Moore’s great-grandfather preached at a South Carolina church held in high regard by the white community, before he was transferred to Jamaica to succeed a prominent pastor who had unexpectedly died
CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA—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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Approved ~ MJM
