PODCAST: MOore FAMILY SECRETS
In collaboration with The Moore Family, The Source Historical Consulting, LLC, Russell Gragg Media, and The Partnership ProjectIn August 1921, Delaware Nixon (Nick) Moore, a prosperous Black barber from High Point, North Carolina, tried to kill his family.
Miraculously, all the family members survived.
In June 2017, Nick Moore’s five granddaughters learned of this horrific hundred-year-old act of violence through a story in the High Point newspaper.
Their childhood memories of their grandparents were shaken. They could not reconcile this story with the gentle and loving couple they remembered from the 1950s. Memories like the five of them in party dresses surrounding their grandparents for Nick and Elizabeth Moore’s fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1955.
If their grandfather had shot their grandmother and attacked their aunts and uncles, how could the family have taken him back?
searching for answers to this historical mystery
the sisters’ investigation took them all across North Carolina and time, back to 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, the site of the only successful coup in U.S. history, revealing the family’s connections to Black prosperity and power that no one had ever before shared with them.
Tracing the Moore family back through enslavement, they may even have roots tied to North Carolina’s founding seventeenth century colony!
The recovered and unfolded discards of the Moore families secrets act as an emblematic example of the hidden complexities and triumphs of many oft overlooked families around the United States.
“…The Affair which is Declared TO have been the most serious Cutting and Shooting SCRAPe ever recorded on the blotter... occurred at the moore home early this morning.”
- Rita Moore (reading from the High Point Enterprise dated for August 15, 1921)
THis 12-episode podcast shareS the perspective of the sisters
and the team of historians, museum directors, archivists, and community members who have joined them on this journey.
A truly remarkable tale, we need your help to bring it to the public. Check out the trailer and please consider making a tax-deductible donation to The Partnership Project’s Whole History Fund, which is financing this project.
It only takes $25,000, to bring the project’s pilot to life.
In honor of the nation’s birthday we’re trying to find 250 people who will each donate $100. If you can donate more that would be wonderful, and of course we appreciate donations of any size.