There he invited SNCC to join his efforts at voter registration in Mississippi, promising to support SNCC workers who came to Mississippi. In the fall of 1960, Moore made his way to SNCC’s second conference being held in Atlanta. He had been making plans to fight to gain these rights for years. In their time together, Moore introduced Bob Moses to the idea and importance of organizing for voting rights. He kept his brick home well-armed and at night, brightly lit with floodlights. For refusing to put a “colored only” sign up, local whites cut off his access to credit. “When I got through with it, people came white people, black people, everybody came,” he remembered. In 1954, he opened a combination service-station and cafe in Cleveland. He helped found the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in 1951 and became president of the local branch of the NAACP. Witnessing firsthand that Blacks were in no way innately inferior and now able to imagine worlds of possibility, Moore went to work challenging the racial order of the South. His time in the service had taught him that “people are just people.” “I think what God did with me was put me on a ship and send me around the world,” Moore reasoned, “And let me live in different environments and be in contact with different people and to really and truly find out what was behind it because I certainly didn’t know.” After what Moore remembered precisely as “three years, six months, and eighteen days” of service, he returned to Mississippi enlightened with new understanding and commitment. Growing up in the South, he had believed that Black subjugation was God’s will. In 1942, Amzie Moore was drafted in the U.S. He started working at the post office in 1935 and used his solid income to build a house, becoming the first Black person in Bolivar County to receive a federal home loan.

He went as far as the tenth grade in school–the highest grade offered at his high school. His mother died when he was fourteen-years-old, leaving him to fend for himself.

The family sharecropped and grew vegetables to stretch their furnish–the ten dollars a month they borrowed from the landlord to live on. Moore was born on September 23, 1911, in Grenada County, Mississippi. As Bob Moses who first met Moore during a 1960 Mississippi trip remembered years later, “Amzie was the only one I met on that trip giving the student sit-in movement careful attention, aware of all that student energy and trying to figure out how to use it.” Amzie Moore (second from the right) with SNCC organizers in Mississippi, 1963, Īmzie Moore brought SNCC into Mississippi in fact, he put voter registration on SNCC’s table.

Howell raines my soul is rested