Amzie Moore (1911-1982): the Delta leader who brought SNCC to Mississippi

Where did Amzie Moore come from?

Amzie Moore was born on September 23, 1911, on the Wilkin plantation in Grenada County, Mississippi, to a sharecropping family. His parents separated when he was a child, and his mother died when he was fourteen. He went to Stone Street High School in Greenwood and finished the tenth grade. In 1935 he moved to Cleveland in Bolivar County, where he took a job with the U.S. Postal Service that he kept until 1968. The steady federal paycheck, which local whites could not take away, gave him a measure of independence few Black Mississippians had. The SNCC Digital Gateway says he became the first Black person in Bolivar County to get a federal home loan.

What did World War II mean to him?

He was drafted in 1942 and served more than three years in a segregated Army, an experience that turned him toward civil rights. He later remembered the time as three years, six months and eighteen days. The Mississippi Encyclopedia says the Army asked him to help raise the morale of Black troops, and that he joined the NAACP while serving. He came home asking why he had been fighting abroad for rights he did not have in Mississippi. Our page on veterans and the movement puts his story beside those of Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry.

What did he build in Cleveland?

In 1951 he helped found the Regional Council of Negro Leadership with Dr. T. R. M. Howard of Mound Bayou, and in 1955 he became president of the Cleveland NAACP branch. The Regional Council organized boycotts and voter registration and drew thousands to rallies in Mound Bayou, the meetings a young Fannie Lou Hamer later attended. Moore opened a service station and cafe on Highway 61 in 1954 and refused to post "white" and "colored" signs on its restrooms, and local whites cut off his credit. He kept guns in his brick house and lit it brightly at night.

In August 1955 he and Medgar Evers searched for the missing Emmett Till. Moore later said that from that point on, Mississippi began to move.

How did he bring SNCC to Mississippi?

In 1960 Bob Moses, on a scouting trip for SNCC arranged by Ella Baker, met Moore in Cleveland, and Moore told him that what the Delta needed was the vote. That fall Moore attended SNCC's conference in Atlanta and invited the organization to work with him on voter registration, promising to support its workers. The SNCC Digital Gateway credits him with putting voter registration on SNCC's agenda, connecting organizers to his network across the state and teaching them how to work in rural communities. Our page on Amzie Moore and SNCC covers that partnership in detail.

How did he reach Ruleville and Hamer?

In 1962 Moore introduced SNCC workers Charles McLaurin, Charlie Cobb and Landy McNair at a church in Ruleville, launching the Sunflower County voter registration project. That project held the mass meeting at William Chapel in August 1962 where Hamer decided to try to register. Without Moore's introductions, the young outsiders would have had no way in.

What did he do later?

After 1964 he turned to anti-poverty work, organizing Head Start in Cleveland in 1966 and helping build low-income housing. He was the first chair of the Mississippi Action Committee on Education from 1967 to 1970 and worked with the National Council of Negro Women. He died on February 1, 1982. His house in Cleveland is now a museum; see the Amzie Moore House.