November 18, 1905 Harry Tyson Moore, teacher and civil rights pioneer, was born in Houston, Florida. Moore graduated from Bethune-Cookman College with a Normal Degree. In 1934, he and his wife founded the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP and in 1937 he filed the first lawsuit in the Deep South to equalize salaries of black teachers with white teachers in public schools. Moore also led the Progressive Voters League from 1944 to 1950 and during that time registered more than 100,000 black people to vote. In 1946, the public school system fired the Moores and blacklisted them because of his political activism. On December 25, 1951, Moore and his wife were killed on their 25th wedding anniversary by a bomb that went off beneath their home in Mims, Florida. In August, 2006, 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 and four individuals, all deceased, were named. In 1952, Moore was posthumously awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal. In 1999, the state of Florida designated the home site of the Moores as a Florida Historical Heritage Landmark and in 2004 Brevard County created the Harry T. and Harriet Moore Memorial Park and Interpretive Center at the home site. A book on the case, “Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America’s First Civil Rights Matyr,” was published in 1999.
