persuaded legendary black attorney (and future Supreme Court justice) Thurgood Marshall to defend the man who survived.

"What he (Moore) was doing was extremely suicidal," said Clarence Rowe, president of the Central Brevard County branch of the NAACP, during the documentary. "At that time, what they would say is the n--- is getting too big for his britches."

The documentary also explores an interesting twist: The national NAACP, impatient with dips in membership statewide and angry at Moore's independent streak, removed him as executive secretary not long before his death -- something Evangeline says she didn't learn until author Ben Green began writing a Harry T. Moore biography, published in 1999.

After the explosion, the FBI mounted a full-scale investigation, targeting three Klansmen who died within a year of Moore's death. No one was ever charged.

The film presents much speculation about why Moore was killed -- his success in registering 100,000 black people to vote statewide, his lawsuits over equal pay for teachers (which got him and Harriette fired as teachers) and the Groveland case are all cited in the documentary.

Experts in the documentary conclude Moore isn't better known because he died too soon -- civil rights historians tend to focus on Deep South states and events after 1954. But Dickson admits there might be another, more basic reason.

"It happened pretelevision," she said. "Ten years later, when African-Americans and moderate whites start seeing (Birmingham, Ala., police commissioner) Bull Connor abusing (civil rights demonstrators) on TV . . . talk about bringing it home in a real way. It's tough to deny."

Despite its quality and scope, Freedom Never Dies commits a curious sin of segregation: only two of the people identified as journalists, authors, police officers or historians during the film are African-American -- including Bond, a history professor who is better known as a civil rights activist.

Most other black people who appear onscreen are old friends of Moore, NAACP members or relatives.

Dickson said she approached Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient John Hope Frankin and Harvard University professors Henry Louis "Skip" Gates and Cornell West, but none could appear on camera. Seven black historians declined to participate because of scheduling conflicts or a lack of expertise, she added.

But Florida A&M professor Hemmingway, who is black, said such lapses can reinforce stereotypes while missing valuable perspectives.

"Whenever anyone does something about the lives of black people, it seems the last people they consult are black people with expertise," said the professor, who said he has collected several of Moore's letters while researching a book on black Florida in the 20th century.

Hemmingway blames Moore's obscurity on other factors: local media's lack of coverage of his death, low interest among colleges in studying Florida's civil rights history, the transience of the state's black population and a reluctance among longtime residents to discuss long ago horrors.

Besides bringing more attention to Moore, Freedom Never Dies records the stories of those who knew Moore and worked on early civil rights actions in Florida -- preserving their firsthand experiences at a time when advancing age and illness have claimed many voices from that era.

Following a trend toward re-examining past massacres (including John Singleton's Rosewood film and a PBS documentary on a mass lynching in Oklahoma), the film also highlights the ways race-based violence was an everyday reality for many people of color.

Most important, it outlines the early racial tension and the hidden legacy of injustice that color how black and white Floridians line up on present-day issues -- from the drive to end affirmative action in the state to current efforts by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to investigate the way black voters were treated during November's election.

Considering that Florida still ranks second among all states for sheer number of hate groups -- 30 organizations in 1999, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center -- Freedom Never Dies offers a message Floridians may need to hear more often.

"I'm hoping it highlights (white people's) inability to see everything through the lens of race," Dickson said. "In other words, we pierce the kind of denial that comes from the white population about these things. It's essential we deal with this past . . . because we can't move forward without it."

These days, Moore is also remembered through the Harry T. Moore Homesite Development Committee, a Mims group that is building an educational center in his memory. It received $700,000 from the state to build a memorial park in 1998 (Web site: http://www.nbbd.com/godo/moore).

Though she's hopeful about the documentary's possible impact, Evangeline Moore never forgets how tough the struggle can be, noting that Freedom Never Dies makes its debut on Maryland's PBS station at 10 p.m. Jan. 28 -- opposite CBS' telecast of the Super Bowl.

"He came before Rosa Parks, before Medgar Evers, and this should have been done a long time ago," she said. "People have a way of forgetting those who have given their lives for their benefit. I hope they come away from (this film) with the knowledge that we still have a long way to go."

At a glance

Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore airs at 10 p.m. Thursday on WEDU-Ch. 3. Grade: B+.

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