William Lewis Moore

Who was William Lewis Moore?

William Lewis Moore was a postal worker and Congress of Racial Equality member who staged lone protests against racial segregation. He was murdered on his final protest.

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 he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Moore suffered a mental breakdown. He was institutionalized for a year and a half with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and became an activist on the behalf of the mentally ill upon his release. It was this activism that eventually led to his civil rights work.

In the early 1960s, Moore 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 Martin Luther King, Jr. was being released from Birmingham jail. His letter to John F. Kennedy notified the president that he intended to walk to Mississippi and asked "If I may deliver any letters from you to those on my line of travel, I would be most happy to do so."