Robin

A husband and wife were killed by a bomb placed under their bedroom, on Christmas night, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. They ran the NAACP in their state. Nobody was ever prosecuted. Guess the year. 1951. Harry T. Moore and Harriette Moore. Mims, Florida. He had been a schoolteacher. He was dismissed for his civil rights work. He then organised full time — registering tens of thousands of Black voters in Florida, and investigating lynchings and police shootings when nobody else would. On Christmas night 1951, a bomb detonated beneath the bedroom of their home. It was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. He died on the way to hospital. The nearest hospital that would admit Black patients was over thirty miles away. She died nine days later. They are often described as the first martyrs of the modern civil rights movement — killed four years before Emmett Till, thirteen before the Civil Rights Act. The FBI investigated. Florida reopened it more than once, most recently in the 2000s, and investigators named Klan members long dead as the likely perpetrators. Nobody was ever prosecuted. Most people date the civil rights movement from Montgomery in 1955. The Moores were organising, and were killed for it, before that — and the reason the date surprises people is that the story was not taught.