Overview

While doing research for a term paper on civil rights for his ninth-grade civics class in the spring of 1976, Mike Marshall found an article in Time magazine about William Moore, a thirty-five-year-old postman from Binghamton, New York. On the afternoon of April 20, 1963, Moore arrived at the Chattanooga bus station from Washington, D.C., where he strapped on his protest signs. He planned to walk to the governor’s mansion in Jackson, Mississippi, and hand-deliver a letter to Governor Ross Barnett. On the third day of his walk, he pushed his cart through Keener, Alabama—about fifteen miles north of Gadsden and twenty miles from Marshall’s paternal grandparents’ home. He stopped at a general merchandise store, ate a can of corn and a pecan pie, and read the afternoon newspaper. About an hour later, he rounded a curve that hugged a small park and saw a black car parked under a walnut tree, its headlights and motor off. “The Sand Mountain area between Chattanooga, Tenn., and Gadsden, Ala., is no place for pilgrims,” read the opening paragraph of the Time story. “It is a land of mountaineers who tote rifles in their cars, glare in suspicion at strangers, and believe unshakably in racial segregation. Last month William Moore . . . thought he might change things by walking through the area displaying civil rights signs. It cost him his life; he was found shot dead on U.S. Highway 11.” No Place for Pilgrims is Marshall’s effort to fulfill a promise to both himself and his dying mother—a promise she did not want him to keep: to solve one of the only remaining civil rights cold cases. And once Marshall discovered who the killer actually was, he also figured out why his mother didn’t want him to “go stirring up trouble.”

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Reviews

If the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, then Mike Marshall’s No Place for Pilgrims invites us to remember the human cost of that arc. Like Henry David Thoreau, William Moore was a one-man counter-friction against the machine of prejudice in the Civil Rights Era South. Moore’s journey ended abruptly in the small community of Keener, Alabama, when he was assassinated under a black walnut tree, and although a clear suspect emerged, no one was ever tried for Moore’s murder. Framed by a personal quest for answers, woven with local lore, and supported by meticulous research, Marshall’s haunting narrative urges readers to consider that, rather than an arc, justice must be found in the completion of a circle—we must go back to the beginning. -- Lesa Carnes Shaul * author of Midnight Cry: A Shooting on Sand Mountain * Veteran Alabama reporter Mike Marshall draws on personal ties to uncover the true story of the last civil rights cold case. After more than twenty years of research and hundreds of hours of oral interviews, Marshall cuts through the red herrings of the case to reveal that the murderer remained a free man living amongst his family, friends, and neighbors, all of whom protected their white supremacist society. This riveting read shows the horrors of how complicit communities and its leaders—from grassroots preachers and Klansmen to governors and federal agents—can be in covering up crimes designed to maintain the status quo. -- Glenn T. Eskew * author of But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle * In 1963, a gunman killed William Moore, a Baltimore postman and civil rights activist, as he walked down the highway near Gadsden, Alabama, on his way to hand-deliver a letter protesting racial discrimination to Mississippi’s Governor Ross Barnet. More than sixty years later, in a gripping true-life detective story, Mike Marshall has not only identified the killer, but he has also placed the murder of William Moore in a rich historical context, describing a white community gripped by a fierce desire to silence ‘invaders, traitors, and agitators.’ -- Dan Carter * author of Unmasking the Klansman: The Double Life of Asa and Forrest Carter * In No Place for Pilgrims, Mike Marshall has given us a riveting, meticulously researched account of a mostly forgotten civil rights murder—the curious case of William Moore, who was fatally shot in the hill country of northern Alabama. Nearly forty years after the crime, Marshall, a writer with deep family roots near the scene of the murder, set out on a quest of his own to determine who did it. This gripping, beautifully written—and deeply disturbing—book is the result of Marshall’s obsession. You will not be able to put it down. -- Frye Gaillard * author of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost * Mike Marshall has not only written a Pulitzer-worthy chronicle of an often-overlooked white civil rights warrior, mail carrier William Moore, but has pieced together the puzzle of his death in a compelling narrative that solves the mystery of his murder once and for all. No Place for Pilgrims is an important contribution to the history of the civil rights movement and the South through portraits of courage and hate at a moment in time where we do not seem to have enough of the former and too much of the latter. -- Doug Jones * attorney and former United States Senator *

If the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, then Mike Marshall’s No Place for Pilgrims invites us to remember the human cost of that arc. Like Henry David Thoreau, William Moore was a one-man counter-friction against the machine of prejudice in the Civil Rights Era South. Moore’s journey ended abruptly in the small community of Keener, Alabama, when he was assassinated under a black walnut tree, and although a clear suspect emerged, no one was ever tried for Moore’s murder. Framed by a personal quest for answers, woven with local lore, and supported by meticulous research, Marshall’s haunting narrative urges readers to consider that, rather than an arc, justice must be found in the completion of a circle—we must go back to the beginning. -- Lesa Carnes Shaul * author of Midnight Cry: A Shooting on Sand Mountain * Veteran Alabama reporter Mike Marshall draws on personal ties to uncover the true story of the last civil rights cold case. Based on more than twenty years of research and hundreds of hours of oral interviews, Marshall cuts through the red herrings of the case to reveal that the murderer remained a free man living amongst his family, friends and neighbors, all of whom protected their white supremacist society. This riveting read shows the horrors of how complicit communities and its leaders—from grassroots preachers and Klansmen to governors and federal agents—can be in covering up crimes designed to maintain the status quo. -- Glenn T. Eskew * Distinguished University Professor, Georgia State University *

Author Information

MIKE MARSHALL is a former longtime journalist for the Huntsville Times who spent decades telling stories about trappers, moonshiners, cockfighters, tent revivals, and snake-handling churches. He has won more than seventy state and national writing awards and is the only writer in Alabama history to win the state’s top sportswriting award for three consecutive years. Marshall is a native of Huntsville, Alabama.

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