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Friend,
Broken glass and scattered pieces of wood clamored across the porch of the white clapboard house tucked into the 6-acre orange grove in Mims, Florida. When the fog and dust lifted, the house’s columns stood off-kilter and the contents of the bedroom spilled forth into the dirt outside.
People heard the blast from a mile away, shattering the peace of Christmas 1951. The next afternoon, the front-page headline of the Orlando Evening Star read, “Bomb Kills Mims NAACP Leader.”
At the time of their deaths, Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette, had registered more than 100,000 Black voters across Florida – the highest Black voter registration rate in the South. It was a bold feat in a state with more lynchings per capita than any other in the country, and where Ku Klux Klan members acted with impunity. To this day, their murders remain unsolved, and to many, the Moores’ heroism remains unknown. A new Florida bill seeks to honor these civil rights martyrs by protecting the right to vote that cost them their lives.
The Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act seeks to enshrine voting protections and mechanisms into state law. Last summer, the Southern Poverty Law Center and civil rights advocates began working with Florida legislators to craft the bill, which strengthens voting rights and access to the ballot. State Sen. Geraldine Thompson and state Rep. LaVon Bracy Davis filed the bill in January.
The bill comes at a time when several states – particularly those in the South – have passed laws limiting voter access by restricting early voting and criminalizing people or groups that assist voters in casting their ballots, among other tactics.
“It’s been a nightmare of changes for voting rights in Florida over the past five years,” said Jonathan Webber, the SPLC’s Florida policy director. “Seemingly every year, Republicans have sponsored and passed major changes to our voting laws. Laws that make it harder for people to vote, harder for people to register, harder for groups to do outreach to get people to register. Floridians deserve every opportunity to vote, and there are people and groups like us on their side, trying to help them exercise their most fundamental human right.”
The road to the bill’s passage will be difficult. Florida Republicans, hostile to such legislation, hold a supermajority in the Legislature. Thompson and advocates encourage Floridians to call and write their state legislators to show their support for the bill.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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