Before His Time : The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore, America's First Civil Rights Martyr

Harry T. Moore worked in Jim Crow Florida on behalf of the NAACP and the Progressive Voters' League from the 1930s, until he was murdered in Christmas Eve 1951 This book offers a memorial to the pioneering work of Harry T. Moore, one of the earliest martyrs of the modern civil rights movement.

Before Martin Luther King, Jr. began to preach from his pulpit in Montgomery, Alabama, before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and before Rosa Park''s famous bus ride, a man named Harry T. Moore tolled in Jim Crow Florida on behalf of the NAACP and the Progressive Voters'' League. For seventeen years, in an era of official indifference and outright hostility, the soft-spoken but resolute Moore traveled the back roads of the state on a mission to educate, evangelize, and organize. On Christmas night in 1951, in Mims, Florida, a bomb placed under his bed ended Harry Moore''s life. His wife, Harriette, died of her wounds a week later. Although Florida''s governor reopened the case in 1991, no one was ever convicted of this crime. Using previously unavailable FBI files, Green introduces his readers to the good and the bad, the villainous and the virtuous, in Jim Crow Florida. In doing so, he offers a poignant and gripping memorial to the pioneering work of Harry T. Moore, one of the earliest martyrs of the modern civil rights movement.