Cecil B. Moore: Anger, Intellect and Black Pride Personified

This week marks the birth of Cecil Bassett Moore, born 101 years ago on April 2, 1915. He wasn’t just one of the greatest lawyers, civic leaders, elected officials, grass-roots activists and civil rights agitators in Philadelphia history. He was also one of the angriest Black men in Philadelphia history.

During the Harlem Renaissance, James Baldwin wrote “To be Black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.” And nobody was blacker and more conscious than Brother Cecil.

Born in Dry Fork, W. Va., Cecil attended Bluefield State College, an HBCU in his racist home state. After achieving the rank of sergeant in the racist U.S. Marine Corps in World War II, he was later honorably discharged at Fort Miflin in 1947. He remained in Philly and decided to go to law school in order to battle America’s racist legal, political, educational, employment and social system.

In fact, years later, in 1974, he said, “I don’t want no more than the white man, but I won’t take no less... [so] let’s fight the damn system!” And fight he did.

Although Cecil was thoroughly educated, he was also both “hood and gangsta.” I don’t mean in a negative kind of way. Instead, I mean in a “by any means necessary” confrontational kind of way. And people from the streets knew and appreciated that. They knew he was one of them.

By the way, it is a little-known fact that while he was studying law at Temple University by night, he worked as a liquor wholesaler by day. And that job, to a certain extent, helped provide him with an entrée into the world of poor Black people from the hood who had been neglected by white (and many Black) politicians.

By the way, although Cecil was known to drink heavily, he never stumbled, never slurred, and never lost his train of thought. He knew how to hold his liquor just like he knew how to hold racists in check. After graduating in 1953, he was ready to fight zealously for poor Black folks from the hood.

During the 1960s, Cecil organized protests with thousands of supporters. He immediately began fighting and picketing labor unions, construction sites (including Strawberry Mansion High School in 1963), Trailways, Greyhound and even the U.S. Postal Service. His goal was equal employment for Blacks. And he won each of those fights.

Unfortunately, many Blacks who benefited were selfish. They didn’t pass the baton by helping other Blacks. That’s precisely why Cecil truthfully and frustratingly once said, “[Often when] I get a Black man a good job, I make another white man.” In other words, he meant successful Black people far too often begin acting like white people in terms of arrogance and elitism.

Despite that, he continued to fight for Black men, Black women, and Black children because he always believed the vast majority of them deserved his help. As he pointed out, “From 1963-1967, I got more than 175,000 jobs for Blacks in this town.”

Cecil’s greatest fights and greatest victories were against Girard College and the Mummers. Girard College restricted admission to white boys based on the 1831 last will and testament of Stephen Girard. Cecil wasn’t having that, so beginning in 1965 he led massive picketing for seven months and 17 days outside the walls of that school until four little Black boys were enrolled. In 1964, he (and Charles Bowser) used legal brains and North Philly brawn to force the Mummers to stop parading up Broad Street in blackface.

As a criminal defense lawyer, he was one of the best who ever did it. He was so much in demand and so busy in court that the City Hall judicial administration specially assigned one calendar courtroom for all his cases. During one stretch, he won an unprecedented 17 not guilty verdicts in a row.

As an aside, I must mention that the most memorable and moving day of my entire career as a lawyer was in 1993 after, as a new and young attorney, I was court-appointed to handle the appeal of a defendant who had been convicted in September 1973 for a murder that occurred in 1970. The killing was allegedly committed by a member of the Philly-based Black revolutionary “People’s Liberation Army.” The man allegedly had been assigned to execute a fellow member who, it was later discovered, was in reality a traitorous police informant. This defendant initially had hired Cecil who represented him since February 1971. But in May 1973, he fired Cecil for supposedly not moving fast enough on the case.

Under certain circumstances, Cecil’s strategy was to frequently delay a case if he couldn’t quickly beat that case. And it was an ingeniously effective strategy. But the defendant grew impatient, hired a different lawyer, was found guilty, and was sentenced to life. In 1993, I sat in the City Hall attic records room actually touching the very same legal documents that Cecil himself wrote about 20 years earlier. I could feel his energy and power through those papers. Unfortunately for the defendant, though, the only conclusion I could draw after extensive review of those papers and after extensive legal research is that he shoulda kept Cecil.

Cecil’s greatness went well beyond the courtroom. He was just as energetic and powerful in his civic activist role — but much more provocative. When he was elected president of the city’s NAACP chapter in 1962, he proclaimed in his January 1963 inaugural speech, “We are serving notice that no longer will the plantation system of white men appointing our leaders exist in Philadelphia.”

Under his administration, the local NAACP chapter’s membership increased from 7,000 in 1962 to 50,000 in the mid-60s. He served as president until 1967 when, due to internal conflicts concerning his “in your face” confrontational style, he was stripped of his power after the national office divided the city’s chapter into three branches, leaving him with the much smaller North Philly branch.

Cecil was elected to the City Council in the Fifth District in 1976 and served until 1979 when he was challenged by John Street, who replaced him due primarily to his worsening medical condition. He became a revered ancestor on Feb. 13, 1979, following cardiac arrest at age 63.

Cecil B. Moore was the man. He was the Black man. He was the angriest Black man in Philadelphia. And he didn’t fear racists, didn’t bite his tongue in their presence, and didn’t take orders from them. As he so eloquently put it, “I was determined when I got back [from the military] that what rights I didn’t have I was gonna take. After nine years in the Marine Corps, I don’t intend to take another order from any son of a bitch that walks.”

And he never did.

The words from David Walker’s Appeal, written in 1829, and the words of Christopher James Perry Sr., founder of the Tribune in 1884, are the inspiration for my “Freedom’s Journal” columns. In order to honor that pivotal national abolitionist and that pioneering newspaper giant, as well as to inspire today’s Tribune readers, each column ends with Walker and Perry’s combined quote- along with my inserted voice- as follows: I ask all Blacks “to procure a copy of this... [weekly column] for it is designed... particularly for them” so they can “make progress... against [racial[ injustice.”