EBOOK
No Place for Pilgrims
Solving The Murder Of William Moore, The Last Cold Civil Rights Case
Mike Marshall(0)
About
While doing research for a term paper on civil rights for his ninth-grade civics class in the spring of 1976, Mike Marshall found an article in Time magazine about William Moore, a thirty-five-year-old postman from Binghamton, New York. On the afternoon of April 20, 1963, Moore arrived at the Chattanooga bus station from Washington, D.C., where he strapped on his protest signs. He planned to walk to the governor's mansion in Jackson, Mississippi, and hand-deliver a letter to Governor Ross Barnett. On the third day of his walk, he pushed his cart through Keener, Alabama-about fifteen miles north of Gadsden and twenty miles from Marshall's paternal grandparents' home. He stopped at a general merchandise store, ate a can of corn and a pecan pie, and read the afternoon newspaper. About an hour later, he rounded a curve that hugged a small park and saw a black car parked under a walnut tree, its headlights and motor off.
"The Sand Mountain area between Chattanooga, Tenn., and Gadsden, Ala., is no place for pilgrims," read the opening paragraph of the Time story. "It is a land of mountaineers who tote rifles in their cars, glare in suspicion at strangers, and believe unshakably in racial segregation. Last month William Moore . . . thought he might change things by walking through the area displaying civil rights signs. It cost him his life; he was found shot dead on U.S. Highway 11."
No Place for Pilgrims is Marshall's effort to fulfill a promise to both himself and his dying mother-a promise she did not want him to keep: to solve one of the only remaining civil rights cold cases. And once Marshall discovered who the killer actually was, he also figured out why his mother didn't want him to "go stirring up trouble."
"The Sand Mountain area between Chattanooga, Tenn., and Gadsden, Ala., is no place for pilgrims," read the opening paragraph of the Time story. "It is a land of mountaineers who tote rifles in their cars, glare in suspicion at strangers, and believe unshakably in racial segregation. Last month William Moore . . . thought he might change things by walking through the area displaying civil rights signs. It cost him his life; he was found shot dead on U.S. Highway 11."
No Place for Pilgrims is Marshall's effort to fulfill a promise to both himself and his dying mother-a promise she did not want him to keep: to solve one of the only remaining civil rights cold cases. And once Marshall discovered who the killer actually was, he also figured out why his mother didn't want him to "go stirring up trouble."
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Reviews
"If the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, then Mike Marshall's No Place for Pilgrims invites us to remember the human cost of that arc. Like Henry David Thoreau, William Moore was a one-man counter-friction against the machine of prejudice in the civil-rights-era South. Moore's journey ended abruptly in the small community of Keener, Alabama, when he was assassinated under a black wa
Lesa Carnes Shaul
"Veteran Alabama reporter Mike Marshall draws on personal ties to uncover the true story of the last civil rights cold case. After more than twenty years of research and hundreds of hours of oral interviews, Marshall cuts through the red herrings of the case to reveal that the murderer remained a free man living amongst his family, friends, and neighbors, all of whom protected their white supremac
Glenn T. Eskew
"Mike Marshall has not only written a Pulitzer-worthy chronicle of an often-overlooked white civil rights warrior, mail carrier William Moore, but has pieced together the puzzle of his death in a compelling narrative that solves the mystery of his murder once and for all. No Place for Pilgrims is an important contribution to the history of the civil rights movement and the South through portraits
Doug Jones