The Warmth of Other Suns (54 page)

Any teacher caught working with the NAACP could face retaliation in Florida. Firing teachers was a common tool of the authorities to undercut efforts to equalize their pay. In due course, the authorities fired NAACP leader Harry T.
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Moore from his principal’s position and banned him from ever teaching in Florida again. Without work and with two young daughters to support, Moore struck a deal to work full-time for the NAACP, but he had to raise some of the money for his salary himself.

He did not let that stop him, and his biggest fight was only beginning. It involved the sheriff in the county where George grew up and would make national headlines.

It started on the morning of Saturday, July 16, 1949, when a seventeen-year-old white woman accused four black men of raping her and attacking her husband on an isolated road in Lake County, near the town of Groveland. A manhunt led to the arrests of three young black men, one of whom had been in police custody at the time the girl said the rape occurred, but was still considered a suspect. The authorities shot and killed a fourth suspect before he could be taken to jail.

Tensions ran so high that the 350 colored residents of Groveland had to be evacuated to Orlando, where the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and colored and white churches put them up.

The three young men were reportedly beaten with rubber hoses while in police custody, with Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall, an imposing figure in a Stetson hat, announcing that a confession had been extracted from them.
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By then the case had become so emotionally charged that the court had a hard time finding a lawyer to represent the defendants. The one who finally agreed, Alex Akerman, said he “had no desire to handle the case,” and said to himself, as he drove toward Lake County for the trial, that he knew this would be “the end” of his career.

The three suspects were luckier than many other black men accused of raping a white woman. They actually lived long enough to hear the jury’s conviction. Two were sentenced to death. The one who had been in police custody at the time of the rape was shown mercy and sentenced to life in prison.

The trial had been so tense that the judge took it upon himself to show the defense team—Akerman and the NAACP lawyers, along with two northern reporters covering the case—the safest door from which to exit after the verdict was read.
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They would all have to get out of town quick. They hoped the verdict would be handed down before nightfall. It wasn’t. They followed the judge’s warning and headed out the side door into the Florida night after the verdict, convicting the men, was read. As they drove out of town, they could see the headlights of two unidentified cars tailing them. The NAACP lawyer floored the accelerator, barely able to keep ahead of the menacing headlights bearing down on them through hairpin country roads. The two cars hunted them into the darkness. The defense team finally made it to the county line and crossed over into another jurisdiction. Only then did the cars tailing them back away.

This was the world Harry T. Moore operated in and that George knew all too well.

The Groveland case, as it came to be known, roused Moore to action. He fired off letters of protest to the governor, to the FBI, to the U.S. attorney general. The pressure he and the NAACP headquarters put on the courts won the men a second trial. (The one who had been shown mercy because he had been in police custody at the time of the rape was advised to be grateful for his life sentence and not seek further redress through a second trial.)

The night before the trial was to begin, for reasons that remain unclear and known only to him, Sheriff McCall decided to move the prisoners to another jail. He handcuffed them together and drove them himself in his patrol car. At one point, he moved the two men to the front seat with him. Minutes later, he was calling for backup. He said the handcuffed men had attacked him and tried to escape. He said he had defended himself by shooting them, emptying his .38 Smith and Wesson in the process.

The shootings and the photographs of the two black men, their bodies splayed on the ground still handcuffed together, attracted national headlines and criticism of the sheriff, the governor, and the Florida legal system from all over the country. The heat ratcheted up further when it turned out that one of the two men had actually survived the shooting by pretending to be dead so the sheriff would stop shooting him.

Harry Moore began calling for an investigation of the shootings and for Sheriff McCall’s ouster. Either the sheriff had shot two shackled men without cause or he had shown recklessness and lack of forethought in transporting the men alone, as Moore saw it. Moore was doing what no colored men dared to do in those days of southern apartheid: he was standing up to the most powerful man in all of Lake County. He was attracting more attention from white supremacists, who had resented him in the past but were incensed at him now. He began getting death threats and for the first time started carrying a gun with him on those lonely drives into the country.

At the same time, unbeknownst to the local whites who deplored him, Moore was losing the support of NAACP headquarters in New York, an organization Moore had worked hard for but which had its own national ambitions and was at that very moment seeking changes in the Florida operation Moore had built. Now that Florida was on the map, in civil rights terms, headquarters wanted to capitalize on the publicity of the Groveland case for its broader goals. It pushed for greater membership and for centralized county chapters rather than the small colonies Moore had nurtured in places like Eustis. Headquarters could not have known the tensions on the ground in those isolated hamlets or the fear in the people George tried to sign up in Eustis all those years ago, or recognize that country people couldn’t risk being seen outside their homes at a countywide NAACP meeting that would attract life-threatening attention. Not then anyway.

Moore and the NAACP remained at odds through the fall and into Thanksgiving of 1951. At a statewide meeting in early December, national officers finally managed enough votes to oust Moore, who had virtually given his life to the cause. His very strength was his undoing that night. The chapters in the small hamlets that were so loyal to him, because they knew more than anyone the dangers he faced just getting there to see them, did not have the resources to send delegates to that meeting. Thus the meeting was dominated by the delegates from Miami, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, big-city groups that had their own politics and looked down upon the country teacher from a small town on the Mosquito Coast none of them had been to.

Now, despite his hard work, Moore was no longer the head of the Florida NAACP. But the white supremacists he had challenged all those years wouldn’t have known that. To them he was still the NAACP’s man on the ground and a target of their anger. Soon white men from outside his county started asking people in town where that colored NAACP fellow lived. There was a mysterious break-in at the Moores’ house, which sat isolated on a country road surrounded by orange groves.

And then on Christmas night 1951, the Moores’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, a bomb exploded under the floorboards beneath their bed as they slept. It hurled furniture into the air and crushed the bed into a crater in the earth. The force of the blast could be heard the next town over. Harry and Harriette Moore suffered grave internal injuries. Relatives rushed them to the nearest hospital, some thirty-five miles away. But, as was the common dilemma for colored patients in the South, they had to wait for the only colored doctor in town to get there to attend them. Harry T. Moore was dead by the time the colored doctor arrived. Harriette, saying she did not want to live without her husband, survived for eight days before succumbing herself.

The county, the state, and the FBI conducted a months-long investigation. It was determined that the Klan, specifically the Orlando Klavern, was behind the bombing. But as the investigation narrowed its focus, the Klansmen closed rank. At their meetings, they now began requiring everyone to recite the Klan oath of secrecy as the investigation closed in on them. The chief suspects all said they had been at a barbecue with twenty or thirty other members at the time of the attack, a convenient alibi for most anyone who would come under suspicion. Ultimately, no one was ever charged or spent a day in jail for the murder of Harry and Harriette Moore, considered by some the first casualties of the modern civil rights movement.

News of the bombing reached George up in Harlem, and he found it both shocking and half expected, knowing what he did about that land of raccoon woods and cypress swamps thick with fear and secrets.

When he spoke of Harry T. Moore, he spoke matter-of-factly, without emotion, flat and to the point. It was as if nothing in the world could surprise him. He had just about heard and seen it all.

Years later, when George was an old man, he would find God, become a deacon, and join the choir at a Baptist church in Harlem. People always said he had a beautiful voice. He was a tenor baritone. He knew all the words to just about any Baptist hymn. Whenever he stood up and sang, there he was, towering over all the sopranos and tenors, his voice rising up above the others but his eyes welling up and tears falling in droplets down the sides of his cheeks. It happened whenever he sang.

LOS ANGELES, MID- TO LATE 1950S
ROBERT JOSEPH PERSHING FOSTER

ROBERT WAS MAKING
a bigger name for himself now. He was getting a reputation not just for making a show of his every arrival but for being the kind of doctor who could just look at somebody and tell that the problem was with the spleen.

The people from Monroe began taking notice. They started coming around, tentative and curious at first. Robert never knew what to expect when they showed up. Jimmy Marshall’s mother had tried to make herself go and see Robert, but for the longest time she just couldn’t get used to his being a doctor. She still hadn’t adjusted to the idea of calling him Robert. She kept slipping and couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“I can’t believe little Pershing Foster is a doctor!” she once exclaimed.

He was becoming so popular that she finally went to see him. But she was appalled at what he asked of her at her first appointment. “How dare you tell me to take my clothes off!” she told Robert as he prepared for the examination.

“Bob got so tickled,” Jimmy remembered. “Then, after he treated her, she had to admit, ‘He’s a good little doctor.’ ”

Robert’s office was well situated on West Jefferson, a fashionable black business district closer to Beverly Hills than South Central, and he now had admitting privileges at several hospitals. He was getting to know other doctors but, oddly enough and just as important, was popular with the orderlies and charge nurses and even the people in the cafeteria, the kind of people other doctors ignored. And they started showing up at his office, too.

“My patients loved me,” he said matter-of-factly years later. “They could tell me anything. They’d tell you in a minute, ‘I can talk to you.’ ”

They waited for hours to see him. Many were people who back in Texas or Louisiana or Arkansas might have only rarely seen a physician, who were used to midwives and root doctors and home remedies they handed down and concocted for themselves. Here was a doctor who was as science-minded and proficient as any other but who didn’t make fun of their down-home superstitions and knew how to comfort them and translate modern medicine into a language they could understand.

“It was twenty people deep on Saturdays,” Malissa Briley, a patient of his, remembered. “They would come early, sign up, then leave, go shopping and run errands, come back three or four hours later and still have to wait.”

Any number of times he’d ask, “How long you been waiting?”

“Don’t even ask me,” she’d say. “You know how long I been waiting.”

People would complain among themselves. “They would sit up in the office and fuss and carry on about how he’s never on time,” Briley said. “And the very next time you go, you see the same people waiting.”