Maryland Governor Wes Moore will likely seek the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. He will ride in shouting about his elite family history. Moore will rail against social and racial injustice.
His life story is dramatic. His great-grandfather was a prominent Black minister who angered the Klu Klux Klan with sermons condemning racism. He narrowly escaped a lynching, and the family had to take refuge in Jamaica. Moore’s grandfather was determined to return to America, and he did, where he raised a grandson who made history as Maryland’s first black governor.
It is a remarkable story, and the only problem is that it’s not true.
Moore’s maternal great-grandfather, the Reverend Josiah Johnson Thomas, did preach in the 1920s at a church in Pineville, SC. Records are housed at the archives of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of South Carolina.
Those documents show that Thomas, a Jamaican native, made an orderly and peaceful public transfer to Jamaica on December 13, 1924. There is no mention of the Klan, which operated openly in the 1920s.
He returned to the island of his birth because he was appointed to succeed a prominent Jamaican pastor who had died a week earlier on December 6th, 1924. There is copious information about the Reverend, but no mention of the Klan.
