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Moore's Legacy
| Myrlie Evers-Williams,
Former Chairwoman, NAACP Board of Directors |
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"Often times we hear people say today that the civil rights movement started when Rosa Parks sat on the bus in the wrong place, or that it really started with Dr. King. What we fail to recognize when reporting the facts of the Civil Rights movement, of the modern Civil Rights movement is that there were people involved without names, who were not known, in challenging a system of inequality in the 40s and in the 50s, but you seldom see anything documented about those cases."
  
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| Evangeline Moore,
Daughter |
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"This is a man who devoted his entire life, I mean his whole life, even our family life hinged around his activities with the NAACP and The Progressive Voter's League...they all talk about Dr. King, that's great, but Daddy did the same thing. In fact, he started it, the movement. In fact, he had no lieutenants or bodyguards, or no one to fly him to this place or the other. He had absolutely nobody but us, and yet he accomplished all of those things- the voting, the teacher salaries, all of the lynchings that he investigated. That's very important, a very important part of history."
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| Caroline Emmons,
Historian |
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"I think that the style that he pioneered is one that ultimately would be adopted by other civil rights groups in the sixties who went back to a community based organizing style. You had King with the SCLC working on sort of a broader base, but I think he very much predates that kind of work with the SNC, the youth activist used. The idea of going into the community and educating and empowering people at the grassroots level I think that was very much a characteristic of the sixties civil rights movement. I don't know if they were familiar with Moore's work but that was a legacy that he left nevertheless."
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| W.W. Law,
Savannah NAACP |
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"There was a total commitment and a willingness on the part of him to roll up his sleeves,
make a difference and get some results. I don't think that anybody in Florida could say
or do anything about voter registration that they do not recognize the invaluable
contribution he made by laying the groundwork and making it almost a total commitment
to see that blacks actually register to vote and begin to broaden their political base."
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| Jim Clark,
Historian |
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"The tragedy of Harry T. Moore in many respects is that he was a man so far ahead of his time that the kinds of things that he did, the kind of pressure he wanted to put on people through letter writing campaigns or calls for action does not become popular for almost another decade-when people like Rosa Parks, beginning Montgomery, refused to give here seat up on the bus, and leading to the 1960s sit-ins at drugstore counters. So he was very much ahead of his time and has been neglected by history and until the last decade almost forgotten by history."
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| Robert Saunders,
Former Field Secretary, Florida NAACP |
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"We believe the Civil Rights movement really began with Harry T. Moore because the
killing of Harry T. Moore went all the way up to the United Nations and around the
world."
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