Cecil Bassett Moore (April 2, 1915 – February 13, 1979) was an American lawyer, politician and civil rights activist who served as president of the Philadelphia NAACP chapter and as a member of Philadelphia's city council. He led protests to desegregate Girard College. Early life and education Moore was born in 1915 in West Virginia. He attended High School in Kentucky but returned to West Virginia to study at Bluefield College. He worked as a traveling insurance salesman and served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. In 1947, after his discharge at Fort Mifflin, he moved to Philadelphia and studied law at Temple University and received his law degree in 1953. Moore attended school at night and financed his studies with a job as a liquor wholesaler. Career Moore cultivated ties with the bar owners to whom he sold his wares and they became an important basis for his political constituency later in his career. He earned a reputation as a no-nonsense lawyer who fought on behalf of his mostly poor, African-American clients concentrated in North Philadelphia. His cases often concerned police brutality, which brought him into conflict with police commander and later police chief, Frank Rizzo. From 1963 to 1967, he served as president of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP. He also served on the Philadelphia City Council. An advocate of militant protest, Moore organized demonstrations against workplace discrimination at construction sites in Philadelphia in 1963 and 1964, and is best remembered for leading a picket against Girard College in 1964, which hastened the desegregation of that school. He was a champion of a wide range of causes central to the Civil Rights Movement, including integration of schools and trade unions, police brutality, and increased political and economic representation for poor African Americans. He attempted to restore order after the unsettling vandalism and violence of the Columbia Avenue riot of 1964. Moore's aggressive manner and confrontational tactics alienated many leaders, black and white, including many within the NAACP who preferred negotiation "behind closed doors" over direct action. He was a fierce critic of established civil rights leaders in Philadelphia, including lawyers A. Leon Higginbotham and Raymond Pace Alexander, and led a successful insurgency to take over the NAACP branch in 1963. Moore recruited NAACP members in working-class neighborhoods, but his harsh criticism of the black bourgeoisie and of white philanthropists led to a decline in