"The Goddam Boss"

When Philadelphia Negroes went on a rioting, looting rampage that ended only last week, there was only one Negro leader who could conceivably have stopped them. He is Cecil Moore, 49, president of the Philadelphia chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., the city's busiest Negro criminal lawyer, and a brilliant but frightfully demagogic man.

"Cecil has a Jesus Christ complex," said a critic recently. "He thinks he is the self-appointed savior of the Negro in Philadelphia." Retorted Moore: "I'm not self-appointed. I was elected." A committee of 16 Negro leaders last year called him "a man bereft of reason." Two of the 16 were Judge Raymond Pace Alexander, the man who had sponsored Moore for admittance into the Philadelphia Bar Association, and Alexander's wife Sadie, who is chairman of the city's commission on human relations. No sooner had they spoken when Moore got up a sign reading: 15 UNCLE TOMS AND AN AUNT DINAH DON'T SPEAK FOR THE N.A.A.C.P.

"Get." Six months after his 1962 election to the Philadelphia N.A.A.C.P. chapter presidency, Moore broke into print with some remarkable outbursts against Jewish leaders in the civil rights field. He knew of none, he said, who was not "a goddam phony." Later he claimed that he had been misquoted, said that he had really been castigating the whole lot of "socalled Northern white liberals," who are "all a bunch of phonies. I accuse anybody who exploits another group as anti-American. This includes Negroes, Catholics, Jews, newspapers, everybody."

Moore is proud of being "ruthless" when it comes to protecting his dominion. He once got a local CORE group to cancel a demonstration by threatening to send a gang of girls through a CORE picket line. "You won't look very good fighting girls," he warned. And when a Harlem envoy came to Philadelphia to organize a rent strike, Moore gave the man 24 hours to get out of town. The man got. It was Moore who instituted the court battle to stop the city's famed New Year's Day Mummers Parade participants from wearing their traditional blackface. Moore won his point, but the Mummers got the last laugh by parading in pink, red, green, orange and purple faces.

On the Corner. What makes Cecil run? Not money, for despite his huge law practice he is forever broke, spending thousands of dollars to represent indigent Negroes. Personal ambition? Perhaps. Twice he has run for Congress, and twice he has been defeated, but he might try again. Yet what obviously drives him is an inner anger combined with the sharp joy of combat.

Moore comes from West Virginia, graduated from Bluefield State College there, and got his law degree at Temple University in 1953. He fought with the Marines in the Pacific in World War II, turned down a battlefield commission because "second lieutenants don't live long in the Marines." His career as an attorney is flecked with contention. He has been rebuked by judges, fined for contempt of court; both the city civil service commission and the state liquor control board have asked that he be barred from practicing before them.

The N.A.A.C.P. consumes most of Moore's out-of-court time. Twenty months ago, his chapter had a membership of 7,000. Today it is close to 30,000. Ten thousand new members have signed up in 1964 alone. But Moore cares not about mere numbers, and he is contemptuous of all Negroes who do not join him in his own combative spirit.

"I run a grass-roots group," he says, "not a cocktail-party, tea-sipping, fashion-show-attending group of exhibitionists. That's the difference. Those things divide the Negro, separate him into classes. I want nothing to divide the Negro; I want a one-class Negro community. Your so-called middle-class Negro is a 'professional Negro' who doesn't come into contact with the masses. I'd be lost if I had to move up to Mount Airy or one of those places where I'd have to be so damned respectable that I couldn't go out and stand on a street corner on Saturday night. The Negro is always on the corner on Friday or Saturday night. That's where you go to talk."

Moore's chief enemy is "thieving merchants." "Don't mention exploitation to me, I've seen the worst of it. I mean when a man buys a pair of $5 shoes for a dollar a week, he winds up paying $12 for the shoes. And the rotten meat, the packages of chicken that say 5 Ib. and weigh 4 1/2 lb., the stale bread and the high rents. I warned them in 1959 that the exploitation was going to blow the top off. I told them again in 1963, but the merchants did nothing to stop it. Well, the people up there won't wreck those stores again. We'll just boycott them. The only Negro store that got wrecked was owned by a man named Richberg. They thought he was a Jew. A Chinaman up there put a sign on his store saying, "I'm colored too!' ''

"I Do." Last week 90 white and Negro leaders met to form an emergency committee to prevent future riots. "So," sneered Moore, "now the ministers and the liberals and the professional part-time Negroes want to form an emergency committee to stop riots. What the hell do they know about it? Do you know that not one of those bastards even asked me to attend that meeting? I invited myself, so's I could walk out if it didn't go my way."

As it happened, the meeting did not go Moore's way, and Moore walked out. "They don't speak for the Negro," he insisted. "I do. The riots proved that. But not a living soul from my group was there. Those bastards don't want to help the Negro. They just want to perform."

Moore scarcely cares that the national leaders of the N.A.A.C.P. blanch with dismay whenever he moves into action. He just wants equal rights--or maybe a little bit better than equal rights--for Negroes. Gazing around his shabby office near the city courthouse one day last week, Cecil Moore sighed: "I'm sick, I'm tired, I'm bankrupt, and I'm weary of the venality I see on all sides of me." But he is not about to give up. For better or for worse, his cause is his life. And as far as Philadelphia Negroes are concerned, again for better or worse, he assesses his position accurately. "I," he says, "am the goddam boss."

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