Douglas E. Moore (July 23, 1928 – August 22, 2019) was a Methodist minister who organized the 1957 Royal Ice Cream Sit-in in Durham, North Carolina.
The sit-in failed to challenge segregation in the short run, and Moore's actions provoked a myriad of negative reactions from many white and African-American leaders, who considered his efforts far too radical.
A new wave of young African-American students, inspired by the actions of the Royal Ice Cream protestors, adopted Moore's agenda, helping to bring about the desegregation of the city's public facilities.
His work with the sit-in helped to spur the creation of “local movement centers”, which facilitated the collective actions of African-Americans seeking to bring about an end to segregation throughout North Carolina and the region in years to come.
[2] In addition, Moore's idea of a group that used the power of nonviolence, using Christianity as an ideological base, ultimately became the symbol of a new era of activism and civil rights in the United States.
Shortly after earning a Bachelor of Arts from North Carolina College in 1949, Moore enrolled at Boston University as a divinity student in 1951.
After his family was denied admission to the then all-white Long Meadow Park swimming pool in 1957, Moore appealed to Durham recreation officers, to no avail.
[9] The sit-in soon turned into a protracted court battle: seeking an ally in his fight for the desegregation of public facilities, Moore hired Floyd McKissick, a prominent African-American attorney, to sue Royal Ice Cream.
Moore failed to communicate to the sit-in participants all of the possible consequences of their actions: Virginia Williams and Mary Clyburn, two of the protestors, claimed in later interviews that they had not expected to be arrested.
Moore's actions came as a surprise to many and threatened to upset the delicate balance that existed in Durham, resulting in a backlash against the protestors from the city's African-American community.
As Moore himself later revealed, there was doubt as to whether or not this would be a good idea, due to the fact that the parlor's owner, Louis Coletta, was a Greek American and a minority himself.
For instance, a group of young girls held regular pickets outside of the parlor under the direction of McKissick, despite being members of the Durham NAACP, which had refused to publicly support Moore.
[17] After several years of legal action, the Royal Ice Cream Parlor finally desegregated along with the rest of the city's public facilities in 1963.
However, the message had been sent, and by the end of the week, students in Charlotte, Raleigh, Winston-Salem, and Fayetteville had joined in the sit-in movement, frightening white store owners by dressing well and staying dignified.
In it, he detailed his own experiences with the desegregation of buses in North Carolina and Virginia, noting that by relying “completely upon the force of love and Christian witness”, he was able to achieve his goals.
[21] Moore led a group of young Durham activists called “ACT”, which met at church every Sunday to talk about how to test the limits of the South's Jim Crow laws.
For instance, Moore supported the efforts of McKissick to spread the gospel of direct action to African-American students in North Carolina.
Lawson, like Moore, taught college students at his church in Nashville how to resist violence and employ the power of love to fight against segregation.
Activists around the South were soon making similar moves, thanks to networks set up by Moore and his allies, whose work also helped to popularize what became known as “local movement centers”.
These centers can be conceptualized as “micro-social structures” that facilitated the collective actions of African-American activists, especially students, across North Carolina and the rest of the South.
[28] Spending several years as a missionary in the Belgian Congo, he gradually underwent a change in his political views, adopting an even more radical, anti-colonial stance.
Exhibiting behavior that contradicted his peaceful teachings of the past, Moore was convicted in 1976 of assaulting a white tow truck driver and put under probation.
Rarely budging from his agenda of activism, which was often perceived as radical, Moore received plenty of criticism from whites and African-Americans alike, especially after the short-term failure that came to be known as the Royal Ice Cream Sit-in.
Moore achieved many successes in his fight against segregation by allying with other prominent civil rights activists and inspiring a new generation of young, African-American student protestors.
Although he rejected some of the causes he had once espoused so fervently later on in his life, by combining his faith with strong leadership, he was able to help bring about much progress in the area of civil rights during a turbulent time in the history of the United States.