Black history in Brevard County: what the state's records hold

Much of the written record of Black Brevard before 1960 survives in two places: the state’s historical markers in Mims and the 2006 case summary Florida’s attorney general wrote on the murder of Harry and Harriette Moore. Together they trace a community from its own church in the 1890s to the voter-registration and equal-pay fights of the 1930s and 1940s.

The church and the cemetery in Mims

In the late 1800s, according to the state’s marker at the LaGrange Mims Community Cemetery, Black and white families both worshiped at LaGrange Community Church, north of Titusville. In 1894 the Black members organized their own congregation, St. James Colored Missionary Baptist Church, bought land in Mims, and in 1904 built their own church.

They buried their dead nearby. Early in the 1900s a two-acre parcel north of the LaGrange church and cemetery was given to the Mims colored community for a cemetery; the earliest marked graves date from 1903, and many were never marked. In June 1913 the church’s trustees bought the parcel from the East Coast Cattle Company, and it became known as the Mims Colored Cemetery. The marker lists the family names of north Brevard Black pioneers buried there: Abrams, Bell, Brothers, Brown, Campbell, Cuyler, Grant, Gibson, Highsmith, McKenzie, Mitchell, Seigler, Simms, Strickland, Warren and Williams.

The Brevard NAACP, 1934

Harry T. Moore, a teacher, learned about the NAACP in 1933, according to the case summary, and in 1934 organized the Brevard County branch. Its early work was dangerous. Soon after the branch was founded, one of its charter members, Edward Reeves, was killed in a dispute at a sawmill where he had gone to collect a debt from a white man; a bystander struck him from behind with a piece of lumber. The bystander was charged with murder, but the case was never prosecuted.

Equal pay: Gilbert’s suit, 1938

The branch’s biggest early fight was over teachers’ pay. In 1937 Moore wrote to Charles Houston, the NAACP’s special counsel, about raising Black teachers’ salaries to the level of white teachers’, and retained a Jacksonville lawyer, S. D. McGill. On May 24, 1938, a petition was filed on behalf of John Gilbert, a member of the Brevard branch’s executive committee and a teacher and principal at Cocoa Junior High School. The case summary calls it “the first such case in the South.”

The county dismissed Gilbert shortly after the suit was filed. The Brevard County court ruled against him, and on July 25, 1939, the Supreme Court of Florida affirmed, on the ground that no statute required teacher salary schedules.

The cost

The fight cost the Moores their jobs. Both had taught in Brevard’s Black schools since 1925, and in 1946 the county renewed neither contract. Harry went to work full time for the NAACP’s Florida State Conference, and in 1944 he and colleagues had already formed the Progressive Voters League to register Black voters.

At about 10:20 p.m. on December 25, 1951, a bomb went off under the Moores’ bedroom in Mims. Harry died shortly afterward and Harriette nine days later. In 2006 the attorney general’s reinvestigation named four Klansmen, all dead, as the likely bombers. The full account is on our Moore page. The Moores are buried in the cemetery St. James’s trustees bought in 1913, and the state’s marker there calls theirs the most noted graves.

Further Reading

• Before His Time: The Untold Story of Harry T. Moore by Ben Green
• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon