Amongst whites representing the anti-racist tradition, John Brown remains the best known martyr. But there are more to be researched, documented, and taught about. Today who even knows the name of William Moore, the ex-Marine postal worker from Baltimore who had grown up in Mississippi and thought its people were basically good? In April 1963, he walked down Deep South highways, wearing a sandwich-board bearing anti-racist slogans, with the goal of hand-delivering a letter, a civil rights plea, to the governor of Mississippi. After 70 miles he was shot dead at close range on U.S. Highway 11 in Alabama. People blamed the victim: "He should have known better. Must have been crazy." We need to honor such "craziness." Rev. Jonathan Daniels, a young northern minister who had been working with the black community, was shot dead in Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965. That same year, Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights volunteer from Detroit who had come to join the Selma-Montgomery march, was shot dead by Klansmen while driving a local black youth home after the event. We hear a little more about two white Summer Project volunteers, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, murdered together with Black activist James Chaney at Philadelphia, Mississippi.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Amongst whites representing the anti-racist tradition, John Brown remains the best known martyr. But there are more to be researched, documented, and taught about. Today who even knows the name of William Moore, the ex-Marine postal worker from Baltimore who had grown up in Mississippi and thought its people were basically good? In April 1963, he walked down Deep South highways, wearing a sandwich-board bearing anti-racist slogans, with the goal of hand-delivering a letter, a civil rights plea, to the governor of Mississippi. After 70 miles he was shot dead at close range on U.S. Highway 11 in Alabama. People blamed the victim: "He should have known better. Must have been crazy." We need to honor such "craziness." Rev. Jonathan Daniels, a young northern minister who had been working with the black community, was shot dead in Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965. That same year, Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights volunteer from Detroit who had come to join the Selma-Montgomery march, was shot dead by Klansmen while driving a local black youth home after the event. We hear a little more about two white Summer Project volunteers, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, murdered together with Black activist James Chaney at Philadelphia, Mississippi." in the context of "Elizabeth Martinez Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers and Freedom School Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer (2007 edition)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.