BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY
William Lewis Moore
| BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY |
William Lewis Moore (April 28, 1927 – April 23, 1963) was a postal worker and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) member who staged lone protests against racial segregation. He was murdered on his final protest.
Moore was born in Binghamton, New York and raised in New York and Mississippi. For a time before his death he lived in Baltimore, Maryland.
In the early 1950's, when he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Moore suffered a mental breakdown. He was institutionalized for a year and a half with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and became an activist on the behalf of the mentally ill upon his release. It was this activism that eventually led to his civil rights work.
In the early 1960s, Moore undertook three civil rights protests in which he marched to a capital to hand-deliver letters he had written denouncing racial segregation.
On his first march he walked to Annapolis, Maryland, the state capital. On his second march he walked to the White House. He arrived at about the same time that Martin Luther King, Jr. was being released from Birmingham jail. His letter to John F. Kennedy notified the president that he intended to walk to Mississippi and asked "If I may deliver any letters from you to those on my line of travel, I would be most happy to do so."
For his third protest he planned to walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi and deliver a letter to Governor Ross Barnett urging him to accept integration. He was wearing sandwich board signs stating; "Equal rights for all & Mississippi or Bust".
On April 23, 1963, about 70 miles (110 km) into his march, Moore was interviewed by Charlie Hicks, a reporter from radio station WGAD in Gadsden, Alabama, along a rural stretch of U.S. Highway 11 near Attalla, Alabama. The station had received an anonymous phone tip about Moore's location. In the interview Moore stated "I intend to walk right up to the governor's mansion in Mississippi and ring his door bell. Then I'll hand him my letter." Concerned for Moore's safety, Hicks offered to drive him to a motel. Moore insisted on continuing his march.
Less than an hour after the reporter left the scene a passing motorist found Moore's body about a mile farther down the road, shot twice in the head at close range with a .22 caliber rifle. The gun's ownership was traced to Floyd Simpson, whom Moore had argued with earlier that day, but no charges against him were ever laid. Moore died a week short of his 36th birthday.
Moore's letter was found and opened. In it Moore reasoned that "the white man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights." He asked Governor Barnett to "Be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you...."
Folk singer Phil Ochs wrote a song in tribute to William Moore that appears on the album A Toast to Those Who Are Good). Another tribute song (in German) for William Moore was written by East German singer/songwriter Wolf Biermann. Pete Seeger sang "William Moore, The Mailman" on his Broadside Ballads album
Starting April 23, 2008, Ellen Johnson and Ken Loukinen walked the 320 miles (510 km) from Reese City, Alabama and delivered Bill Moore's original letter to Jackson, Miss. and Dr. Bob Zellner (one of the original Freedom walkers in 1963) attempted to present the letter to the current governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour on May 6, 2008, but the Governor would not meet with them to accept the letter.
Memorial[edit]
On the 47th anniversary of his murder, April 23, 2010, a memorial plaque in tribute to Moore was unveiled. The plaque is now permanently displayed at the Greater Binghamton Transportation Center, across from Kennedy Park and down the street from the Martin Luther King Promenade, in the City of Binghamton, NY.
A pioneer in civil rights. Moore is the only Caucasian featured in Investigation Discovery's Injustice Files in 2011
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