From the time of their occurrence up to the present, people have constructed and revised narratives about violent racial events in Florida. In the case of the racial violence in Ocoee and the lynching of July Perry, multiple accounts coexisted until one particular group in the 1990's contested earlier conservative white Southern narratives with new public memories containing African American perspectives of the events, demanding racial justice and memorialization of the events. A struggle over the power to construct this narrative resulted in compromises between the two sets of memories. While some goals were attained, the landscape of memorization remains undeveloped. The construction of a narrative concerning the meaning of Harry T. Moore's life and death entered the public domain at his death and remained unchanging, carried forward by the collective memories of African Americans in Florida. Historians reassessed his role as a martyr for civil rights to the first martyr of the Civil Right's Movement. A group of African Americans in Brevard County were successful in attaining resources that included landscape and a memorial complex during the 1990's and the first decade of 2000. The construction of public memories and the power to gain landscape and resources for commemoration reflected the aims and power of each group. Because the public memories of July Perry were contested, the group could not attain commemorative landscapes. However, the narratives about Harry T. Moore had consensus, allowing significant commemorations.

This study investigates the role music played in the Civil Rights Movement as a form of political protest. The first part of the studies analyzed how political protest music was used in the early part of the twentieth-century leading up to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. An analysis of the role of music in African-American culture also provides a historical background to the music-making of the Civil Rights Movement. Specific musical forms such as topical ballads, freedom songs, and spirituals are examined. In addition, musical influences of African culture as well as religious influences on music-making during the Civil Rights Movement are also examined. The second section of the paper investigates the life and murder of NAACP organizer Harry T. Moore of Mims, Florida. Moore’s life and death became the subject of a topical ballad, “The Ballad of Harry T. Moore”, composed in 2001 by musical group Sweet Honey In The Rock. An analysis of the song’s, literary, political, and musical connections to the ideology and music of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as subject matter, gives evidence that places the song within the tradition of the musical protest activities of the Civil Rights Movement