Career
Beginning in 1951, Moore, Aaron Henry and Medgar Evers worked with Doctor T.R.M. Howard, a self-made entrepreneur, fraternal organization leader, and surgeon, to build the (RCNL). The RCNL sought to encourage entrepreneurship, self-help, and civil rights in the Delta. He participated in the RCNL"s campaign to boycott gas stations that failed to provide restrooms for blacks.
His gas station was one of the few that allowed blacks to use restrooms between Memphis and Vicksburg.
In August 1955, as word first got out that Emmett Till was missing, Evers and Moore quickly became involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers and going into the cotton fields searching for anything that would help find the young Delta visitor. Moore asserted, after collecting stories first hand from the field laborers, that whites had murdered thousands of blacks over the years and thrown their bodies into the region’s swamps, rivers, and bayous.
Moore conceived of the voter registration campaign that was later the centerpiece of Freedom Summer in 1964. The local leader welcomed outside help including SNCC organizer Robert Parris Moses, coming into the Delta from New York City to build the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC. Moses later said that Moore was a guiding force from the start.
Review Martin Luther King, Junior., Andrew Young, John Lewis, Thurgood Marshall, and Review
Jesse Jackson were some of his guests.