It could not be in Jesus’ name,
Beneath the bedroom floor,
On Christmas night the killers
Hid the bomb for Harry Moore.
It could not be in Jesus’ name
The killers took his life,
Blew his home to pieces
And killed his faithful wife.
Langston Hughes, “Ballad of Harry T. Moore”
While it’s difficult to pinpoint the beginning of an intellectual era, historians generally agree that Harry T. Moore was the first martyr of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Yet, despite his central role in the cause, Moore is often forgotten. To quote Myrlie Evers-Williams, former chairwoman of the NAACP board of directors, “Oftentimes 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 … but you seldom see anything documented about those cases.”
In 1934, nine years after graduating from college, Harry Moore founded the Brevard County chapter of the NAACP. In 1937 Moore, along with the help of NAACP council Thurgood Marshal, filed a lawsuit for the equalization of teacher salaries across racial groups. In 1941, he organized a statewide chapter of the NAACP while maintaining his teaching position. That changed in 1946 when Moore and his wife, by now well-known civil rights activists, were fired from their teaching positions and blacklisted from the profession. Instead of shying away from his work in response to these pressures, Moore re-devoted himself to the NAACP, becoming an organizer.
In 1949, Moore began work on the Groveland Rape Case. Norma Padgett had accused four men—Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin—of rape. She was white and they were black. Within days, three of the accused were in custody and the fourth was dead.
In the context of this fervor, the Groveland Case quickly became national news. Moore, with the NAACP behind him, committed to the boys’ defense. After years in court, first in trial and later battling the conviction that inevitably came down, the two defendants who appealed were granted a retrial. Shortly afterward, Irvin and Shepherd were shot by the police. Shepherd was killed, Irvin seriously injured, and Sheriff McCall of Lake County was absolved of all wrongdoing.
That absolution did not stop activists from questioning what happened that night, and when Irvin, who survived by playing dead, had recovered, he described a different chain of events. McCall claimed he stopped to fix a flat and was attacked by his two charges, who had been chained together. Irvin, on the other hand, claimed that McCall had pulled them out of the car and started shooting. In response to this testimony, Moore fought for Irvin’s suspension and indictment on murder charges. But he did not succeed.
Six weeks later, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a bomb exploded beneath the Moore’s bedroom floor. That Christmas Day, at the age of forty-six, Harry died; Harriette, nine days later. Their killers were found only after four separate investigations and fifty years of speculation.
The Moores remain the only couple to both have died in the civil rights struggle.
Already famous for his work as an activist, Harry Moore became even more prominent in death. Rallies were held across the nation, and at one of these rallies, Langston Hughes debuted his elegiac “Ballad of Harry Moore.”
The ballad stopped Harry’s story from being forgotten. Recently, Sweet Honey in the Rock resurrected “Ballad of Harry Moore” in their shows. After one performance, an audience member exclaimed, “It gives us a knowledge of things we really had no knowledge about. … [T]here are so many African Americans who don’t have a clue about African Americans.”
Preserved forever in Hughes’ lines is the quiet resolve amongst civil rights activists in the wake of the Moores’ death. The ballad’s refrain, “No bomb can kill the dreams I hold / Freedom never dies,” became the defining sentiment of the movement. In the following years, Florida’s continued bombings did little to deter people from the cause.
It’s nearly impossible to track the impact of a song. Still, the “Ballad of Harry Moore” was one of the first in a long line of civil rights era protest anthems. From Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” released a year later to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” over a decade afterward, the Civil Rights Movement is a story that is as well told in the grooves of a record as it is in the words on a page.
Music was there throughout, energizing people at rallies, broadcasting burdens across races and classes and eventually continents. A number of artists—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mahalia Johnson, and Peter, Paul, and Mary—played at the March on Washington, arguably the most famous gathering of the Civil Rights Movement. Johnson even performed as the introduction to Martin Luther King Jr.’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech. Their songs, carefully chosen to resonate with a crowd itching for change, served as testimonies to the need for it. Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” for example, was a jaded absolution of Medgar Ever’s murderer. The real culprit? The system that groomed him to perpetrate his crime. In it, Dylan sings:
A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
‘You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,’ they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.
Though he held a controversial position, Dylan raised an interesting question: can a politics produced by such a broken system really work to fix it? Early in 1964, shortly after the death of his eighteen-month-old son, Sam Cooke wrote and recorded his iconic “A Change is Gonna Come.” The song, released just weeks after Sam Cooke’s own tragic death, was partially inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” “A Change is Gonna Come” quickly became an anthem for the Civil Rights Movement, and is generally viewed as one of the best songs of the 20th century. What makes “Change” particularly interesting is not its top twenty spot on Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Songs of All Time” list, but rather what happened to the song once it made it to the radio.
I go to the movies and I go downtown
Somebody keep telling me, “Don’t hang around”
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will…
Here, writing in the wake of a racial run-in while on tour, Cooke strikes at the heart of the segregation and racial discrimination seen through America and concentrated in the South. These practices were no secret, but never before had they been sung about on a top forty hit. As a result, “Change” made its way to the radio without the lyrics in question, leaving only LP buyers able to hear all of Cooke’s reflection. In doing so, record executives subjected “Change” to the limits of the very system he was speaking out against.
And so the question lingers, does it matter who makes the music of our memory? The influence of music executives on music, while often overlooked, is essential.
As someone must produce every record, with every song comes an executive directing expression. There’s no ignoring the possible sanitation of protest pieces of music. Winston Churchill said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” Does the same apply for the once “subversive” songs that have become part of our musical canon?
On some level, it must. “A Change is Gonna Come” is evidence that songs are not impervious from outside influence, from edits intended to make the song sell more records. While music serves as a reservoir of collective memory, even these things must be taken with a grain of salt.
Still, music remains one of the most effective ways we have of engaging with our past. Within the span of a song, an artist, through the fusion of melody and lyrics, is able to transport her listener back in time. Here the artist is able to communicate the thoughts and emotions captured years prior for years hence.
Imagine reading an essay on the death of Hattie Carroll, or reading the lyrics of the song on the page: something immeasurable is lost without Dylan’s music driving home his point about its importance. The greatest songs of recent memory are inextricably linked with our collective memory, and our greatest memories are tied to the pieces of music that keep us from forgetting them.