Moore was born in
Binghamton, New York, and raised in New York and Mississippi. For a time before his death he lived in
Baltimore, Maryland. In the early 1950s, when Moore was a graduate student at
Johns Hopkins University, he had a mental breakdown. He was institutionalized for a year and a half with a diagnosis of
schizophrenia. After being released, he became an activist on behalf of the mentally ill. He gradually got involved in civil rights activism for African Americans. Moore joined the
Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). In the early 1960s, he undertook three civil rights protests in which he marched to a capital to hand-deliver letters he had written denouncing racial segregation. On his first march he walked to
Annapolis, Maryland, the state capital. On his second march he walked to the
White House. He arrived at about the same time that Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. was being released from the
Birmingham jail after protests in that city. His letter to President
John F. Kennedy said that he intended to walk to
Mississippi and "If I may deliver any letters from you to those on my line of travel, I would be most happy to do so." For his third protest he planned to walk from
Chattanooga, Tennessee to
Jackson, Mississippi and deliver a letter to Governor
Ross Barnett urging him to accept integration. He was wearing sandwich board signs stating: "Equal rights for all" and "Mississippi or Bust". On April 23, 1963, about into his march, Moore was interviewed by
Charlie Hicks, a reporter from radio station
WGAD in
Gadsden, Alabama, along a rural stretch of
U.S. Highway 11 near
Attalla. The station had received an anonymous phone tip about Moore's location. In the interview, Moore said: "I intend to walk right up to the governor's mansion in Mississippi and ring his doorbell. Then I'll hand him my letter." Concerned for Moore's safety, Hicks offered to drive him to a motel. Moore insisted on continuing his march. Less than an hour after the reporter left the scene, a passing motorist found Moore's body about a mile farther down the road, shot twice in the head at close range with a .22 caliber rifle. The gun's ownership was traced to Floyd Simpson, a white man who was a known "investigator" for the local Ku Klux Klan chapter, whom Moore had also openly argued with just earlier that same day; however in September 1963, an Etowah County grand jury decided there was not enough evidence to indict Simpson. Moore died a week short of his 36th birthday. His letter was found and opened. In it, Moore reasoned that "the white man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights." He asked Governor Barnett to: "Be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you...." Folk singer
Phil Ochs wrote a song in tribute to William Moore that is part of the posthumously released 1986 album
A Toast to Those Who Are Gone. Another tribute song (in German) for William Moore was written by East German singer/songwriter
Wolf Biermann.
Pete Seeger sang "William Moore, The Mailman" on his album,
Broadside Ballads. Starting April 23, 2008,
Ellen Johnson and Ken Loukinen walked the from
Reece City, Alabama, near where Moore was killed, and delivered Bill Moore's original letter to the capitol in Jackson, Mississippi.
Bob Zellner, a long time activist and first white Field Secretary of the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was with them and attempted to present the letter to Governor
Haley Barbour on May 6, 2008, but the latter declined to meet with the party. ==Memorial==