No Place for Pilgrims

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.”