Top Dem governor under fire after his claims about family history and the KKK are fact checked

Governor Wes Moore, D-Maryland, is under fire over claims that his family had to flee the Ku Klux Klan.

Speaking to Time magazine in 2023, Moore described himself as “literally the grandson of someone who was run out of this country by the Ku Klux Klan” while discussing how he “reconciles Patriotism” with the “racist past” of the United States.

“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. Both of those two things are facts and they can live together,” he said.

While that would make for one heck of an underdog story, the Washington Free Beacon is now casting some doubt on Moore’s version of events with claims that “historical records” contradict his story.

“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,” the outlet reported.

“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,” the article continues. “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.”

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Moore’s office rejected the outlet’s report.

“We’re not going to litigate a family’s century-old oral history with a partisan outlet,” said Moore spokesperson Ammar Moussa. “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.”

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