Forty Years of Determined Struggle

A Political Portrait of Robert Moore, a Baltimore Leader

By Rudolph Lewis

Some of us are destined to live a charmed life of sacrifice, to place body and soul on the line in pursuit of democratic ideals. Such an individual is Robert B. Moore, a leading Baltimore advocate for the working poor. From his early life to present, we can track a career of commitment to justice, equality, and brotherhood. President of 1199E-DC, the leading health care workers union in Maryland, Robert  Moore works vigorously still as a leading representative for a better, healthier, and more prosperous life in Baltimore.

Born in Baltimore, 1944, Robert “Bob” Moore was the first son of Robert Abraham Moore and Willie Alzenia Barber, both migrants from South Carolina. He was raised in working class neighborhoods of East and West Baltimore. His father R.A. Moore was a war veteran and a shop steward for the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) at Bethlehem Steel. His parents were Presbyterian and so he became an active member of Knox Presbyterian Church, Herman Octavious Graham, pastor. Because of his ardent spirit, his love of the Word, many expected that he would become a minister.

Early Years of Activism

While in high school (1960-1963),  Bob became a member of the Jackie Robinson Youth Council of NAACP and participated in numerous church-led picketing and demonstrations. He was among those who picketed BG&E and telephone company. “They claimed they couldn’t find qualified Negroes to read the meters or answer the phones. There was much social denial in those days,” Bob Moore said, as he recalled his childhood exploits.

He also participated in the Gwynn Oak Amusement Park demonstrations. “My first arrest occurred at Gwynn Oak. It was an act of civil disobedience. In 1963, I began to move toward sit-ins. For the most part, the NAACP’s direct action was limited to picketing and passing out leaflets. I fervently believed that any injustice must be challenged as forcefully as was legal or ethical. I saw what other students were doing, sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Those acts took courage and self-control, a knowledge of the self. The youth of my day had to put themselves to the test. The old fears had to be vanquished. The young men and women who dared to say No to gradualism, these were my heroes.  

“On the front line, I was among the first to be arrested with a howling mob throwing projectiles. The News American interviewed me, my picture appeared in the paper. The next day I was fired from my job at a  car wash. Reverend Herman O. Graham of Knox Presbyterian Church was one of the leaders of that demonstration. That our minister was involved softened my parents criticisms. I was also involved in the 1962/1963 Freedom Rides to local restaurants, to desegregate restaurants such as White Tower and those in little Italy. I was young then. Gradually I came to believe the churches were not doing all it could do.”

In 1963, Bob graduated from Frederick Douglass High School and began classes at Morgan State College for the Spring semester. A superior wrestler in his weight class, Robert Moore won in his freshman year the CIAA Wrestling Championship.  Months later, President John F. Kennedy made a televised speech in which he asked Congress to pass a civil rights act. Bob heeding the call joined 200,000 people in the nation’s capital to march from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial “for jobs and freedom.” He heard Martin’s “I have a Dream Speech” and he heard the young John Lewis, chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Later that summer, September 15, four black girls were killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. These were dangerous times to be involved in political protest. At nineteen, he participated in the Northwood Theater demonstrations, which involved civil disobedience and arrest. Morgan students involved in the Northwood affair caused much concern for Dr. Jenkins, then the president of the college. Bob has done some reevaluation of his own political militancy. “I have since learned there is more than one side to a question. For Dr. Jenkins and others, there was a real question of institutional jeopardy. Morgan was receiving state funds.”

Morgan State, Student Policies, & U-JOIN

While at Morgan, Bob became a founder of Dissent (1963- ), a Morgan State student group, Dr. Clifford DuRand was the student advisor. Dissent was primarily a study group that considered local and national policies and political ideologies. But many of the students involved became activists. Some of them, like Bob, belonged also to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  

“My influences and contacts expanded when I began to attend student conferences. There were students from Harvard and other schools on the east and west coasts. I gained a national sense of the Movement. The 1963 conference recruited students to do volunteer work in the South, including the 1964 Mississippi Project. I didn’t go to Mississippi because I didn’t have the money to pay my way. So I remained in Baltimore. Here, SDS was mainly a Hopkins students’ thing. But there were others involved. We wanted to make the struggle for the everyday life of the poor more concrete. So we created a Baltimore project – Union for Jobs or Income Now (U-JOIN). U-JOIN wanted to go beyond the issues of public accommodation and job discrimination. We had two offices, one on South Broadway, manned by a white staff, and another on Gay Street, manned by a black staff. But we had one staff meeting.  

“Our first initiative was to involve poor people in building organizations. We monitored policies that affected the community and organized teach-ins. We acted on what community people believed were there most pressing problems with landlords and local businessmen. We organized rent strikes. We tried to organize the unemployed, but found that was near impossible. We made considerable gains in organizing welfare recipients, which eventually grew into a welfare rights organization, headed by Peggy McCarthy.”

In early 1964, Bob Moore testified before a Baltimore City Council committee holding hearings on poverty in Baltimore. “Donald Schaefer chaired the committee hearing on funding. He mistakenly thought I was for the funding and called me forward as a person living in the target area. I stated U-JOIN’s position: The funding did not generate jobs. Ironically, the conservative wing headed by John Pica, of the third district, supported our position. This bout with the Health and Welfare Council, a local white philanthropic society, was a win for U-JOIN and its director Walter Lively, my mentor, who went on to become the head of the Baltimore Urban Coalition. His premature demise robbed Baltimore of a great leader. Many expected him to be Baltimore’s first black mayor.”

Overall 1964 was a pivotal year for the Movement. There was both tragedy and great hope. Freedom Summer in Mississippi was a ringing success with over 800 students volunteers registering thousands of African Americans and organizing 200 Mississippi black youth into forty-two Freedom Schools, despite KKK terror. Three civil rights workers – Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner – were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. President Johns signs Civil Rights Act, July 2, 1964.

Fall of 1964, Bob left Morgan State College and became a full-time staff member with U-JOIN. “We were also involved in community coalitions to stop urban renewal, especially the proposed demolition along the Route 40 corridor. That effort developed later into the Relocation Action Movement (RAM), an organization that tried to get more pay for their homes and assistance in purchasing other suitable housing.” That fall he also became a member of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). “At the Chicago conference, Thanksgiving 64, I joined YPSL. My first meeting was a whirlwind of ideas and activities. The right wing of the party didn’t believe in having a labor party. To keep them from gaining leadership, we dissolved the organization.”

New York & SNCC

Bob resigned his position with U-JOIN and went to New York where he worked with New York SNCC until fall 1965. Spring 65, King and others organized a Selma to Montgomery March. The Alabama State Troopers at Edmund Pettus Bridge repelled the demonstrators; March 7, 1965, became know as “Bloody Sunday.” Bob Moore participated in a march on Washington in support of federal intervention. “We walked the forty or so miles between Baltimore and Washington, down Route 1. There was some name calling by locals in Laurel, the usual demeaning names used by whites in those days. We were about a hundred, members of U-JOIN, the Northern Student Movement, and SDS. We camped out before the White House, held a vigil of protest and provided teach-ins. We wanted the marchers to be protected by the FBI and national guard.” The Selma to Montgomery marchers, 3200, arrived safely March 25, 1965, and were given a victory address by Reverend King.

Fall 1965, Bob Moore left New York for Lowndes County, Alabama, about twenty miles from Tuskeegee. “I arrived in time for the funeral of Sammy Young, a young black murdered for wanting to use a restroom at a service station. Lowndes County and its repressive political system gave birth to the black panther as a symbol of revolutionary struggle. SNCC’s Alabama Project developed the Lowndes County Freedom Party, the panther became its symbol. Huey and the Panthers later adopted the symbol for their use in Oakland. . . . My work in Alabama was much like that in Baltimore. We tried to build organizations among the poor so they could improve their lives.”

 Early 1966 to the fall of 1967 Bob worked in the Atlanta City Project. “We did the kind of organizing I had done in Baltimore. We had what we called ‘the nitty gritty bus’, a van with speakers. We would ride into a neighborhood, play music and invite people to meetings.” That spring he also had to report to the Selective Service Board in Baltimore on Franklintown Road. “I went there with objections to the Vietnam War. For me, the  real struggle was not in Vietnam, against communists, Vietcong, 10,000 miles on the other side of the world. What was happening inside of America topped all of that. The real enemy of America could not be a Vietnamese peasant with a machete and a bowl of rice. I knew that race and poverty were the urgent issues America needed to resolve. And I wanted to be an agent in that resolution.” In 1966, SNCC became the first civil rights organization to oppose the Vietnam War.  

The last three years of SNCC (1966-1969) were thrilling, elevating, and instructive. “At a meeting in the Catskills, spring 1996, SNCC changed its leadership and focus. Stokeley Carmichael, a field secretary, replaced John Lewis, SNCC’s chairman for about six years. Many young people had turned from King as icon to Malcolm, who came to Alabama by SNCC invitation.  So nationalism became a factor in SNCC deliberations. Whites in SNCC were encouraged to start their own groups in white communities to organize against racism. Positions were taken in support of the Palestinian struggle for independence and security. All brands of militant ideas spring up in SNCC.”

In Greenwood, Mississippi, Carmichael, as  chair of SNCC, addressing a crowd of 3200, raised the crowd of “Black Power.” This slogan galvanized black youth from Newark to Oakland. “There was much confusion, though we all meant well. We believed fervently that black people needed to rediscover themselves, so there was much criticism that became personal and hurtful. We all had some white friend or wife or husband. There was much bitterness and backbiting. Our executive secretary James Forman, strategist and fund-raiser (contacts with Belafonte), was married to a Jewish woman.  Many black women were married to or dated Jewish men. Despite it all, the struggle had to go on. Organizations for the working poor had to be built. The struggle had to be enhanced; the contradictions made more apparent. Black people had to gain more say over their own lives, see themselves through their own eyes. The way we went about it was problematic, but the basic thrust was sound.”

Vietnam & Other Projects

In a demonstration at the Atlanta Selective Service Board, Bob was arrested in a protest against the Vietnam War. “Insulted by one of the female demonstrators, the cops went wild, swinging sticks and choking demonstrators. The federal government charged us with injuring government property and preventing a citizen from reporting to the Selective Service. The property charge was a misdemeanor; the other a felony. Some, like Donald Stone and Larry Fox, received three years. The case was appealed; the Supreme Court refused to hear it. Charged and convicted, in 1970, I delivered myself up for imprisonment and served four months of a six-month sentence at Allenwood prison. I was  elected Treasurer of 1199E-DC while I paid my dues to the struggle at Allenwood prison, convicted on the absurd charge of causing a pin to come out of a hinge in the door at the Atlanta Selective Service office.”

Bob also participated in the Selma Project, Summer 1966. He helped to register people to vote and organize a farm co-op. 

The fall of 1967, after continued work in Atlanta, Bob decided to return to his hometown, Baltimore, to continue his political work. “By that time the Civil and Voting Rights bills had been signed by Johnson. Northern volunteers in the South had declined since 1964. SNCC’s 1966-1967 policies isolated whites. Financial consideration became secondary to organizational policies. With liberal money drying up, field secretaries had to generate the finances for their projects and programs in the community.

“By his 1966 Chicago Project, King sent a signal that the Movement was moving into the Northern ghettoes. At home in Baltimore, I could eke out an existence while I set up a project to further SNCC goals and policies. Being dormant, Baltimore, I believed, could benefit from SNCC’s vibrancy, an element lacking in the Baltimore Movement. SNCC gained national attention and focus under the leadership of Carmichael and Rap Brown. Stokeley had headed for Washington, DC, and King was on his way there with the Poor People’s campaign. So my return north to Baltimore seemed right.”

Baltimore & Black Power

When he returned in 1968 to set up a Baltimore SNCC office, having organized in Baltimore, New York, Alabama, and Georgia, Bob Moore was a Movement veteran. He was then only twenty-three years old. “I received considerable attention by the local Baltimore media early February 1968.” The Johnson administration nationally and that of D’Allesandro’s locally campaigned for a war on crime. SNCC viewed the summer riots in urban cities as legitimate expressions of repressed rage that resulted from decades of inhuman treatment. “I seized the crime issue. It had its shock value and everyone thereafter knew that things would not be the same.”

After The SUN reported Bob’s position, Clarence Mitchell, a Negro then state senator from Baltimore, claimed the floor on personal privilege to denounce SNCC and Bob Moore. He claimed Bob’s statements were bigoted and he questioned Bob’s standing in the community. Well-known and established members of the black community gathered about Bob to ward off such verbal attacks by Mitchell and his ilk. (See February 8 and 10, 1968 issues of The SUN.) These leaders included Vernon Dobson of Union Baptist, Homer Favor of the Urban Studies Institute  at Morgan State, Joseph C. Howard, then an assistant state’s attorney; and Walter Lively, executive director of the Baltimore Urban Coalition. They supported Bob’s call for a civilian police board and the abolition of dual standards of justice.

“The Mitchell Incident and SNCC’s support by leading black citizens laid the foundation for building black unity and a Black United Front in Baltimore, one of the main aims of SNCC to develop political power. This change in the black perspective became evident after the Baltimore Riot of 1968 that followed the assassination of Reverend King. To a gathered group of black leaders, Spiro Agnew, then governor of Maryland, accused and chastised them for giving comfort to black radicals. He had me in mind. In effect, he made them responsible for the burning and looting in Baltimore. A few walked out in protest; the dam burst and most flooded out of the meeting. Agnew gained national fame for knowing how to handle backsliding Negro leaders. As a result, he later went on to become Vice President during Nixon’s administration. Some say he gained national stature as a result of my political organizing in Baltimore.”

On May 1968, Bob Moore married Sheila Lewis. The Reverend Frank Williams, a Movement minister, conducted the services. He also had a Nigerian wedding at the Soul School, the services conducted by Shaguna Lumumba, a well-known cultural nationalist. Together Sheila and Bob had two sons: Mahadi and Kakari.  Fall 1968, Bob was hired as an organizer by AFSCME to organize election wins of the sanitation workers. “The aftermath of King’s assassination led to a more militant, more organized effort to achieve fights around community control of schools, black electoral power, an end to poverty. The atmosphere was one of people pushing forward with a unified agenda for more political say in things that impact life in the city.”

Baltimore, 1199 & Health Care Worker

March 1969, Bob Moore began work with 1199, the National Organizing Committee of Hospital and Health Care Workers. Fred Punch was the lead organizer, sent down from Brooklyn, New York. “I saw 1199 as extremely progressive. Unlike many labor unions, 1199 made an alliance with King before he was killed and with SCLC. I was familiar with the concerted efforts of 1199 and SCLC in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1968 strike of 100 days. SCLC also decided to assist in the Baltimore campaign. The hospital and nursing homes then were not covered by NLRB rules. So community support was necessary to galvanize the workers and force the city and state to recognize the right of health care workers to organize in their own interest.

“What I brought to the table as one of the first organizers of the Baltimore/DC organizing drive was that I had established contacts of leading black citizens in Baltimore and Washington. Amazingly, we organized 5000 workers in six months. Nothing like this occurred in any other city 1199 organized in. The Hopkins win was extraordinary. It displayed what can be achieved in building an organization. After the 1970 negotiations, the average wage of our members rose from $1.65 and hour to $2.50. Workers gained paid health insurance, vacation time, and a grievance procedure. These workers gained considerable power on the job and politically as an organization of workers.”             

  In 1974, he ran against Fred Punch; lost, and was reassigned to Rochester where he participated in organizing drives at hospital and nursing homes. In 1976, he returned to Baltimore and worked for the Catholic Charities. He helped to organize the sponsoring committee that later formed Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD).

In 1978, Bob Moore returned to 1199E-DC as Director of Organizing, during the presidency of Ron Holly (1976-1986), the second president of 1199E-DC. “All labor took a whipping during the Reagan Years (1980-1988). After the 1199 strike of 1980, there were takebacks on health care coverage. In 1982, we lost the Benefit Fund. The strikes at Sinai, GBMC and Lutheran were disastrous. We lost closed shop at GBMC, During this period, there was a lack of planning and fullness of thought. We were trying to deal with conflict in the manner we used to organize the union in 1969. By the 80s we had lost the massive community support we enjoyed. Our initial organizing drives were rightly perceived by the community as extensions of the civil rights movement. Negotiating contracts in the 80s was a different story. We didn’t get the community backing we had hoped for. And so we took it on the chin. All unions, all workers lost under Reagan.”

1199 & New Leadership

In 1986, Bob Moore became the third president of 1199E-DC. It was a long journey, 26 years in the struggle. He rose to lead a workers’ organization he had helped to build and that he loved.

“When I became the head of this local, I emphasized that which we had lacked for ten years: how to plan and achieve our goals; how to maximize our efforts and to unify forces within and external to the local. In the last fourteen years, the achievements of our administration have been many. In my first term, hospital contracts came in above inflation and the national average. Since 1990,  nursing home wages have tripled. The minimum now is around $7 an hour; the average nursing home wage will be above $10 an hour after wage increases in the year 2000."