Amzie Moore, born September 23, 1911 on the Wilkin plantation near the Grenada and Carroll County lines, served 'three years, six months and eighteen days' in the U.S. Army before returning to his job at the U.S. Post Office in Cleveland in Bolivar County where he had worked since 1935. Moore had been assigned to intelligence in Burma; he was once ordered to tell African American soldiers that conditions in the United States would be better when they returned.[i]  Apparently he knew better, since Moore joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) while still in the service.

 Once home, Moore learned that one black person in Mississippi was being killed every week; the NAACP attributed some of these deaths to the 'home guard,' a fanatic group with vestiges of the Civil War.[ii]  Leon McTatie's[iii] body, a Home Guard victim, was found in a Sunflower County Bayou and Moore, investigating for the NAACP, found the man had been whipped to death for stealing a saddle, a crime witnesses say he did not commit. McTatie's wife saw her husband killed and three defendants even confessed to the beating, but it took a grand jury less than ten minutes before releasing the accused slayers. This was only one example of the Mississippi justice Moore and others were up against.[iv]  

An early activist before the War, Moore in 1940 had organized a successful rally of 10,000 blacks in Cleveland, while helping to organize the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. Upon return, he opened a gas station, beauty shop, and grocery store on highway 61 that also became headquarters for the area's civil rights efforts. Moore's house would be used as a "revolving dormitory" and "safe house" for activists during the movement's voter-registration drives in the 1960s (Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, and John Lewis knew his house well) while Moore's gas station was said to offer the only restrooms for black drivers between Memphis and Vicksburg.

Proud of his roots, Moore often talked about his grandfather, a slave who lived to be 104. He 'couldn't read or write, yet he accumulated more than a section of land and had [about] ' twenty thousand dollars ' saved when he died." Left on his own at fourteen, after his mother died in 1925, Moore completed high school, but could not realize his dream of a college education. Yet throughout the rest of his life, Moore succeeded in becoming a self-educated person[v] and also one of Mississippi's most liked and respected civil rights leaders.