— Mississippi Freedom Trail —
Front
Returning home from WWII, Cleveland businessman Amzie Moore (1911-1982) became a principal architect of early civii rights activism as a founding member of the Mississippi NAACP and the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. Convinced that political power was the key to obtaining civil rights, he planned and led voter registration projects. Moore persuaded SNCC organizer Bob Moses to recruit students for campaigns, setting the stage for Freedom Summer of 1964.
Rear
Amzie Moore worked for the U.S. Postal Service from 1935 to 1968 and also operated a service station with a restaurant and a beauty parlor. He served in the army during WWII, and during the early 1950s, after his return to Cleveland, became a movement leader, active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He procured financial support from the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an interracial, southern-based human rights organization. He also was a founding member of the Regional Conference of Negro Leadership and was instrumental in one of its firsts efforts, a boycott of service stations not offering restrooms to blacks. He offered his home to visiting activists and for numerous civil rights efforts, despite continual threats of violence and economic pressures, especially regarding mortgages on his home and service station.
In 1955 Moore was elected president of the local NAACP branch, He grew impatient NAACP bureaucracy, however, and in 1955 he wrote a letter to director Roy Wilkins questioning the New York office's commitment to Mississippi. Moore saw the vote as key to cracking the closed society, and he planned and coordinated many voter registration projects. Greenwood's drive, spearheaded by Moore, was the largest single registration effort in Mississippi since Reconstruction. Moore persuaded Bob Moses, later director of SNCC's Mississippi Project, to come to Cleveland in the summer of 1961 and launch intensive voter registration campaigns. Moore's innovation, recruiting students to help with the registration, proved crucial to the movement. With Moses and others, Moore coordinated large SNCC-led COFO projects across the state—projects utilizing student recruits—that were models for Freedom Summer of 1964. Moses later said, "Amzie saw the students as a way out...[as] a force that he and other people should try to tap."
Moore's main operational center was the New Hope Baptist Church, which was burned to the ground after an NAACP meeting there. After the murder of Emmett Till, independent investigations by Amzie Moore Along with Medgar Evers and Ruby Hurley pointed to a broader conspiracy, with several black men involved with Milam, Bryant, and other whites. Moore was a community leader in addition to his civil rights efforts. In 1966 he organized the local Head Start, and he was also responsible for the building of many housing units for low-income families in Cleveland.
Comments 0 comments