Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  “George! Arnold! Help!” Peaches screamed into the fog, at the Simms house a few hundred yards down the road. “George!”

  In minutes they had arrived. The porch, shattered into bits, evidenced the effects of a powerful bomb: dynamite, or nitroglycerin. Whatever it was, Harriette’s two brothers were expecting nothing good when they entered the ruin of a home.

  Peaches was sobbing, hysterical. “Something has happened to Daddy!” she cried, and the two men rushed to rescue the two bodies from the wreckage of a bedroom.

  Once they had lodged Harriette in the front seat of George’s roomy Buick sedan with her sisters-in-law Ernestine and Mabel, and Harry in the back with his mother, they sped as much as the fog allowed toward the Fernald-Laughton Memorial Hospital in Sanford, thirty miles away. The silence in the car was taut, broken only by Harriette’s faint cries for Evangeline or a worriedly whispered “Harry.” He was fading fast. With his head cradled against her shoulder, Rosa tried to comfort him, a boy in his pajamas, her son Harry in his pain. He “groaned several times.”

  When finally they cleared the fog, George aggressively stepped on the gas. He was worrying over his decision to drive Harry and Harriette to the hospital in Sanford, but he was certain a Jim Crow ambulance would not have responded quickly to a call from Mims on Christmas night. They had just reached the hospital when George heard Harry’s gargled moan. And Rosa’s stifled cry: Harry’s head had dropped down onto his mother’s lap; blood was seeping from his mouth onto her clothes and into the Buick’s upholstery.

  Fernald-Laughton Memorial was not a modern medical facility. A mansion in a residential neighborhood of Sanford that had been converted into a hospital, it had a limited staff: only one nurse and no doctors were on duty that Christmas night when George Simms carried his brother-in-law to a stretcher in the emergency room. The nurse telephoned Dr. George Starke, one of but a few black physicians in the area. Anxious, impatient, Simms, who had seen enough combat injuries in Korea to know that severe damage to the lungs and other internal organs characterized primary blast injuries, considered his brother-in-law’s chances, as it was not uncommon for victims to initially survive an explosion before taking a fatal turn for the worst. And still Dr. Starke hadn’t arrived at the hospital.

  The master sergeant in Simms sent him back to his car. He himself would bring Dr. Starke to the hospital, but his path crossed Starke’s in the Florida night. About the same time that Simms arrived at Starke’s residence, the doctor was entering the emergency room at Fernald-Laughton. And by the time Simms had raced back to the hospital, Dr. Starke was shaking his head as he stared down at the man on the stretcher. “Cerebral hemorrhage, internal hemorrhages and shock,” the doctor was saying to Simms. His words could explain cause but could not alter effect: Harry T. Moore was dead.

  “Yes, Mamma, that’s me” were the last words Harry T. Moore was ever heard to speak. Minutes later, in his pajamas, he’d peeled back the covers and, as he had for twenty-five years, settled into bed beside his wife, already asleep . . . and in an instant Moore’s work was done. His words dissolved into a groan. There would be no more speeches to his people, no more letters to the editor, no more telegrams to the governor, no more words. It was what they wanted, the men behind the man shrouded in the fog beneath the orange tree: no more words. The last words Moore was known to write he had typed in his impassioned letter of December 2 to Governor Fuller Warren, in which he implored the governor to hold Sheriff Willis McCall responsible for the cold-blooded murder of Samuel Shepherd, and the last of the questions he posed in that letter would resonate in the press worldwide in the days ahead.

  We seek no special favors; but certainly we have a right to expect justice and equal protection of the laws even for the humblest Negro. Shall we be disappointed again?

  Respectfully yours,

  Harry T. Moore

  THE CONDENSATION LAY thick over the Moores’ orange grove when Broward County sheriff Bill Williams turned up at the scene of the blast with deputies and a bloodhound. Within hours FBI agents had arrived as well. Investigators combed through the wreckage; they photographed footprints in the grove; they gathered Moore’s paperwork, which had been scattered everywhere by the explosion. By the time the morning sun had burned off what remained of the fog, mourners had begun to congregate in front of the Moores’ cordoned-off house. They’d number more than a thousand by day’s end, and many of them had traveled on foot. They’d all known Harry T. Moore, either through voter registration drives or by his NAACP work. They talked; they conjectured; they wondered why anyone would want to harm the nigh-saintly Mr. Moore. Deputy Clyde Bates attended to the “general talk,” and the consensus, he said, linked the killing of Harry Moore to the Groveland case.

  At one point, while mourners paid their respects to Moore before a makeshift shrine—a stack of shattered planks that had been the front porch—a young black boy, who had crawled under the house, was beating the underside of the first floor with a stick. He caught the eye, or ear, of Special Agent Robert Nischwitz of the FBI, who asked the boy what he was doing under there. “Trying to scare the rats away” was the boy’s reply, in which Nischwitz found an apt metaphor for the situation in Mims. “Certain” that the Klan was responsible for the blast when he had arrived at the scene, the agent noted that Klansmen, too, “were all over the place, like rats.” Like rats, they’d have to be beaten out of hiding.

  Harriette Moore, meanwhile, remained in shock at Fernald-Laughton. She had begun to regain the strength to talk, but Dr. Starke worried that she might not survive the severe internal injuries she had suffered. The next week would be crucial; the doctor gave her a fifty-fifty chance of recovery. When Harriette was informed that her husband was dead, however, her mood darkened. She let go of hope. “There isn’t much left to fight back for,” she told a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel. “My home is wrecked. My children are grown up. They don’t need me. Others can carry on.” Asked her thoughts as to who might have committed the bombing, Harriette replied, “I have a couple of ideas who might have done it, but when people do those kinds of things they have someone else do it.”

  On the morning after the blast, the New York Times ran a front-page story, “Bombing Kills Negro Leader,” that stated plainly what many Floridians—and perhaps Harriette Moore—thought when it linked Harry Moore’s murder to Willis McCall in its lead paragraph:

  MIMS, FLA., Dec. 26—A Negro crusader who led a campaign to prosecute a white Sheriff for shooting two handcuffed Negroes was killed last night and his wife was seriously injured by a bomb blast beneath their bedroom. Harry T. Moore, 46 years old, . . . was the third Negro to die in the state by violence believed resulting from the 1949 Groveland rape case.

  The Washington Post made the link between the killing and the sheriff even plainer in an editorial titled “Terror in Florida,” which stated, “When state officers flout the law, it can be scarcely surprising that the lynch spirit should spread.”

  Harry T. Moore became the first civil rights leader to be assassinated in the United States when he was killed on Christmas night in 1951. Shortly after the bombing Eleanor Roosevelt warned, “That kind of violent incident will be spread all over every country in the world, and the harm it will do us among the people of the world is untold.” Indeed, stories in newspapers as far off as Asia and Africa reported the “violent incident,” and editorials in the world’s most influential newspapers condemned it.

  Moore’s killing unsettled Thurgood Marshall profoundly. In his travels across the South his hosts always attended to his safety in his comings and goings to court, on his social visits, and even in his sleep. Although in conversation he generally downplayed the danger and his fear, so as not to worry his family and associates, in a statement he made in 1951 he admitted to the terror he felt every time he set foot in the hostile environment of the South. “I can testify,” he said, “there’s times when you’re scared to death. But you can’t admit it; you just have to lie like hell to y
ourself. Otherwise, you’ll start looking under the bed at night.” Marshall could empathetically imagine, then, the hostility, the menace—the “pressure”—that locals like Harry Moore bore on a daily basis, year in and year out, as they continued bravely, despite “the possibility of violent death,” the campaign for the civil rights of blacks in the Jim Crow South. The governor’s office was flooded with thousands of letters and telegrams demanding action on behalf of the Moores, but the telegram that Governor Warren received from Thurgood Marshall struck a more somber note, reminding the governor that the Moores were “representatives of the finest type of citizens of your state” and that “unless they can be secure from lawlessness no one in Florida is safe from destruction.”

  Governor Warren was aggrieved by the press response to the Moore assassination. Editorials nationwide advertised “Terrorism in Florida,” which led to organized efforts calling for boycotts of citrus and tourism. One op-ed page asked, “Notice Negro Blood on Your Grapefruit?” Another criticized the wife of New York’s mayor Vincent Impellitteri for vacationing in Florida: “It’s a pat on the back to the Klan murderers.” And a heavily circulated Associated Press story with the headline “Terrorists Kill by Night; Shadow of Violence Drifts Across Sunny Vacationland” was exactly the kind of national publicity the state of Florida and Fuller Warren did not need.

  Under the threat of drastic economic repercussions in Florida’s tourist and citrus industries, Warren could not simply ignore the Moore affair—and thereby tacitly exempt the KKK, especially as the Klan was now perceived by the press and the public to be running unrestrained by any governance in the state. Warren thus offered a six-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the “arrest and conviction of the dynamiters,” and he promised a full investigation into Moore’s murder, as “his assassins must be caught and punished.” In addition, Warren announced, he was sending his special investigator, J. J. Elliott, to Mims.

  Elliott, in his turn, declared that he would personally attend Moore’s funeral service, where he would be “acting as a human shield to guarantee the church’s safety.” He indicated, too, that he would be willing to “ride with the family to see that nothing happens, if they want me to.” The offer came with a boast: “I am the second best pistol shot in the state.” Also, when Walter White announced that he was traveling to Florida “to see what can be done to stop the reign of terror,” Elliott proffered his services as an armed personal escort.

  As the day of Moore’s funeral approached, the public outcry grew. So did the reaction to it, with black-owned homes and social clubs becoming targets for bombings throughout the South. Mostly, though, the nation’s attention was fixed on Florida and the increasingly high-profile case of the civil rights leader who was slain in the twelfth of that state’s bombings in 1951. The New York Times continued its daily coverage of news related to Moore’s assassination. It reported, for instance, that Donald Harrington, a minister of the Community Church of New York in midtown Manhattan, had offered a prayer for Florida residents “in their moment of degradation and humiliation”—a moment that had shamed not only Florida but all of America in the estimation of foreign nations: “Our whole country stands blackened and discredited in the eyes of the world because of Florida’s failure to protect the lives and liberties of all her citizens.” Harrington continued, “I am ashamed of Florida. I am ashamed of the white race. . . . I am ashamed of all the churches of Florida and elsewhere that have turned their eyes away from what has been going on in Lake County for these past years, and passed by on the other side while their fellow-Americans of a darker skin were being denied the most basic American and human rights and privileges. I weep for my country’s sacred honor.”

  The NAACP, which had forced Moore from his executive position in Florida only weeks earlier, was now calling on President Truman for “fast, resolute action” inasmuch as “the killer of Harry T. Moore is the assassin of the democratic ideal.” On December 28, as announced, Walter White arrived in Florida. At the hospital in Sanford he presented a check in the amount of $250 to Harriette Moore, with the pledge that all the money owed to Harry Moore by the NAACP—the $2,600-plus in back pay—would be paid in full. In fact, in the coming weeks the NAACP would raise many thousands of dollars on the back of Moore’s death, and White realized he could not afford the public relations debacle that would surely result if donors should become aware of the NAACP’s ill treatment of its “democratic ideal” in the months before his murder.

  With J. J. Elliott indeed as his escort, White visited the Moore house in Mims. There, for the press, he praised the FBI’s investigation into the fatal bombing. “Everything was being done that could be done,” he told reporters, and he noted that U.S. attorney general J. Howard McGrath had told him “a dozen FBI agents [were] loose on the bombing,” because J. Edgar Hoover “has never been so disturbed over a case.” White finished the day at a mass meeting in Orlando, where reporters, echoing recent comments made by Governor Warren, suggested to White that communists might have been responsible for Moore’s death. White sneered as he replied, “I’m sure as I can be that Sheriff McCall is not a Communist.”

  Walter White left Florida two days later, as Moore’s funeral was being postponed in the hope that Harriette might soon recover sufficiently to attend. White’s flight home was hastily arranged, and unpublicized. Although there had been no threats on the NAACP leader’s life during his stay in Florida, tensions had been running high throughout his visit. A police spokesman in Orlando owned to reporters that it was “a relief to know that he’s gone.”

  Against Dr. Starke’s wishes, Harriette Moore visited her husband’s body at Burton’s Funeral Parlor. Weeping uncontrollably, she reached out to hold her Harry one last time. She did not make it to the funeral. On the morning of the service her blood pressure dropped precipitously and the doctor forbade her to leave the hospital.

  Early that morning, too, George Simms and J. J. Elliott arrived at St. James Missionary Baptist Church. Wearing mechanics’ jumpsuits and armed with flashlights, the master sergeant and the special investigator crawled under the church to search for hidden explosives. They found nothing. They then inspected the church interior wall to wall, pew by pew. Satisfied that the church was secure, they allowed the service to proceed.

  More than six hundred people attended the funeral of Harry T. Moore on New Year’s Day of 1952, most of them in the yard outside the small church. Evangeline and Peaches took their places beside their grandmother, Rosa Moore, in the front pew, and to the strains of “Rock of Ages,” played on a phonograph, their father’s plain casket adorned with a wilting floral arrangement was borne up the aisle to the pulpit. Among the mourners were representatives from the Civil Rights Congress who circulated a petition—some of it written by Stetson Kennedy—accusing the U.S. government of black genocide. A dozen men and women eulogized Moore, and from New York Walter White issued a statement on behalf of the NAACP’s national office.

  Following the service, mourners joined the mile-long procession from the church and along Old Dixie Highway to LaGrange Cemetery. Solemn-faced, in dark suits and Sunday dresses, they gathered near a cluster of live oaks cloaked in Spanish moss, at the segregated section of plots for blacks. A final prayer was spoken to take the soul of Harry T. Moore beyond the grave into which his body was lowered. The casket sank slowly, then paused, obstructed in its progress, as had been Harry Moore in his life’s work. Peaches and Evangeline gazed helplessly down at the wilted flowers atop the casket—they’d had to have the flowers brought in from Miami because local florists refused to deliver arrangements to Negro funerals—until, finally dislodged, the casket continued its descent.

  The next day Harriette Moore continued hers. J. J. Elliott and a state attorney rushed to her hospital bedside in the hope of getting a final statement, but the fading widow of Harry T. Moore was adamant. She would not speak a word to them “even if they had a pistol on them.” Harriette Vyda Simms Moore passed away on January
3. Her two grieving daughters braved the burial of a beloved parent for the second time within a week.

  Thurgood Marshall was out on the NAACP circuit, delivering addresses at memorial services for Harry T. Moore and his wife. At Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Harlem, where two thousand people packed the pews, Marshall shared the speakers’ platform with the likes of Jackie Robinson as well as Walter White, who announced that the NAACP was considering a nationwide work stoppage if Florida failed to bring the parties responsible for Moore’s death to justice—even so, White continued to express his confidence in the FBI. Marshall’s more fiery rhetoric, however, was not at all likely to please J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, Marshall assumed a style that recalled the protests against lynching that he and his friend Moore had organized in Florida’s postwar forties, except that now he protested not with but on behalf of his friend. “You can pick up a newspaper or tune in on your radio set any time and learn where the FBI has out-witted some of the cleverest criminals in the world,” Marshall declaimed at Pittsburgh’s Central Baptist Church. “Yet when it comes to mob violence against Negroes, all you can get is, ‘We’re investigating.’ It’s time we got up off our plush seats and did something about it.”

  The FBI did continue to investigate the case, as did Fuller Warren’s man, J. J. Elliott, but neither made any significant progress in the weeks following the bombing. Tracking down a source for the explosives was next to impossible, for, as FBI special agent Frank Meech noted in his reports, “Getting dynamite all over central Florida was like buying chewing gum.” Even more frustrating to the agents, and more obstructive to their investigation, was the interview process, on which the FBI heavily relied. County sheriff departments and known Klan members were hardly forthcoming, and in central Florida the line between law enforcement and the KKK had often been indistinct. By the end of the 1940s it was completely blurred. “We’d go in and talk to someone in law enforcement,” Meech reported, “and they’d say, ‘what the hell are you investigating that for?’ He was only a nigger.”