No Place for Pilgrims: Solving the Murder of William Moore, the Last Cold Civil Rights Case

Summary

While doing research for his ninth-grade civics class in 1976, Mike Marshall found an article in Time magazine about William Moore, a thirty-five-year-old postman from Binghamton, New York. In 1963, Moore arrived at the Chattanooga bus station from Washington, DC, 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 as he pushed his cart through Keener, Alabama, he saw a 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 US 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 understood why his mother didn't want him to "go stirring up trouble."