One thing to bear in mind as we approach the end of ‘Confederate History' month -- the slaughter of the civil war failed in many ways to solve the problem the planters of the South had created.

Even after the civil war, and the Emancipation Proclamation, the prejudices that under wrote slavery remained. Blacks were still considered property, in attitudes if not in fact. And a great swath of the US South would do every thing within its power to ensure that blacks were never treated as humans with equal rights.

Against such a cultural wasteland, William Moore stands out. A Baltimore postal worker, Moore set out in April of 1963 to walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. He wanted to deliver a letter to Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett urging him to accept integration—which Mississippi along with every other Southern state had thus far refused to accept.

On his walk, Moore wore sandwich boards reading "Equal Rights For All & Mississippi Or Bust" and "End Segregation In America—Eat At Joe's Both Black & White

On April 23, on his third day out, and less than 70 miles into his walk, about an hour northeast of Birmingham, Alabama, Moore was shot twice in the head and killed, his body left by the side of the road. No one has ever been convicted of his murder.

In April of 2008, two people finally completed Moore's walk, traveling the 320 miles from Reese City, Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi. There they delivered Moore's original letter to Mississippi's current governor Haley Barbour. In his letter Moore wrote that "the white man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights." He asked Governor Barnett to "Be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you...." 45 years after Moore’s death, the current governor of Mississippi; Haley Barbour, still refused to accept his letter.

Haymarket riot

When you think of the first of May, consider how many hours you typically work in a day.  That would be 8. But what seems so commonplace as to hardly worth mentioning—an 8 hour work day -- was a hard fought ‘right’ that underlies part of the story behind the infamous Haymarket riot of 1886 and the execution of unjustly accused anarchists.

In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions passed a resolution stating that eight hours would constitute a legal day's work from and after May 1, 1886. The resolution called for a general strike to achieve the goal, since legislative methods had already failed.

The heart of the movement was in Chicago, organized primarily by the anarchist International Working People's Association. Businesses and the state were terrified by the increasingly revolutionary character of the movement and prepared accordingly with hundreds of policemen ordered to stand at the ready.

Predictably, with that much fire power and tension, an incident occurred. On May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works Factory, killing four and wounding many. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality.

The meeting proceeded without incident, and by the time the last speaker was on the platform, the rainy gathering was already breaking up, with only a few hundred people remaining. It was then that 180 cops marched into the square and ordered the meeting to disperse. As the speakers climbed down from the platform, a bomb was thrown at the police, killing one and injuring seventy. Police responded by firing into the crowd, killing one worker and injuring many others. But the deaths caused by the Haymarket riot were just beginning.