How I got out of jail and ran for governor of Indiana : the Jim Moore story as told to Claire Burch /

"Jim Moore, although over ninety-years old is still active in developing ideas that will benefit people. Despite partial blindness and a peacemaker, he delivers newspapers every day, plans and distributes leaflets, speaks out wherever he goes against poverty and injustice, and spends his spare time trying to get housing for the homeless. In 1931, under his birth name of Theodore Luesse, he went to prison for twenty-one months for "obstructing the legal process." What he was obstructing were evictions in Indiana during the Great Depression. He obstructed evictions of jobless people because of his deep belief that every person has a right to live, just because he is alive. All his arrests have been for a social cause. Since the government protects the habitats of animal life, it was Jim's belief that this same protection should extend to human beings." -- from editor's note

Claire Burch interviews famed social justice advocate Jim Moore. Moore discusses in depth his working-class upbringing in rural Batesville, Indiana during the Great Depression. It was from this milieu that he developed class-consciousness after being sent to jail for twenty-ones months for attempting to halt Depression-era evictions. So began what would be a lifelong passion for housing advocacy for the working class. In Moore's own words, "This kind of society produces all kinds of antagonism, all kinds of contradictions, all kinds of hatred, all kinds of exploitation, all kinds of wars, depressions, and plagues, starvation, and diseases. It needs to be replaced by a society that will benefit all the people instead of just the few, that doesn't know any national lines, a society that will exist for the benefit of the people as a whole. That is socialism."