Consider Harry T. Moore for

state’s new statue, says columnist Beth Kassab.

This week lawmakers finalized a plan to replace an old Confederate statue that has represented the Sunshine State in the nation’s Capitol for 94 years.

Gov. Rick Scott said he’ll likely sign the bill to swap out the tribute to Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, who is famous because his forces were the last Confederate command to surrender but who had very thin ties to Florida.

The question now is who will replace Kirby Smith?

A committee of the state-run Great Floridians program will be required to submit three names to the Legislature for consideration by January.

But, as I’ve written before, the Great Floridian program has a rather loose interpretation of its mandate to honor people “who have made major contributions to the progress and welfare of this state.”

Often it seems the program is used to bestow flattery on anyone who is famous for any reason or who the governor would simply like to curry favor with.

Take Wayne Huizenga, a notable businessman, sure, but who was recognized in 2013 after donating to Scott’s political committee.

Or Hamilton Disston, a late 1800s real-estate developer who dreamed of draining the Everglades and was named to the exclusive list in 2012.

Not exactly the stuff to inspire today’s children.

But I’m here to help. And so can you.

Over the coming months I plan to occasionally highlight people who are worthy of a pedestal in Congress’ National Statuary Hall Collection. Send me your suggestions and together we can make sure the governor and Legislature know who Floridians think would best represent our state.

Each state gets two statues in the hall, and Florida is keeping John Gorrie, the man credited with inventing air conditioning. I think we can all agree Florida would be a far different place without the ability to escape oppressive August afternoons with the downward slide of the thermostat.

Now, my first potential pick: Harry T. Moore, who was ahead of his time.

“Before there was Malcolm X, before there was Martin Luther King Jr., before even Medgar Evers, there was Harry T. Moore,” says Sonya Mallard, coordinator of the museum and park dedicated to the Moores in Mims.

Moore was born in the Panhandle in 1905, graduated from Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach and eventually settled just north of Titusville in Mims, where his wife’s family was from.

By the mid-1940s Harry and Harriette Moore lost their teaching positions at public schools in Brevard County because of their political activism.

Harry Moore took an early leadership role with the NAACP

and focused his efforts on winning equal pay for black teachers, investigating numerous lynchings that took place in Florida and registering people to vote.

Moore also spoke out against the convictions — two later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court — of three black men who were accused of raping a white woman in Lake County. (A fourth man was killed well before the trial even began.) The case, known as the Groveland Four, got the attention of the national NAACP and Thurgood Marshall, who would later become a U.S. Supreme Court justice, as a result of Moore’s work.

By November 1951, though, NAACP dues were falling in Florida and Moore butted heads with the national leadership. He lost his position as leader of the state association.

The next month, on Christmas Day and their 25th wedding anniversary, the Moores’ home exploded while they slept.

Several investigations determined dynamite was planted underneath their bedroom, most likely by suspects tied to the Ku Klux Klan who wanted to quiet Moore. No one was ever charged with the murders.

Today a replica of the Moores’ yellow cottage stands on the original site in Mims along with a museum and event space dedicated to the couple.

Their daughter, Evangeline, helped make sure her family home looked as she remembered it. She died in October at age 85.

A Christmas tree sits trimmed in the front window. A life-size figure of Moore pens a letter at the kitchen table.

The couple had good jobs in the school system. They owned an orange grove.

They could have kept to themselves and led a comfortable life. But they spoke out. And paid with their lives.

Not before, though, they truly did make “major contributions to the progress and welfare of this state.”

Moore was listed as a Great Floridian, though not until 2007. A place in the statuary hall would be an even more fitting tribute.