FLORIDA: The Uninvited Guest

During his career as a Negro leader in Florida, shy, greying Harry Tyson Moore seemed to personify a new and subtle change in the mores of the South: the indisputable fact that the white Southerner is slowly accepting the Negro's right to the vote and fuller freedom under the law. Moore was a bland, scholarly, teetotaling sort of man who taught school most of his life, but he was a firebrand for all that. And Floridians allowed him to have his say.

As state head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Moore made himself one of the most controversial figures in the state. He cranked out endless tracts about civil rights on his home Mimeograph machine. He spoke up endlessly for equal education and school-bus service for Negro children, against discrimination in any form. He did more than talk—as a leader of the Progressive Voters' League of Florida, he did his best to give Negroes genuine political power through bloc voting.

Breath of Prejudice. Harry Moore was not immune to the baleful breath of prejudice. After he got into the N.A.A.C.P., he was ousted as a junior high-school principal and sent to a tiny three-teacher elementary school. But he was not fired. He prospered over the years, was able to buy a neat six-room house and a six-acre orange and grapefruit grove at Mims (pop. 1,081), an Indian. River fruit-packing town 45 miles from Daytona Beach.

He drove a new Buick on frequent long trips all over the state—on N.A.A.C.P. missions which many a Southern white man could only have construed as dangerous and inflammatory. His voice was one of the loudest raised in protest against the handling of the controversial Groveland rape case in which four Negroes were accused of attacking a 17-year-old housewife, back in 1949. When Lake County. Sheriff Willis McCall killed one of the defendants and badly wounded another while transporting them, handcuffed, along a lonely road last November (TIME, Nov. 19), Moore went further: he campaigned openly for the prosecution of the sheriff. His family worried endlessly about his safety, but he was never harmed.

Family Reunion. On Christmas, Harry Moore and his wife Harriette held a family reunion. Their 23-year-old daughter Annie, Moore's mother, his wife's soldier-brother, who had just returned from Korea, sat down with them to a ham and turkey dinner. After the big day, all went to bed early—lights in the house were out by 10 o'clock.

In the darkness, a man walked out of the cover of Harry Moore's orange grove, slipped up to the house, and carefully placed a charge of explosive under the corner of Harry Moore's bedroom. No one saw or heard him. FBI men, who checked painstakingly later, could tell by his tracks only that he was a long-striding man with small feet, who apparently got away by automobile and drove off in the stream of traffic flowing along U.S. Highway No. 1.

The bomb went off with a deafening, almost smokeless, explosion at 10:20 p.m. The front of the house was reduced to sagging debris in a split second. Moore's wife rose, wounded, dazed and screaming, amid a tangle of dust-clouded wreckage. But Moore lay motionless. He bled gently from the mouth and died just after his terrified friends got him to a hospital.