The Ballad Of The Walking Postman (MP3)

    
The Ballad Of The Walking Postman (The Freedom Walk Of William L. Moore)  (2:32)

Today's musical selection tells the story of Bill Moore, a white civil rights protester from Baltimore who was murdered in rural Alabama in April 1963 while on a one man Freedom Walk.  He was killed on the way from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi where he planned to hand deliver to governor Ross Barnett a letter imploring him to accept racial equality and integration. 

On his walk, Moore promoted his agenda by wearing sandwich board type signs reading "Equal Rights For All - Mississippi Or Bust" and "End Segregation In America - Eat At Joe's Both Black & White."

That alone would have been provocative enough to warrant concern for his safety.  But Moore, a committed atheist, also pushed a cart displaying a "wanted" poster adorned with a sketch of Jesus that was captioned "Jesus Christ - Wanted for sedition, criminal anarchy, vagrancy, and conspiring to overthrow the established government."

Moore had been warned of the danger of undertaking the march by himself while carrying such signs through small towns across the deep South, but he was undeterred.   On the third day of his journey, his dead body was found along the side of the road about an hour northeast of Birmingham.  He'd been shot twice in the head.  An arrest was made, but the grand jury neglected to issue an indictment so no one was ever convicted. 

The Ballad Of The Walking Postman was written and produced by Buck Ram, a noted songwriter, arranger and producer who was also the manager of the Platters, for whom he'd written such huge hits as Only You (And You Alone), The Great Pretender, and Magic Touch.

In April 2008, a quartet of activists paid tribute to Moore by completing his march.  They walked the 300 miles from Reece City, Alabama all the way to Jackson to deliver a copy of Moore's letter to the Mississippi governor.  Well, that was the plan, anyway.  When the marchers arrived, the governor, citing a scheduling conflict, was not on hand to accept the letter.

Comments

[djack]

Platters, not Drifters

-Fussy

[Listener Greg G.]

Fixed now. Thanks for catching.

[Hulka]

Phil Ochs also wrote a song about William Moore; it came out on a compilation of demos and outtakes called "The Early Years."

[Doug Schulkind]

Wow! Thank you so much for posting this, Greg. For years I have been playing on my radio show a performance of a poem about Bill Moore written by East German dissident Wolf Biermann. Though it is sung in German—by scholar, critic and Brecht historian Eric Bentley—it never fails to make me weep.

The poem is called "Ballad of the Letter-Carrier William L. Moore of Baltimore," and it appears on the Folkways record, Bentley on Biermann.

I have isolated that track from the RealAudio archive of a show from December 2002. To hear it (you must have a RealAudio Player) click here.

[Listener Greg G.]

Doug, thanks for the information and the links. Glad to know this song struck such a chord with you!

[Ivy]

Thanks for the link to the song Doug. It's very moving. Amazing to think that a poet in East Germany wrote about the civil rights struggle in the States in the 1960s.

[Steve Evans]

Bill Moore, a very brave guy to walk through the southern states advertising his views which must have been highly unpopular at the time - a fact that would have been also made known to him I am sure. A ballad and a story that is bound to have worldwide appeal now as it did in the 1960s.