Earlier this month, a mailman named Douglas Hughes from Ruskin, Fla., who wanted to make a political statement, landed a gyrocopter on the grounds of the United States Capitol.
He was upset about corruption in American democracy and had written a manifesto entitled “The Civilist Papers.”
Fifty-two years ago last week, another mailman wanted to make a political statement, this one about civil rights in general but specifically in the state he once called home, by walking to the state capital in Jackson, Miss., to deliver a letter to the governor.
William Lewis Moore of Baltimore began that lone walk on April 21, 1963, after he got off a bus at the Greyhound station in downtown Chattanooga.
Two days later, in a little remembered incident, the white man became one of the first unintended martyrs in U.S. civil rights history.
Moore, a native of Binghamton, N.Y., a former Marine and a college graduate, had a mental breakdown in the mid-1950s and had been institutionalized for three and a half years. After he was released, he began advocating for the rights of the mentally ill and eventually for civil rights for blacks.
He later organized demonstrations for civil rights in Binghamton and became a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Later, in Baltimore, Moore made individual walks emphasizing rights for blacks to the state capitol in Annapolis, Md., and to the White House, where he was refused admission and his letter to President John F. Kennedy was not accepted.
His letter to the president said he planned to walk to Mississippi and wondered if the president wanted him to deliver anything to segregationist Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett.
Rebuffed, Moore, 35, put in for a two-week vacation from the post office and bought a bus ticket for Chattanooga. Why he wanted to begin the 400-mile journey to Jackson from here is not known. His plan was to walk 40 miles for 10 days.
He arrived here shortly before 3 p.m. on a warm Sunday. In time, he donned a sandwich board, with one side saying “Equal Rights for All (Mississippi or Bust)” and the other side saying “End Segregation in America” and “Eat at Joe’s – Black and White.”
Moore, as he left the bus station, was variously described as pushing a grocery cart and pulling a red wagon, pulling a shopping cart and pushing a two-wheeled postal cart. Attached to one of the carts was an image of Jesus with the words “Wanted: Agitator, Carpenter by Trade, Revolutionary, Consorter with Criminals and Prostitutes.”
He headed out of downtown toward Highway 11, which would take him around Lookout Mountain on Cummings Highway, into Lookout Valley and down through Wildwood and Trenton, Ga., continuing through the valley between Lookout and Sand mountains before entering Alabama.
On April 23, 70 miles into Moore’s journey, he was interviewed by Charlie Hicks of WGAD in Gadsden, Ala. Hicks, like others before him, was worried about the lone walker’s safety and offered to take him somewhere, but Moore refused.
An hour later, he was found dead in a picnic area near the community of Keener by Willis Elrod, who had pulled over to use the restroom. He had been shot twice in the head at close range with a .22 caliber rifle.
The gun was traced to grocer Floyd Simpson, with whom Moore had argued at his U.S. Highway 11 store in Collbran, Ala., according to the slain man’s journal, but Simpson was never charged. He admitted talking with Moore and warning him about the volatility in the area but denied killing him. Simpson, a Ku Klux Klan member, died in 1998.
“A couple of men who had talked to me before drove up and questioned my religious and political beliefs,” Moore wrote in his journal. “‘Now I know what you are,’ one of the men said. And one was sure I’d be killed for them, such as my ‘Jesus’ poster on my buggy.”
The letter to Barnett, copies of which he distributed throughout his brief route, read in parts, “Do not go down in infamy as one who fought the democracy for all which you have not the power to prevent” and “the white man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights,” and exhorted him to “be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you.”
Ten members of CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) attempted to restage Moore’s walk a couple of weeks later, and they also left from Chattanooga. According to various reports, as they began their walk they were taunted with words such as “Bunch of morons, if I ever saw it,” “The [expletives] ought to be in a mental institution” and “Hope you stop a .22.”
Upon entering Alabama, they were arrested and jailed. Eventually, they were transferred to Kilby State Prison in Montgomery and, according to one source, were housed on death row. They were not released until June 4, when they were convicted of breaching the peace and fined $200.
By that time, riots in Birmingham, Ala., following the bombings of targets associated with civil rights leaders had broken out, and Moore was virtually forgotten. But the response by Birmingham city police would help waken the country to its sins of omission and commission involving blacks – and the right to peaceful protest.