Harry tyson moore biography of william butler

On Christmas night of , Florida civil-rights crusader Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette, were killed by a bomb placed under their house, most likely by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Students, even in his home state, rarely learn of his existence, and his name does not appear among the 40 listed on the granite Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama , commemorating those who lost their lives in the fight for equality.

Harry T. Moore was an educator and civil rights activist who helped establish an NAACP chapter in Brevard County, Florida.

Harry Tyson Moore was born November 18, , in the panhandle farming community of Houston , Florida. This branch of the family saw to it that Moore received a good education. Nearly a straight-A student, he graduated from high school in Live Oak, Florida, and then went on to college. Moore earned a teaching degree at Florida Memorial College at the age of 19, and later went on to earn a second degree at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach.

Meanwhile, he had begun teaching in the segregated black school system of Brevard County. Moore quickly advanced to become a junior high school principal in Titusville, remaining there from to ; after that he served as principal and taught fifth and sixth grades in Mims.

Harry Tyson Moore (November 16, – December 25, ) was an African-American educator, a pioneer leader of the civil rights movement, founder of the first branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Brevard County, Florida, and president of the state See more.

Moore would remain an educator until he lost his job in retaliation for his political activities in The cheery tourist industry associated with Florida in the public mind has obscured the fact that race relations in the state for much of the 20th century were grim. Between and Florida had more lynchings per capita than any of the other Deep South states upon which the attention of reformers was focused, and the basic elements of the long struggle for civil rights were late in coming to the state.

A quiet man who simply refused to accept the disrespect that white Floridians heaped upon their black neighbors, Moore began with small, personal acts of resistance. He refused to let his two daughters work as maids, and he would drive 45 miles to a black-owned movie theater rather than submit to the segregated. Married Harriette Vyda Simms, ; two daughters.

Soon Moore began to think in terms of larger efforts. Well aware through personal experience of the disparity between the pay of black and white teachers in Florida schools, he urged the national NAACP to seek redress.