Robert Saunders and the NAACP's Florida Campaign
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
Harry T. Moore had been the most effective civil rights organizer in Florida's history. He had built the state's NAACP chapter from almost nothing, registered more than a hundred thousand Black voters, and led the campaign that overturned wrongful death sentences for the Groveland Four, four young Black men falsely accused of rape in nineteen forty-nine.
On Christmas Day of nineteen fifty-one, Moore and his wife Harriette were at home in Mims, Florida. It was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. A bomb planted beneath their house exploded. Harry died in the ambulance. Harriette died nine days later. The bomb had been planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan. No one was ever convicted.
Robert William Saunders, Sr., grew up in Tampa's West Tampa neighborhood, the grandson of Bahamian immigrants who had been founding members of the Tampa NAACP chapter in nineteen seventeen. In nineteen fifty-two, with Moore's murder still unsolved, Saunders became Florida's NAACP field secretary. He was thirty years old.
Over the following fourteen years, Saunders organized from Tampa. He pursued school desegregation in county after county across the state. He secured salary equity for Black teachers who were being paid less than white teachers doing identical work. He worked to integrate public beaches, parks, and housing. He registered voters in communities where registering was dangerous. He investigated police brutality cases. He did this across a state of fifty-four thousand square miles with limited staff, frequent threats, and the knowledge of what had happened to his predecessor.
In nineteen sixty-six he left the NAACP to lead the Southeast Regional Civil Rights Section of the United States Office of Equal Opportunity in Atlanta. He returned to Tampa in nineteen seventy-six. He died here in two thousand three.
Saunders documented his work in a book called Bridging the Gap. His papers are at the University of South Florida. The fourteen-year campaign he ran from Tampa is one of the least-known chapters of the civil rights movement's ground-level organizational work in the South.
