About 30 students from a Melbourne charter school are filing through a replica of the home of slain civil-rights activists Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore on a recent Friday morning at Moore Memorial Park and Museum in Mims.
The museum docent leads them past the Moores’ bedroom, where the couple slept on Christmas night 1951 – also their wedding anniversary – as three suspected Klansmen crept under the floorboards below and lit the fuse of a dynamite bomb that destroyed the house, killed the Moores and touched off international outrage over their murder.

It’s Black history. It’s American history. And what happened that night 73 years ago continues to impact young people today who come to the museum to learn about the sacrifices for freedom made by the Moores and other civil-rights icons such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“I learned that many people before me in other times have worked very hard, went to jail, had to go through lots of different traumatizing pains to get to this overall goal to have freedom, rights and justice,’’ said Athen Green, a 12-year-old seventh-grader at Learning Forward Educational Academy Center in Melbourne, who was touring the museum with his sister, Eden, and grandfather, Dr. John Long.
As the nation celebrates the legacy and life of King this week, and heads toward Black History Month in February, the museum is showing films about King and highlighting his connection to the Moores.
Before their deaths in 1951, the Moores, who were Brevard County school teachers, were active in Florida promoting civil rights, according to Carshonda K. Wright, the museum’s cultural leader. During the 1940s, they started chapters of the NAACP around Florida, advocated equal pay for Black school teachers – for which they were fired from their jobs – and registered 160,000 new Black voters through their Progressive Voters League.
A young Michael Luther King Jr. – he would not change his name to Martin, after the founder of the Protestant Reformation, until 1957 – came to Florida in the mid-1940s to visit potential colleges to continue his education. He learned about the Moores through Mary McLeod Bethune, the prominent educator, philanthropist and civil-rights activist, who had educated the Moores at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Wright said.
“So their one connection is Mary McLeod Bethune,’’ Wright said. “He was touring colleges and he was made very aware of all of the activist work that Mr. Moore was doing here in the South at that time.’’
King would ultimately go to college at Morehouse in Atlanta and then earn his doctorate in systematic theology at Boston University, from which he graduated in 1951 – the same year the Moores were murdered in Florida.
Wright said the 22-year-old King was deeply affected by the Moores’ deaths. The explosive act of terrorism made international headlines and served as the rallying cry at the 1952 NAACP convention in New York, which raised $50,000 to support activism and legal aid in the South – including the successful Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955, which propelled King onto the national stage.
The Moores served as forerunners to King – in life and in death, Wright said. King would be assassinated in 1968 – his own life cut short, just like the Moores, by hate-driven terrorism.

To Moore Center Coordinator Sonya Mallard, both King and the Moores represent what is best about America because they sacrificed their lives in the cause of freedom for all Americans. In losing their lives, they made the words of the Declaration of Independence – that all men are created equal – actually come to life, making them “true patriots.’’
“Moore and Dr. King made Americans better by just being examples to us,’’ Mallard said. “They left a legacy for us to look upon, to read about, to learn about, to see that sometimes non-violence is the way to go. Sometimes we don’t have to argue, we don’t have to fight, we can agree to disagree, but yet we have to respect the laws of our land; we have to be equal and fair to all people, no matter their cultural background, no matter their nationality. America is for all.’’
Every Friday in January, the Moore Memorial Park and Museum is showing two films about Dr. King: “King,’’ the 1978 biopic starring the late Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson, and “I Have a Dream,’’ a documentary about King and his famous 1963 speech at the March on Washington. Screenings are at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. each Friday. The center and the film screenings are free and open to the public. Museum tours have to be scheduled in advance. The museum is at 2180 Freedom Ave., in Mims. Contact: 321-264-6595 or by email at info@harryharriettemoore.org.