Overview
In 1963, the streams of religious revival, racial strife, and cold-war politics were feeding the swelling river of social unrest in America. Marshaling massive forces, civil rights leaders were primed for a widescale attack on injustice in the South. By summer the conflict rose to great intensity as blacks and whites clashed in Birmingham.
Outside the massive drive, Bill Moore, a white mail carrier, had made his own assault a few months earlier. Jeered and assailed as he made a solitary civil rights march along the Deep South highways, he was ridiculed by racists as a "crazy man." His well publicized purpose: to walk from Chattanooga to Jackson and hand-deliver a plea for racial tolerance to Ross Barnett, the staunchly segregationist governor of Mississippi. On April 23, on a highway near Attalla, Alabama, this lone crusader was shot dead.
Although he was not a nobly ideal figure handpicked by shapers of the movement, inadvertently he became one of its earliest martyrs and, until now, part of an overlooked chapter in the history of the civil rights movement.
Floyd Simpson, a grocer and a member of the Gadsden, Alabama chapter of the Ku Klux Koan, was charged with Moore's murder.
A week later, a white college student named Sam Shirah led five black and five white volunteers into Alabama to finish Moore's walk. They were beaten and jailed. Four other attempts to complete the postman's quest were similarly stymied.
Moore had kept a journal that detailed his goal. Using it, along with interviews and extensive newspaper and newsreel reports, Mary Stanton has documented this phenomenal freedom walk as seen through the eyes of Moore, Shirah, and the gunman, the three protagonists.
Though all shared a deep love of the South, their strong feelings about who was entitled to walk its highways were in deadly conflict.
Mary Stanton, an assistant public administrator of the town of Mamaroneck, N.Y., is the author of From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Lliuzzo. Her work has appeared in Southern Exposure, Gulf South Historical Review, and Government Executive.
Synopsis
The historic account of how a determined white postal worker became one of the earliest martyrs in the civil rights movement
Kirkus Reviews
Stanton, who restored Viola Liuzzo to history in From Selma to Sorrow (1998), offers a moving, well-written portrait of another overlooked civil-rights warrior: mail carrier Bill Moore. Moore launched a now-forgotten one-man campaign for African-American equality with his own two feet: having previously walked from Baltimore to Washington to hand-deliver a letter to President Kennedy pleading for an end to segregation, he set out from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in April 1963 carrying a signboard reading "Equal Rights for All (Mississippi or Bust)." His plan was to walk along US Highway 11 through lower Tennessee, northern Georgia, and northern Alabama on to Mississippi, where he intended to deliver another letter to Governor Ross Barnett, appealing for tolerance "as white southerner to white southerner." Along the way, Stanton writes, Moore met a few more or less enlightened white folks, some of whom shook his hand, some of whom were somewhat sympathetic but nonetheless opposed. (One woman told him, "Look, I'm a Christian and I don't wish the niggers no harm, but you're dead wrong about this integration business.") A few days into his long walk, Moore was shot dead by an Alabama grocer and Klansman who was eventually acquitted of the murder. He was the first civil-rights worker to die in the line of duty, but not the last. Retracing his steps and quoting liberally from the diary he kept, Stanton honors Moore and his brave efforts while examining his troubled life as "an economic failure, a loner, and an atheist in a society which distrusted all three." (He'd been treated for schizophrenia as well.) She also traces the post-1963 trajectory of Moore's murderer, who "learned to live with alocal reputation of being 'the man who'd gotten away with murder,' a dubious distinction which caused him to be admired by some of his neighbors and avoided by others." A fine contribution to the literature of the civil-rights movement and to Southern history.