Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore, killed in Mims, Christmas 1951

At about 10:20 p.m. on December 25, 1951, a bomb went off in the crawl space under the bedroom of Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore’s house in Mims, in north Brevard. Harry Moore, the executive secretary of the NAACP’s Florida State Conference, died shortly afterward. Harriette died nine days later, on January 3, 1952. No one was ever charged. In 2006, after a reinvestigation, Florida’s attorney general and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement concluded that four members of Ku Klux Klan klaverns around Apopka were the likely bombers. All four were dead.

Two Brevard teachers

Harry Tyson Moore was born on November 18, 1905, in Houston, Florida, and graduated from Florida Memorial High School in Live Oak in 1925. Harriette Vyda Simms was born in West Palm Beach on June 19, 1902. According to the state’s 2006 case summary, both taught in Brevard County’s segregated Black schools from 1925 to 1946, and in 1927 Harry became principal of the Titusville Colored School.

In 1934 he organized the Brevard County branch of the NAACP. The state marker at the Moore homestead says he led the NAACP’s Florida State Conference as president from 1941 to 1946; the case summary says that in 1946 he became the conference’s first full-time paid executive secretary. In 1944 he and colleagues formed the Progressive Voters League to register Black voters. His fight for equal pay for Black teachers went back to the 1930s, and in 1946 Brevard County renewed neither his teaching contract nor Harriette’s.

Groveland

The case summary names the Groveland case among the likely motives. Four Black men had been accused of rape in Lake County in 1949. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in 1951 and ordered new trials, Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall shot both defendants while driving them back to Lake County, killing one. McCall claimed self-defense. Moore called it murder and demanded that the sheriff be indicted. The FBI later cleared McCall, and the report says the bureau found no evidence linking him to the bombing.

Christmas night

The case summary reconstructs the night. The house stood about 18 inches off the ground on wooden blocks. Harry and Harriette were in their bedroom at the northeast corner; their daughter Annie Rosalea, called Peaches, was in the next room, and Harry’s mother, Rosa Tyson Moore, in a bedroom toward the northwest corner. Their other daughter, Evangeline, was at home in Maryland. The bomb, most likely dynamite set off electrically, had been placed directly beneath the head of Harry’s bed. Harriette’s brothers drove the couple 37 miles to the hospital in Sanford.

The FBI worked the case for four years. More than 78 special agents interviewed more than 1,500 people in five states, according to the case summary, and informants inside the Klan were among their sources. No one was charged.

The 2006 findings

Attorney General Charlie Crist reopened the case in December 2004. The case summary that resulted named four men: Earl J. Brooklyn, who had shown a hand-drawn sketch of the Moore house at a Klan meeting; Tillman H. Belvin, seen with Brooklyn asking directions to the house; Joseph N. Cox, who killed himself the day after his second FBI interview; and Edward L. Spivey, whose deathbed confessions named Cox as the man who set off the dynamite. The report found that other people were involved as well.

The Moores are buried in the LaGrange Mims Community Cemetery on Old Dixie Highway, and their homesite in Mims carries a 1999 state historical marker. Old Titusville’s account covers the investigation in more detail.

Further Reading

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