Civil Rights

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.

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.

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.
 

In the 1960s, Dr. Robert B. Hayling was a leader of the Civil Rights movement in Florida. His former dentist’s office in St. Augustine is now a museum. Dr. Hayling died on December 20, 2015, at the age of 86.

One of Hayling’s last public appearances was at the Florida Historical Society Annual Meeting and Symposium on May 23, 2015, where he discussed his life.

Hayling grew up in Tallahassee, the son of a professor at Florida A&M University. At an early age Hayling became aware of racial inequities in America.

“To tease my grandmother a bit, I would ask her, ‘Grandmama, if black and white people can’t get along here on earth, how they gonna get along in heaven?’ And my grandmother would scream out ‘Cleo, come get this boy! God is gonna strike him dead!’ I’m still living, but I still have that question.”

After graduating from Florida A&M University in 1951 with a B.A. in Biology, Hayling volunteered to serve in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in 1952.

“At times I would apply for different things that it wasn’t ordinary for a black to have the audacity to approach,” Hayling said. “So I did have some rejection, and then some questioning, ‘Why are you asking for these privileges or those privileges when others of your complexion have not made a disturbance?’ If that makes me a troublemaker, I plead guilty.”

After completing his service, Hayling earned his doctoral degree studying dentistry at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. He was active in the civil rights movement there. One night, the windows of his dormitory imploded from the shock of a dynamite blast at the home of a teacher across the street.

In 1960, Hayling moved to St. Augustine, Florida to start his dental practice.

While many older African American residents were afraid of repercussions from participating in civil rights activities, Hayling was successful in recruiting younger people to the movement as advisor to the NAACP Youth Council and a local leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

A large cross was erected in a field near St. Augustine in September 1963. The cross was to be burned during a rally of the Ku Klux Klan, which had attracted national leaders of the organization. Hayling and three of his friends tried to catch a glimpse of the rally.

“We never thought that parking on the side of U.S. 1, on the shoulder of the road, looking over into the field where the rally was being held, that we would encounter difficulty. But we looked up and there were two klansmen in the front of the car with big guns, and two klansmen in the rear of the car with big guns,” Hayling said.

Hayling and his friends tried to escape, but were pulled from the car.

“We were taken out of the car with ax handles and baseball bats across our heads, and taken to the speaker’s platform,” Hayling remembered. “We were stacked on top of each other like cord wood.”

The four men were beaten further and threatened with being set on fire. When word came that law enforcement authorities from outside of the area were on their way to the rally, the crowd disbanded and Hayling and his friends were released.

Hayling spent about two weeks in the hospital after being beaten by members of the KKK, but continued his civil rights activities. In February 1964, shots were fired into Hayling’s home, narrowly missing his pregnant wife, and killing the family dog.

In response to the violence aimed at his family, Hayling moved to Cocoa Beach.

In the summer of 1964, national attention was focused on St. Augustine as the Civil Rights Act languished in congress. Hayling returned to the city to coordinate peaceful demonstrations with Dr. Martin Luther King.

The images of peaceful protests in St. Augustine being answered with violence helped lead to passage of the Civil Rights Act.

“From my leadership training in the Air Force, I thought that I could put it into practice,” Hayling said. “I had no idea that St. Augustine would be so reticent and so hard to crack.”

U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined the lives and careers of innocent people in the 1950s, fueled by Cold War-era paranoia about the possible communist infiltration of America.

The Florida legislature had its own version of McCarthyism called the Legislative Investigation Committee, popularly known as the Johns Committee.

Organized in 1956 by state senator and former Florida governor Charley Johns, the Johns Committee investigated what it labeled “subversive activities” in state colleges, civil rights groups, and suspected communist organizations.

The Johns Committee tried but failed to link communism to the NAACP.

By 1961, the primary focus of the Johns Committee was to remove homosexual teachers and students from Florida universities.

Students and teachers were rousted from their dorm rooms and offices, dragged to dark basements and interrogated for more than 15 hours with no bathroom breaks, food, or drink, as they were grilled about their suspected homosexuality. Others were questioned about the possible homosexual activities of friends and neighbors.

“The Committee” is an award winning half hour documentary produced by students in the Burnett Honors College at the University of Central Florida. The film explores the outrageous activities of the Johns Committee.

The documentary was a cooperative effort, led by Dr. Robert Cassanello and Dr. Lisa Mills. “It’s called an interdisciplinary seminar,” says student filmmaker Monica Monticello. “It was in conjunction with the UCF film department as well as the UCF history department, and students from all majors from within the honors college were welcome to join the class and help in the production.”

Honors students from the UCF film program helped to give the project a professional look, and students from the history department made sure that the content was accurate. A diverse group of students from a variety of other disciplines participated in the making of the film. “We had students that were from accounting majors to digital media and art majors, to more traditional film and TV production. Some were journalism students,” says student filmmaker Logan Kriete. “There were a lot of different majors in the class.”

The documentary covers what is ancient history to the student filmmakers who created it. Most of their parents weren’t even born when the Johns Committee was active. Interviewing people who lived through the abuses of power inflicted upon them by the Johns Committee made this history “real” for these students.

“Just hearing their stories made it a completely different experience,” says Monticello. “It’s history, but it’s really not that long ago. These people were there and it happened to them, and now they were in front of us, talking about it.”

“It took the idea of what we were researching from just words on paper and what happened as ‘history’ to someone’s actual life, and what happened to them and what they experienced and went through directly,” says Kriete.

“The Committee” has earned awards including “best documentary” at the 2014 Love Your Shorts Film Festival and the 2014 Durban Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, and was an “official selection” at the Gasparilla International, Fort Lauderdale International, Out Twin Cities, and Florida Film Festivals.

Feelings about homosexuality are largely generational, with comfort levels very high among younger populations. The student filmmakers of “The Committee” are aware that gay rights remain a hotly debated issue today.

“I think one of the scariest things about this documentary, aside from the fact that it’s only 50 years ago, is that we have this feeling that this could happen again,” says student filmmaker Amy Simpson. “It’s what happens when one small group of elite just become obsessed with power and are corrupted by their power, and it’s what the majority can do to any minority group.”

“History does repeat itself,” says Monticello. “When there’s this feeling of fear, and people are afraid of outside groups, that’s when this kind of thing happens. You can see this happening in our nation right now, and that’s what makes it very scary.”

A screening of “The Committee” and a discussion with the film’s directors will be held Wednesday, October 15, on the University of Central Florida Cocoa Campus at Eastern Florida State College, Building 3, Room 103, 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm.

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is executive director of the Florida Historical Society and host of the radio program “Florida Frontiers,” broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30 and Sunday afternoons at 4:00, and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00. The show can be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.