Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

Moore had covered some seventy miles by Tuesday evening, when a reporter from radio station WGAD in Gadsden stopped him on the road for an interview. Asked his purpose, Moore said, “I intend to walk right up to the governor’s mansion in Mississippi and ring his doorbell. Then I’ll hand him my letter.” The letter was a civil rights plea asking Barnett to “be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you.” Of shouted threats that he would never make it alive, Moore said that he had grown up in Mississippi. “I don’t believe the people in the South are that way. I think a lot of this stuff is just made up.” The reporter left Moore on a remote stretch of U.S. Highway 11, near Attala. A passing motorist discovered the body a mile down the road, shot twice through the head at close range. A call from a farmhouse telephone brought sirens and reporters upon the murder scene. Moore lay face up in the grass, still wearing his signboards.