MIMS, Fla. – Nearly a century ago, a husband and wife decided they wanted more for themselves and for the Black community.
Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore fought for equal rights and pushed back against injustices.
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It all began in the classroom. The couple started off as educators in segregated public schools.
Harry accepted his first job in Brevard County teaching a fourth-grade class. He met his wife Harriett shortly after. They later built a home in a citrus grove in Mims.
In 1934, the couple transformed into activists. Their activism forever changed the lives of their family and the state of Florida.
Sonya Mallard works for the Harry T. and Harriett V. Moore Cultural Complex. She said without people like them the way we live today would look starkly different.
“Harriett and Harry T Moore had the audacity to do the unthinkable for a couple to do back during the Jim Crow Era,” she said.
In 1934, Harry founded the Brevard County Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
He worked to bring people together and educate them in the process.
Harry and Harriett spent years fighting for equal rights. Harry made it his mission to stop injustices like the many lynchings carried out in the Jim Crow South.
In 1941, he challenged several lynchings in Florida. His efforts brought attention to the lynching of a Black teenager named Willie James Howard in 1944 and to the Groveland rape case in 1949.
Harry also knew the key to pushing Black people forward was through education and civic engagement.
He became instrumental in getting Black people to vote through the Progressive Voters League, more than a decade before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mallard said he helped more than 116,000 Black Floridians get registered to vote. He even taught his students how to cast ballots.
“Their whole reason for doing all that they did was so the next generation could have a better life,” Culture Center leader Carshonda Wright said.
The couple has been called the catalyst to the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, their progressive work came at a price.
On Christmas day in 1951, the Moores celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. It was a devastating day for their family and the communities they fought for valiantly.
That night in Mims, a bomb exploded under their home.
“That bomb was so loud they call it the bomb heard around the world,” Mallard said.
Harry was killed in the explosion and his wife died nine days later. Before her death, Mallard said she still found a way to get to her beloved husband’s funeral even though doctors were against it.
State investigators said members of the Ku Klux Klan were likely responsible, but justice was never enforced.
“I’m proud to say that out the ruins and ashes or that dynamite that’s how we got this 12-foot facility,” Mallard said.
Their lives were taken, but the couple’s legacy still lives on at the Cultural Complex where thousands of people have come to learn the history of the changemakers.
The Moores’ great-grandson Darran Pagan visited the complex Friday. He said he takes great pride in carrying on their legacy. He’s also humbled knowing they are now getting the recognition they deserve.
Rep. Charlie Christ sent a letter to President Joe Biden nominating the Moores’ for the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“I think it is certainly long overdue just because they made the ultimate sacrifice,” Pagan said.
He hopes they receive the honor, but his only other wish is that his grandmother, the Moores daughter, would be here to see it.