Maryland governor Wes Moore, who is widely expected to seek the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, has a powerful family story of racial injustice that he repeatedly tells during public speeches: His grandfather, as a small boy, fled 1920s Charleston with his family in the dead of night after his father—a prominent black minister and Moore’s great-grandfather—angered the Ku Klux Klan with sermons condemning racism. Narrowly escaping a lynching, the family took refuge in Jamaica. But Moore’s grandfather, just six years old at the time, vowed to return to America, where he eventually raised a grandson who made history in 2022 by becoming Maryland’s first black governor.
It’s a story straight out of Hollywood, and it was a central feature of Moore’s 2022 campaign stump speech, in which he described a version of American patriotism wherein “loving your country does not mean lying about its history.” Moore first told the tale of his exiled grandfather in a 2014 memoir and has since retold it countless times as he seeks to reclaim patriotism for the Democratic Party and to contextualize his own unlikely rise to power.
But there’s a problem with Moore’s story: It’s flatly contradicted by historical records and is almost certainly false.
Moore’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side, the Rev. Josiah Johnson Thomas, did preach in the 1920s at a church in Pineville, S.C., about 65 miles north of Charleston. But historical records housed at the archives of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of South Carolina undercut the three main elements of Moore’s story—that Thomas suddenly fled the country in secret, that he was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, and that he was a prominent preacher who spoke from the pulpit against racism.
Detailed church archival records, as well as contemporary newspaper coverage, indicate that Thomas, a Jamaica native, on Dec. 13, 1924, made an orderly and public transfer from South Carolina to the island of his birth, where he was appointed to succeed a prominent Jamaican pastor who had died unexpectedly a week earlier, on Dec. 6, 1924. Amid the copious documentation of the life and career of Moore’s great-grandfather, there is no mention of trouble with the Klan, which operated openly in 1920s South Carolina but never had a chapter operating out of Pineville, according to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Mapping of the Second Ku Klux Klan.
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Moore falsely claimed that he was born and grew up in Baltimore, which he did not; that he was inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn’t exist; that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not; that in 2006 he was considered a foremost expert on radical Islam based on his graduate thesis, which he never submitted to Oxford University’s library and can no longer locate; that he was a doctoral candidate at Oxford in 2006, a claim he has no documentation to support and on which Oxford refuses to comment; and that he had “a difficult childhood in the Bronx and Baltimore” despite attending New York City’s elite, private Riverdale Country School—where John F. Kennedy went to school—as a child and not living in Baltimore until college, when he attended Johns Hopkins University, another elite private school.
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{snip} Moore’s great-grandfather made no mention of the Ku Klux Klan or any sort of dramatic escape from America when he spoke to the newspaper about his return to Jamaica. The paper reported that Thomas “laboured in the States for a number of years, and like many other Jamaicans he has returned to his native land to work among his people.”
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The historical record lacks any evidence to support Moore’s claim that the KKK targeted his great-grandfather because of sermons decrying racism. Then-South Carolina bishop William Guerry, best known for his work to advance racial equality in South Carolina, reported to the National Council of the Episcopal Church in 1924 that the white community in Pineville, S.C., held the church where Thomas preached in high regard for the work it commissioned for the black community.
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The post Wes Moore Says the KKK Chased His Great-Grandfather Out of South Carolina. Historical Records Tell a Different Story. appeared first on American Renaissance.
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