Before His Time: The Untold Story of
Harry T. Moore, America's First
Civil Rights Martyr
by Ben Green

Fifty years ago -- before Martin Luther King, Jr., began to preach from his pulpit in Montgomery, Alabama, the landmark "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, or Rosa Parks's famous bus ride -- a man named Harry T. Moore toiled in Jim Crow Florida on behalf of the NAACP and the Progressive Voters' League. For seventeen years, in an era of official indifference and outright hostility, the soft-spoken but resolute Moore traveled the back roads of the state on a mission to educate, evangelize, and organize. But on Christmas night in 1951, in a small orange grove in tiny Mims, Florida, a bomb placed under a bed ended Harry Moore's life. Although his daughters, Peaches and Evangeline, survived, his wife, Harriette, died of her wounds a week later. Unjustly neglected until now, Moore's death stands as the first in what was to be a long and tragic line of assassinations in the civil rights movement.

It was Moore's defense of the Groveland Four -- black youths accused, under murky circumstances, of raping a white woman in Lake County -- that drew the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan and pitted him against one of the most feared and vilified sheriffs in the country. Two of the Groveland Four were shot -- one fatally -- in the custody of Sheriff Willis McCall, who despite fifty investigations and a litany of racial scandals would remain in office for nearly thirty years. Ben Green revisits the people and circumstances surrounding Harry Moore's death, and brings alive a cast of characters worthy of Harper Lee or Flannery O'Connor. But as we journey through time with Green, we see all too vividly that police beatings, suppressed evidence, complicit juries, and angry mobs comprise an unforgettable part of our recent past, and even our present.

The governor of Florida reopened the case of Harry Moore's murder in 1991. Although the investigation revealed for the first time that the Klan was almost certainly responsible for Moore's death, no one was put behind bars. Bringing a fresh eye to the newly available FBI files, Green offers a reckoning of the good and the bad, the villainous and the virtuous. His shocking book helps us to reclaim the past, as far as we are capable of knowing it, even when complete and final justice eludes us. It also offers a poignant testimony to all the unsung heroes who, like Harry Moore, were long-forgotten early martyrs to the cause of civil rights and racial justice.

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Step Out on Nothing: How Faith and Family Helped Me Conquer Life's Challenges
by Byron Pitts

In Step Out on Nothing, Byron Pitts Chronicles his astonishing story of overcoming a childhood filled with obstacles to achieve enormous success in life. Throughout Byron's difficult youth-his parents separated when he was twelve and his mother worked two jobs to make ends meet-he suffered from a debilitating stutter. But Byron was keeping an even more embarrassing secret: He was also functionally illiterate. For a kid from innercity-Baltimore, it was a recipe for failure. Pitts turned struggle into strength and overcame both of his impediments.

Along the way, a few key people "stepped out on nothing" to make a difference for him-from his mother, who worked tirelessly to raise her kids right and delivered ample amounts of tough love, to his college roommate, who helped Byron practice his vocabulary and speech. Through it all, he persevered, following his steadfast passion. After fifteen years in local television, he landed a job as a correspondent for CBS News in 1998, and went on to become an Emmy Award-winning journalist and a correspondent for 60 Minutes. From a challenged youth to a career covering 9/11 and Iraq, Pitts's triumphant and uplifting story will resonate with anyone who has felt like giving up in the face of seemingly insurmountable hardships.

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The Groveland Four:
The Sad Saga of a Legal Lynching
by Gary Corsair

The Groveland Four: The Sad Saga of a Legal Lynching is the shocking, but true story of prejudice, violence, corruption, courage and redemption that made international headlines. Gary Corsair's account is based on exhaustive research into one of the most notorious Civil Rights cases of all time, a case that began when a 17-year-old Florida girl reported being kidnapped and raped by four Negro men on July 16, 1949.Here for the first time anywhere, are the vivid memories of those who lived the nightmares of blood-thirsty mobs, police brutality, lying witnesses, Ku Klux Klan terrorists, manufactured evidence, and murder by the very men sworn to uphold the law. The Groveland Four: The Sad Saga of a Legal Lynching is the product of exclusive interviews with the only surviving defendant, relatives of the men who died for a crime they swore they didn't commit, another’s with first-hand knowledge of the events that have polarized Lake County, Florida, for 50-plus years. Corsair also gained access to legal files untouched for 50 years that reveal rare insights into the men who fought to save the defendants and cast serious doubts on the guilty verdicts rendered by all-white juries.