Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat widely hyped as a future White House contender, is finding himself on uneasy ground as questions mount over a dramatic family story he has repeatedly used to frame his rise — and America’s past.
For years, Moore has told audiences that his grandfather was driven from South Carolina by the Ku Klux Klan, a tale meant to underscore both the nation’s racial sins and Moore’s own historic ascent as Maryland’s first Black governor. The story has been a staple of his public persona, invoked in interviews, podcasts, and glossy magazine profiles.
“I am literally the grandson of someone who was run out of this country by the Ku Klux Klan, right?” Moore told Time magazine in 2023 while discussing how he balances patriotism with America’s “racist past.”
“Right? So the fact that I can be both this grandson of someone who was run outta this country by the Ku Klux Klan, and also be the first Black governor in the history of the state of Maryland.”
Moore has consistently identified that relative as his grandfather, James Thomas, a minister who served in South Carolina in the early 20th century. In a 2020 appearance on the Yang Speaks podcast — tellingly titled “Wes Moore on how the KKK ran his family into exile” — Moore described Thomas as being forced to flee Winnsboro, South Carolina, under threat from the Klan, eventually relocating to Jamaica.
But a recent report from the Washington Free Beacon throws cold water on that version of events.
According to the report, church archives, diocesan records, and contemporaneous newspaper accounts paint a far less cinematic picture. Rather than a covert escape prompted by racial terror, Thomas’s move to Jamaica appears to have been a formal, public reassignment within the Protestant Episcopal Church after he was appointed to replace a deceased pastor.
The records further suggest that Thomas’s church in Pineville, South Carolina, was well regarded by the local White community for its medical outreach, with no documented references to racial conflict or Klan intimidation during his tenure. Not exactly the stuff of a midnight flight from hooded mobs.
Still, the timing couldn’t be worse for Moore. The controversy adds to a growing list of questions about his personal narrative — including past scrutiny of his military record and an Oxford University thesis — issues that have resurfaced online as Democrats quietly size him up as a possible 2028 contender.
Critics on social media were quick to pile on.
“Moore is reaching Biden levels of fabulism,” National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru wrote.
“Hoo boy,” Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume added. “Read this, and the post it is in response to.”
“We’re not going to litigate a family’s century-old oral history with a partisan outlet,” Moore spokesperson Ammar Moussa told Fox News Digital. “The broader reality is not in dispute: intimidation and racial terror were pervasive in the Jim Crow South, and it rarely came with neat documentation. Even Bishop William Alexander Guerry — whom they cite to suggest there was no hostility — was later murdered amid intense backlash tied to his racial equality work. The Governor is focused on doing the job Marylanders elected him to do.”
