Margarita Romo, an advocate for seasonal and migrant farm workers, Judge James B. Sanderlin, and Harry T. and Harriet Moore, who were murdered Christmas night in 1951 for their activism, were selected Wednesday to the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
Romo is executive director of Farmworkers Self-Help Inc., which provides immigration assistance, job training and courses on immigration, as well as a free medical clinic, after-school programs for teens, free loaves of bread for the hungry, and the Normal Learning Center for children ages 12 and younger. She has also established Agricultural Women Involved in New Goals and championed improvements to Tommytown, a poor farm-worker community on the north end of Dade City.
Sanderlin, who died in 1990, was the lead attorney in a 1964 classroom segregation case that led to desegregation in Hillsborough and Sarasota Counties. He also led a group of sanitation workers in a four-month strike for better pay for African-American sanitation workers in St. Petersburg and represented 12 black police officers known as the “Courageous Twelve” in ending discriminatory assignments in segregated neighborhoods.
Harry T. Moore, founder of the first branch of the NAACP in Brevard County, led civil-rights efforts on issues such as equal pay, investigating lynching and voter registration. The Moores, whose nomination was jointly filed, were killed by a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan.
The inductees were selected by Gov. Rick Scott from a list of 10 nominees proposed by the Florida Commission on Human Relations.
