Amzie Moore kept his brick house in Cleveland well armed and floodlit at night. He was a postal worker, an Army veteran and the owner of a service station, born in 1911 on a plantation in Grenada County to a sharecropping family. He took a post office job in 1935 and built the house with a federal home loan, the first granted to a Black resident of Bolivar County. After he came home from the service in 1946 he helped Dr. T. R. M. Howard found the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. In 1955 he became president of the Cleveland NAACP branch and built it into one of the largest in the state, and that year he and Medgar Evers searched for the missing Emmett Till. After the Brown ruling of 1954 White Citizens' Councils spread, and in 1957 Moore and Evers answered a new voter-interpretation law with citizenship schools that taught reading and the state constitution. At his business he refused to post segregation signs, and local whites cut off his credit. By 1960 Black residents were about 40 percent of Cleveland and nearly 70 percent of Bolivar County.
A name on Ella Baker's list
In the summer of 1960 Bob Moses, a New York teacher volunteering in the SCLC office in Atlanta, was handed a list of Deep South contacts by Ella Baker as SNCC planned a fall conference. Moore was on it. He convinced Moses that voter registration was the key in a Delta where Black people made up about two-thirds of the population. That fall Moore attended SNCC's Atlanta conference and invited the group to work in Mississippi. Accounts differ on what came next. SNCC's history has Moses back in Cleveland in the summer of 1961, with Moore judging the Delta not ready and sending him south to McComb to work with C. C. Bryant. Moore, interviewed in the 1970s, remembered Moses spending most of a summer at his house.
Six to twelve at the table
When the Delta project took shape in 1962, Moore's house was its center. He drove Moses and Dorie Ladner to Charleston to recruit Willie Peacock, a Rust College student, and one Sunday at a church in Ruleville he introduced Charles McLaurin, Charlie Cobb and Landy McNair. Moore taught the young workers whom to contact and how to move through Ruleville, McComb and Greenwood. He sent Sam Block, whom he had mentored, to Greenwood and connected him with Cleveland Jordan, a plantation worker who had pressed for change since the 1950s. Field secretaries stayed with Moore, sometimes six to twelve at once, and he fed them spaghetti and meatballs, cheese and peaches. He remembered a caller telling him, "In five minutes, your house gon' blow up."
The house now
Moore died on February 1, 1982. His house was restored in 2016 and is now the Amzie Moore House Museum and Interpretive Center, a Mississippi Landmark, and Cleveland named a park for him in 2001. A photograph from September 1962 shows Moses, Block and Peacock together at the house.
Ruleville, where he introduced the first workers, is where the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden stands. Mound Bayou is where Howard housed Black reporters during the Till trial.