Books like Before his time by Ben Green

Harry T. Moore, a devoted NAACP and Progressive Voters' League activist, worked quietly yet relentlessly in Florida’s backroads for seventeen years, educating, evangelizing and organizing African‑American voters during an era of official indifference and hostility. His commitment brought him into direct conflict with the Ku Klux Klan and Sheriff Willis McCall when he defended the Groveland Four—black youths accused of raping a white woman. On Christmas night in 1951, a bomb under a bed in a small orange grove in Mims killed Moore, and his wife died a week later. The killing, the first in a tragic line of civil‑rights assassinations, was later linked to the Klan, yet no one was ever convicted. Ben Green revisits the people and events surrounding Moore’s death, drawing on newly available FBI files and Florida’s 1991 reopened investigation to provide a balanced reckoning of the good and the bad and of the villainous and the virtuous involved.

First publish date: 1999