Amzie Moore

Amzie Moore was born on the twenty-third of September 1911 on Wilkin Plantation in Grenada County, Mississippi, the eldest son of Black sharecroppers who worked the land and grew vegetables to stretch the meager credit they borrowed from the landlord. His childhood was marked by hardship: his parents separated when he was young, and his mother died in 1925, when he was fourteen. Left to fend for himself after his father departed, he nonetheless finished the tenth grade, the highest offered to him.

In 1935 Moore secured a federal post office job in Cleveland, Mississippi — a rare and precious foothold for a Black man in the Deep South. He became the first Black person in Bolivar County to receive a federal home loan, and after wartime service he built a small commercial life of his own along Highway 61, operating a service station, a grocery, and a beauty shop that gave him a measure of independence from white economic control.

That independence made him a pillar of the movement. Elected president of the Cleveland branch of the NAACP in 1955 — a post he held until his death — he built it into one of the largest in the state and served as a vice president of the state conference. When young organizers arrived in the Delta, it was Moore's home that sheltered them and his counsel that guided them.

In 1960 he met Bob Moses and pressed upon him the singular importance of the vote, inviting the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to make the Mississippi Delta the ground of its voter-registration work. As mentor and protector, he taught a generation how to move and organize in rural communities. Amzie Moore died on the first of February 1982 in Cleveland, Mississippi. He is honored as the quiet architect who planted the seed of Delta freedom and lived to see it take root.