Harry Tyson Moore was born on November 18, 1905, in Houston, a rural unincorporated community near Live Oak, the only child of Johnny and Rosa Moore. After his father died in 1915, he lived with aunts in Daytona and Jacksonville before returning home in 1919 to enroll in Florida Memorial College. He graduated as valedictorian in May 1925 with a Normal School degree and became an educator for black schools in Brevard County, first teaching at an elementary school in Cocoa, where he met fellow teacher Harriette Vyda Simms of Mims. They married in 1926 and had two daughters, Annie Rosalea and Juanita Evangeline, and he later became a principal in Titusville. In 1934, he founded the Brevard County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and his efforts led to the formation of 50 branches in Florida. In 1937, he filed the first lawsuit in the South calling for salary equalization for white and black teachers; although he lost, it sparked similar lawsuits across the state. He organized the Florida State Conference National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and served as its executive secretary, advocating for equality in teacher salaries, segregated schools, and black voter registration. By 1943, his activism had expanded to lynchings and police brutality, and he collected sworn affidavits from victims' families on every lynching that had occurred in Florida. In 1944, he helped form the Florida Progressive Voters League, which registered tens of thousands of black Americans throughout the state. In 1946, he and his wife were dismissed from their teaching jobs because of his public civil rights activism, and he became a full-time paid organizer for the Florida National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On Christmas night in 1951, Harry and Harriette were murdered in their home in Mims, Florida, when a bomb was planted beneath their house. Their deaths were the first assassinations of prominent civil rights leaders and became one of the sparks that ignited the broader Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Langston Hughes wrote the Ballad of Harry T. Moore in his honor, and in 2013 the Moores were inducted into the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame.