Douglas E. Moore

Douglas E. Moore (July 23, 1928 – August 22, 2019) was a Methodist minister who organized the 1957 Royal Ice Cream Sit-in in Durham, North Carolina. Moore entered the ministry at a young age. After finding himself dissatisfied with what he perceived as a lack of action among his divinity peers, he decided to take a more activist course. Shortly after becoming a pastor in Durham, Moore decided to challenge the city's power structure via the Royal Ice Cream Sit-in, a protest in which he and several others sat down in the white section of an ice cream parlor and asked to be served. The sit-in failed to challenge segregation in the short run, and Moore's actions provoked a myriad of negative reactions from many white and African-American leaders, who considered his efforts far too radical. Nevertheless, Moore continued to press forward with his agenda of activism.

Ultimately, however, Moore's plan of using the sit-in to challenge Durham's power structure proved successful. A new wave of young African-American students, inspired by the actions of the Royal Ice Cream protestors, adopted Moore's agenda, helping to bring about the desegregation of the city's public facilities. His actions also had effects that stretched far beyond the boundaries of Durham. Working with activist leaders he had once spurned, including Martin Luther King Jr., and inspired by the actions of students in places such as Greensboro, North Carolina, Moore was able to organize additional sit-ins during the sit-in movement that spread all across the South. His work with the sit-in helped to spur the creation of “local movement centers”, which facilitated the collective actions of African-Americans seeking to bring about an end to segregation throughout North Carolina and the region in years to come.^[2] In addition, Moore's idea of a group that used the power of nonviolence, using Christianity as an ideological base, ultimately became the symbol of a new era of activism and civil rights in the United States.