The Execution of Martin Moore: Racial Injustice in the 1930s U.S. Justice System

During the summer of 1936, Helen Clevenger, an honor student at New York University, accompanied her Uncle William on a tour of North Carolina. But after a week on the road, one morning William received no answer to his repeated knocks on Helen’s door at the Battery Park Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. Panicked, he tried the knob and had to force his way into the room. Helen’s body blocked the door. She had been shot through the chest, her face badly beaten. The murder made national headlines. Local authorities scrambled for weeks to make an arrest. Finally, with the eyes of the nation upon them, the sheriff’s office requested help from two detectives from New York City. Only 48 hours later, Martin Moore, a 22-year-old African-American hotel employee, confessed to the crime while in police custody. The state appointed Moore two white lawyers, who attempted to block the introduction of his confession on the grounds that he confessed under duress and promises of leniency. When called to the stand, Moore testified that during questioning he was beaten for 20 minutes by “a fat man from New York with a piece of rubber hose,” who told him that if he “didn’t own up to [the murder] he’d whip [him] to death.” Yet, after the four-day trial, an all-white jury returned a guilty verdict in under an hour. Less than four months later, after again repudiating his confession, Martin Moore was executed in North Carolina’s gas chamber