PODCAST: THE FAMILY SECRET

In partnership with. The Moore Family, The Source Historical Consulting, LLC, and Russell Gragg Media

In 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.

After he spent six months in a prison work gang, Nick Moore returned home to his family, and they and their entire community never spoke of it again. That was until Moore’s five granddaughters learned of this horrific act of violence through a story in the High Point newspaper in June of 2017. 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. The sisters even have a photo of the five of them in party dresses surrounding grandparents in party dresses 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?

The Family Secret traces the sisters’ search for answers to this historical mystery. Their investigation took

them back to Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, site of the only successful coup in U.S. history. Then

they discovered a remarkable family history of Black prosperity and power that no one had ever shared

with them. Eventually they traced their family back into enslavement, and maybe even to the origins of

the Carolina colony in the seventeenth century. They discovered that the history of their family, with

both its successes and its horrors, illuminates many of the complexities within the history of North

Carolina and even the nation.

Our 10-episode podcast will share this story from the perspective of the sisters and the team of

historians, museum directors, archivists, and community members who have joined them on this

journey. It’s a remarkable tale, and we need your help to bring it to the public. After you listen to our

preview, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to The Partnership Project’s Whole History

Fund, which is financing this project. We’re hoping to raise $25,000, and 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.