African American

On Christmas night 1951, a bomb exploded under the Mims home of educator and civil rights activist Harry T. Moore. The blast was so loud it could be heard several miles away in Titusville.

Moore died while being transported to Sanford, the closest place where a black man could be hospitalized. His wife Harriette died nine days later from injuries sustained in the blast.

The couple celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on the day of the explosion, and Harriette lived just long enough to see her husband buried.

The Moore’s daughter, Juanita Evangeline Moore, was working in Washington, D.C. in 1951, and was scheduled to come home for the holidays on December 27th, aboard a train called the Silver Meteor. She did not hear the news about her family home being bombed until she arrived.

“When I got off the train in Titusville, I knew something was very, very wrong,” Moore said in an interview before her death in October 2015. “I had not turned on radio or television, so I didn’t know a thing about it until I got off the train. I noticed that my mother and father were not in front of all my relatives to greet me and they were always there.”

Moore was given the news by her Uncle George, who was home on leave from Korea.

“We got into his car and got settled, and the first thing I asked was ‘Well, where’s Mom and Dad?’ No one said anything for a while, it was complete silence. Finally, Uncle George turned around and he said ‘Well, Van, I guess I’m the one who has to tell you. Your house was bombed Christmas night. Your Dad is dead and your Mother is in the hospital.’ That’s the way I found out,” said Moore.

“I’ve never gotten over it. It was unbelievable.”

Moore insisted on being taken to her parent’s home. The blast had done extensive damage. She saw a huge hole in the floor of her parent’s room, into which their broken bed had collapsed. Wooden beams had fallen from the ceiling. Shards of broken glass covered the bed in the room she shared with her sister, Peaches.

Harry T. Moore was born November 18, 1905, in Houston, Florida, located in Suwannee County. At age 19, Moore graduated with a high school diploma from Florida Memorial College where he was a straight-A student, except for a B+ in French. Other students called him “Doc” because he did so well in all of his classes.

Moore moved to Mims in 1925 after being offered a job to teach fourth grade at the “colored school” in Cocoa. He met Harriette Vida Sims. They married and had two daughters. Moore, his wife, and both of their daughters graduated from Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona.

As a ninth grade teacher and principal at Titusville Negro School, Moore instilled in his students a sense of pride and a solid work ethic. A popular and skilled educator, Moore was fired for attempting to equalize pay for African American teachers in Brevard County.

Moore led a highly successful effort to expand black voter registration throughout the state, dramatically increased membership in the Florida branch of the NAACP, worked for equal justice for African Americans, and actively sought punishment for those who committed crimes against them.

“I do remember a lot of NAACP work with my Dad from the time I was able to understand what was going on,” said Juanita Evangeline Moore. “I helped him a lot with his mailing lists. We had a one-hand operated ditto machine. He usually typed out the stencil and he ran off whatever material he wanted to send out.”

Although the murders of Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore have never been solved, it is believed that members of the Ku Klux Klan from Apopka and Orlando planted the bomb on Christmas night.

Moore and his wife were killed 12 years before Medgar Evers, 14 years before Malcolm X, and 17 years before Martin Luther King, Jr., making them the first martyrs of the contemporary civil rights movement.

The Moore Cultural Complex in Mims features a civil rights museum and a replica of the Moore family home.

There were more cases of lynching per capita in Florida, between 1900 and 1930, than in any other state.

Alabama and Mississippi had more total cases of lynching during this period, but Florida was the statistical leader based on population.

A 1993 study indicates that between 1882 and 1930, one out of every 1,250 African Americans in Florida was lynched. A black person was almost twice as likely to be lynched in Florida as Georgia, and seven times more likely in Florida than in North Carolina.

The last known lynching in Brevard County happened in the summer of 1926. It was the third lynching of a black man in the area in two months. The victim’s name was James Clark, and a photograph of his lynching was made into a postcard.

An article about the murder appeared in the Tuesday, July 13, 1926 edition of the Cocoa Tribune newspaper.

“It is said that the negro had been arrested Sunday for an attempted attack on a white girl of Eau Gallie, and that he was on his way, about 7:00 o’clock that evening, with the chief of police to Titusville for safe keeping, when the officer was over-powered by masked men,” the article states. “The man was whisked away, the body being found the next morning.”

There was no attempt to find out who had murdered Clark before he could be tried for his alleged crime in a court of law. The article states only that it was determined that Clark was, in fact, dead.

“A coroner’s jury was empaneled Monday morning to view the remains of a negro man, who was found three miles north of Eau Gallie Monday morning,” the Cocoa Tribune printed. “The jury’s findings were that the man, James Clark, came to his death by being hanged from a tree and riddled with bullets.”

On January 15, 1989, the Orlando Sentinel revisited what was then a 63-year-old case. At that time, there were still people alive who had information about the lynching.

A.T. Rossetter was a municipal judge in Eau Gallie for 25 years before the town merged with Melbourne in 1969. He was 18 when the Clark lynching took place.

“Back in those days, the sheriff’s office and those people never cared much about it, the hanging,” Rossetter told the Sentinel. “They never investigated it. I didn’t believe anybody could be that cruel.”

On July 11, 1926, Clark was working as the chauffeur of a traveling salesman who was staying at a hotel in Eau Gallie. The 10-year-old daughter of the hotel owner was allegedly raped by Clark, who was arrested for the crime. A “black preacher” was said to have witnessed the attack on the girl.

“Rape was a lot worse crime back then,” said W. Lansing Gleason, who had been mayor of Eau Gallie from 1929 to 1942. He was 89-years-old when interviewed by the Sentinel. “The thinking was, anybody that did anything like that ought to be hanged.”

Word quickly spread that a lynching was planned, so Clark was to be moved to Titusville to await trial. Rossetter was standing in front of the pool hall, across the street from the alley leading to the jail.

“I saw the chief of police come out of the alley in the car, and the colored man was in the car,” Rossetter said.

Ten men ran out of the pool hall and jumped into two cars, chasing the police car. Half an hour later, the sheriff returned to town without his prisoner.

“He said he was held up, and they took his gun away from him and they took the colored man away from him, so he just came on back to town,” said Rossetter. “Of course, the next day he had his gun back on.”

The site of the lynching, near Parkway Drive and U.S. 1, was named Lynching Tree Drive until 1980, when the name was changed to Legendary Lane. The tree is long gone.

Former Brevard County Commissioner Joe Wickham was a teenager in 1926. “They were mean, some of those guys in those days,” Wickham told the Sentinel. “They just took the law into their own hands. It was sad. Very sad.”

Last week, a conference called “Tracing the Caribbean Footprints of Zora Neale Hurston: A 125th Birthday Commemorative Cruise” was held aboard the cruise ship Freedom of the Seas, with private tours in Haiti and Jamaica.

The conference cruise was sponsored by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. That organization is dedicated to the preservation of the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States and the memory of its most famous resident, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.

Hurston visited Haiti in 1936, where she immersed herself in the local culture, including the practice and documentation of the religion of Voodoo.

She claimed to have taken a seven week break from her anthropological work to write her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

“I believe she did write the novel in seven weeks,” said Ruthe Sheffey, professor emerita at Morgan State University and founder of the Zora Neale Hurston Society. Sheffey explained that Hurston had just ended a personal relationship that could have inspired the fictional story of Janie and Tea Cake.

In 1937, Hurston traveled to Jamaica, where she continued her collection of folklore and folksongs, and the documentation of Caribbean lifeways.

Another result of Hurston’s travels in the Caribbean was perhaps her most dramatic non-fiction work, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. In the book, Hurston describes the ancient African religion of Voodoo, documenting its many gods, rituals, and songs of worship.

“Zora was not a tourist with a camera taking pictures,” said Carl-Henry François, who emigrated from Haiti in 1983, and has taught engineering at the University of Central Florida. “She was part of what she was describing. She knows the hymns that they would sing, the position of each person in that hierarchy of the Voodoo gods and worshipers. She knows exactly the names of them.”

Hurston did more than document the Voodoo religion. She immersed herself in the rituals and practices of the belief system.

“What amazed me was her engagement,” said Marie-José François, a medical doctor who emigrated from Haiti with her husband, and is president of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community.

“When I say engagement, it’s not somebody sitting there translating for her. She was a witness. She saw stuff to put it down on paper. (Hurston believed that) to tell the story you have to live the story. She was really part of it. I know about Voodoo, but not to the extent that Zora described.”

Much of Voodoo focuses on the medicinal properties of herbs and plants that can be used to both help and to harm people. Hurston spends a chapter of Tell My Horse documenting the creation of Zombies. She describes the use of potions to make a person appear to be dead, erasing their personality. The person becomes the “living dead,” easily manipulated and controlled.

“In Voodoo is like we have both hands,” says Marie-José François. “One is to cure, one hand to kill. Is like the knife of the pharmacist. You can overdose, or keep the right dose. That’s why when you look at Voodoo, people have to be very careful. We have good stuff in Voodoo, like when you talk about the medicinal plants, that’s the good part.”

Voodoo came to the Caribbean when Africans were brought there by Europeans as slave labor. By 1804, people of African descent took control of Haiti from their oppressors, establishing the oldest black republic outside of Africa. The Voodoo religion became an important part of the Haitian identity.

As Haitians and other people of African descent made their way to Florida, some of them brought their ancient religious beliefs with them.

Stetson Kennedy was Zora Neale Hurston’s supervisor when she worked for the Works Progress Administration’s Florida Writers’ Project. In his 1942 book Palmetto Country, Kennedy documented the practice of Voodoo in Key West, Miami, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee.

“Everywhere that you have populations coming from the west coast of Africa, whether they’re in Brazil, they have Macumba, in Cuba they have Santeria, and even in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, anywhere that you have any population that came from Africa, they have these practices,” says Carl-Henry François.

Mother Laura Adorkor Kofi was assassinated on March 28, 1928, while giving a speech at Thompson’s Hall in Miami. Many in the audience believed that Kofi was a divine prophet sent by God to liberate African Americans and black people around the world.

“She said that she had a revelation to liberate African American people, to take them on the right course, back to the Promised Land, Africa, and to create an independent community, a cultural, independent community,” says Vibert White, author of an essay on Kofi in the book Africa in Florida: Five Hundred Years of African Presence in the Sunshine State.

Kofi came to America in the early 1920s from West Africa, and quickly became part of the Black Nationalist movement. She joined Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, becoming a prominent spokesperson and national field director for the organization. At the time, the UNIA was much larger and more influential than other African American support groups such as the NAACP and the Urban League.

“Within months, she becomes the most popular figure in that group, except for Marcus Garvey,” says White. “They send her throughout the Deep South. Mississippi, Alabama, and everywhere she is going she’s attracting, five, and ten, and fifteen thousand audience members, something that had never been seen before.”

UNIA founder Marcus Garvey was very supportive of Kofi until he was imprisoned for mail fraud in 1925.

While Garvey was in prison, Kofi’s fame and influence grew. Enthusiastic crowds continued filling theaters and auditoriums in Florida and throughout the south to hear Kofi’s passionate speeches about the opportunities available to black people if they repatriated to Africa.

“For many African Americans, it was their first time listening to someone from Africa,” White says. “She spoke about the greatness of Africa. She spoke about the movement from Africa to liberate the people here, and that there was a divine relationship between the Africans, the east blacks, and the western blacks, the African Americans. She spoke of pride and strength.”

From his prison cell, Garvey attacked Kofi’s credibility and encouraged his followers to abandon her. Some members of the UNIA began creating disturbances at Kofi’s presentations, and she feared that her life was in danger at the hands of Garvey’s inner circle.

Kofi relocated from Miami, where she felt threatened, to Jacksonville. She announced her split from the UNIA, and established the African Universal Church. As leader of this new spiritual movement, she became known as “Mother Kofi.”

“She’s from Kumasi, she’s from the Ashanti community,” says White. “The Ashanti community in West Africa has some of the strongest religious beliefs of any people within that region. They believe that they are direct descendants from God, that the Garden of Eden is in Kumasi.”

While still living in Kumasi, Kofi had a vision that she believed came directly from God, identifying her as a divine presence on earth. She came to believe that it was her spiritual calling to liberate black people around the world, particularly in America. Before her murder, she wrote a treatise called “Sacred Teachings and Prophesies.”

On March 28, 1928, Mother Kofi returned to Miami to speak. Thousands gathered to hear her talk about the power of God to help Africans and black Americans. In an unusual move, she asked her bodyguards to sit down. That allowed a gunman to rush the stage and shoot Kofi in the back of the head, killing her.

Mother Kofi became a religious martyr to her followers.

“It took them over a month to bury her,” says White. “When they left Miami, they had a funeral in West Palm Beach. They had a funeral in St. Augustine. They had a funeral in Daytona Beach, and so on, until they ultimately got to Jacksonville to bury her.”

Mother Kofi had identified Eli Nyombolo as her successor in the African Universal Church. He continued and expanded the AUC.

“He was from South Africa and connected to the Zulu community,” White says. “The Zulu community was very instrumental in the development of the African National Congress, the ANC, that ultimately fought to destroy apartheid.”

Today, people still make religious pilgrimages to Mother Kofi’s mausoleum in Jacksonville’s old City Cemetery.

February is Black History Month.

A new exhibit at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa is recognizing the accomplishments of two internationally known Floridians with strong local ties.

On display are panels featuring rare photographs, letters, and information about educator, activist, and civil rights martyr Harry T. Moore; and writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. A video component produced by the Florida Historical Society includes commentary from scholars and oral history interviews with friends and relatives.

On Christmas night 1951, a bomb exploded under the Mims home of Harry T. Moore. The blast was so loud it could be heard several miles away in Titusville.

Moore died while being transported to Sanford, the closest place where a black man could be hospitalized. His wife Harriette died nine days later from injuries sustained in the blast.

The couple celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on the day of the explosion, and Harriette lived just long enough to see her husband buried.

The Moore’s daughter, Juanita Evangeline Moore, died on October 26, 2015. In a video interview included in the new exhibit, Moore remembers that she was working in Washington, D.C. in 1951, and was scheduled to come home for the holidays on December 27th, aboard a train called the Silver Meteor. She did not hear the news about her family home being bombed until she arrived.

“When I got off the train in Titusville, I knew something was very, very wrong,” Moore said. “I had not turned on radio or television, so I didn’t know a thing about it until I got off the train. I noticed that my mother and father were not in front of all my relatives to greet me and they were always there.”

Moore was given the news by her Uncle George, who was home on leave from Korea.

“We got into his car and got settled, and the first thing I asked was ‘Well, where’s Mom and Dad?’ No one said anything for a while, it was complete silence. Finally, Uncle George turned around and he said ‘Well, Van, I guess I’m the one who has to tell you. Your house was bombed Christmas night. Your Dad is dead and your Mother is in the hospital.’ That’s the way I found out,” said Moore.

“I’ve never gotten over it. It was unbelievable.”

Moore and his wife were killed 12 years before Medgar Evers, 14 years before Malcolm X, and 17 years before Martin Luther King, Jr., making them the first martyrs of the contemporary civil rights movement.

On July 9, 1951, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in a letter to Florida historian Jean Parker Waterbury: “Somehow, this one spot on earth feels like home to me.  I have always intended to come back here. That is why I am doing so much to make a go of it.”

It would be natural to assume that Hurston was writing about her adopted hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Growing up in Eatonville, the oldest incorporated municipality in the United States entirely governed by African Americans, instilled in Hurston a fierce confidence in her abilities and a unique perspective on race. Eatonville figures prominently in much of Hurston’s work, from her powerful 1928 essay How It Feels To Be Colored Me to her acclaimed 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

Hurston, however, was not writing about Eatonville when she spoke of “the one spot on earth [that] feels like home to me” where she was “the happiest I have been in the last ten years” and where she wanted to “build a comfortable little new house” to live out the rest of her life.

Zora Neale Hurston called Brevard County “home” for some of the most fulfilling and productive years of her life, first in 1929, and again for most of the 1950s. It was here that she wrote her most important collection of folklore, Mules and Men.

To find out more about the lives and accomplishments of Harry T. Moore and Zora Neale Hurston, visit the Black History Month exhibit at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa. Museum hours are 10am to 5pm, Wednesday through Saturday.
 

The slave ship Guerrero was lost off the coast of south Florida on December 19, 1827, with 561 Africans aboard.

Underwater archaeologists believe that the ship has been found.

The Diving with a Purpose Underwater Archaeology Program began in conjunction with the National Park Service and the National Association of Black Scuba Divers, to have African Americans participate in the search for the slave ship Guerrero.

That effort was filmed for the PBS documentary series “Changing Seas” in the episode “Sunken Stories.” The program is produced by WPBT2 in Miami, and can be viewed on their web site at changingseas.tv.

“One of the main stars of the documentary was the late Brenda Lanzendorf, who was the underwater archaeologist for the Biscayne National Park,” says Erik Denson, lead diving instructor for the Diving with a Purpose Underwater Archaeology Program. “The National Park Service has over a hundred shipwrecks in the Biscayne National Park Area. She needed help to document the shipwrecks.”

Lanzendorf taught Denson and his group of mostly African American divers the basics of underwater archeology so they could assist in the discovery and documentation of the Guerrero.

“They gave us the skills to do a good job and to actually understand what we were doing as far as underwater archeology is concerned,” says Denson.

The illegal slave ship Guerrero was operated by pirates. The Guerrero was bound for Cuba with about 700 slaves aboard when the British Navy ship Nimble pursued and attacked. A storm came and both ships were shipwrecked on the reef off the coast of Key Largo.

As a result of the shipwreck, 561 of the Africans aboard the Guerrero perished.

Wreckers came to help get the ships off of the reef, but received an unexpected greeting.

“The pirates actually took one of the wrecker’s ships and ended up going to Cuba with some of the remaining slaves,” Denson says. “Some of the slaves were rescued and they ended up going to Key West, and eventually made their way back to Liberia.”

There were several possible places where the remains of the Guerrero could be located. Working with the Mel Fisher Heritage Society and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during excavations in 2010 and 2012, Denson believes they found and identified the slave ship.

“Through historical documentation we got an idea where this battle took place and where the shipwrecks came about,” says Denson. “We had a few different sites that we wanted to explore. We did magnetometer and site scan sonar to get hits in certain areas, so we narrowed it down.”

Positive identification of particular shipwrecks can be challenging.

Some of the artifacts uncovered that are believed to be from the Guerrero include a cologne bottle from the early 1800s, bone china, lead shot, blue edged earthenware, metal rigging, copper fasteners, and wooden plank fragments.

“Those key pieces of artifacts and evidence really point to that time frame,” says Denson. “We know that the Nimble lost its anchor during the battle, and we found an anchor for that type of ship, that era. So a lot of empirical evidence points to that site, that wreck.”

The artifacts from shipwrecks are not as easy to spot as it might seem. It takes experienced divers with trained eyes to locate these objects.

“These things have been down there for hundreds of years, and they’re covered with corral,” says Denson. “You have to look for things that don’t occur in nature, right angles and shapes that look man made.”

Denson and his divers meticulously document shipwrecks with trilateration mapping, drawings, measurements, and photographs.

The members of Diving with a Purpose are not treasure hunters searching for gold and other valuable objects.

“We abide by a code of ethics,” says Denson. “These are historical sites that need to be preserved and protected. In the case of the Guerrero, there may be human remains there.”

Since forming in 2005, Diving with a Purpose Underwater Archaeology Program has trained many underwater archaeology advocates who have become DWP instructors themselves. The organization has assisted with the search for slave shipwrecks around the world, including off the coast of Africa.

“These ships are an important part of our history,” says Denson.