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

In Jim Crow Florida, a young black man’s courageous fight to obtain equal rights for blacks ends in a personal tragedy that remains unsolved to this day. This is his story.

Before Martin Luther King Jr. began to preach from his pulpit in Montgomery, before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and before Rosa Parks' famous bus ride, a man named Harry T. Moore toiled 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.

In Jim Crow Florida, a young black man’s courageous fight to obtain equal rights for blacks ends in a personal tragedy that remains unsolved to this day. This is his story.

“We can only share the author’s admiration for his subject’s singular achievement. . . . Green has performed a valuable service in bringing attention once more to this courageous man.”—New York Times

“A gifted storyteller and a tenacious investigator, Ben Green uncovers a remarkable and heartbreaking tale that has been buried for fifty years.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

Before Martin Luther King Jr. began to preach from his pulpit in Montgomery, before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and before Rosa Parks' famous bus ride, a man named Harry T. Moore toiled 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 rightsmovement.

The New York Times Book Review - Adam Nossiter

...[W]e can only share the author's admiration for his subject's singular achievement....Green has performed a valuable service in bringing attention once more to this courageous man....The story is dramatic because of its very obscurity.

Ben Green is a professional journalist and the author of The Soldier of Fortune Murders and Finest Kind. He is also on the faculty of Florida State University.