South Carolina Congressional candidate Michael B. Moore speaks at a rally outside of the U.S. Supreme Court on October 11, 2023, in Washington, DC. South Carolina voters and Civil Rights are calling on SCOTUS to protect Black voters in the Alexander V. SC State Conference of the NAACP court case. (Photo by Shannon Finney/Getty Images for Rooted Logistics)
On his 17th birthday, Michael B. Moore got a letter from his maternal grandfather, Dr. C.E. Boulware, reminding him that he was a year away from voting.
Boulware, a city council member in Durham, North Carolina, and civil rights activist, wanted to impress on his grandson the obligation of participating in civic life.
“It’s really exciting, isn’t it?” his grandfather wrote. “Soon you may decide, I hope you do, to be among those who offer themselves and their dedicated service as a public official.”
Now 62, Moore is looking to do exactly that.
He is running as a Democrat against incumbent U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican seeking a third term in the 1st Congressional District.
At his campaign launch, he read portions of his grandfather’s letter, including an invitation “to take up the mantle and carry it to much loftier heights than I’ve ever dreamed of.”
Moore has an uphill battle to oust Mace.
The district was listed as potentially in play earlier this year by the Cook Political Report, a non-partisan political analysis publication. But over the summer, it went from “likely Republican” to “solid Republican” with a 7-percentage-point advantage for the GOP.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May that the district lines, which favor Republicans, should stay in place. Mace easily fended off a well-funded Republican primary challenger in June. Unlike in the spring, when Mace repeatedly sparred with her primary opponent Catherine Templeton, she has said relatively little about Moore.
Mace’s campaign did not answer a series of questions from the SC Daily Gazette for this article.
But Mace and Moore both have leaned into their personal stories as they make their appeal to voters.
Mace tends to focus on her unlikely rise to Congress.
When she spoke to the Republican National Convention this summer, she talked about her journey from high school dropout and Waffle House waitress to graduating from The Citadel — the first woman to do so. She spoke about her father, an Army general, and her mother, a school teacher. And she talked about being a survivor of rape and a single mother.
Robert Smalls. (Library of Congress/Provided)
Moore frequently highlights that he would be the fourth member of his family in five generations to be elected to office. Among those predecessors is Robert Smalls, his great-great-grandfather, who escaped slavery on a stolen Confederate steamship and later represented the Lowcountry in Congress even after Reconstruction ended.
Moore has not held elected office previously, working as a businessman in the private sector, including leading Glory Foods. But the tradition of public service was something he grew up with, he said.
Moore heard his grandmother, Ariana Boulware, tell stories about her grandfather Robert Smalls.
“Some of my earliest memories are of hearing from her and her siblings about him and his service,” he said.
Smalls escaped slavery by stealing a Confederate steamship, the Planter, which he then piloted for the United States. He helped write the new South Carolina state constitution in 1868 and served in the state House and Senate before winning a seat in Congress in 1874, where he served five terms.
This year, the Legislature voted unanimously to memorialize Smalls on Statehouse grounds with a monument.
Samuel Jones Bampfield, Smalls’ son-in-law, also served in the General Assembly — another elected official in Moore’s lineage.
Moore also got a first-hand look at what public service involved when his grandfather took him on constituent service calls around Durham.
Moore remembers visiting one house where the “front yard had completely caved in.” He doesn’t remember what the issue was — perhaps a water main break — but he does remember the feeling he got.
“(I felt) just extraordinarily proud of him and having a real sense for the good that can be done through service,” Moore said.
Although Moore’s family was from South Carolina on both sides, his parents met at the University of Pennsylvania. He was born in Philadelphia and raised in Massachusetts. But he came to South Carolina frequently to visit extended family.
Moore moved to South Carolina as the first CEO of the International African American Museum in Charleston. He said he always stayed engaged with politics — he thinks he was involved in student government at every school he attended after middle school.
A general view of the International African American Museum on June 27, 2023 in Charleston, South Carolina. The museum sits on the former site of Gadsden’s Wharf, where all Charleston-bound slave ships were received during the final 22 months of legal trans-Atlantic slave trade in the United States. (File/Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
But it was while leading the museum’s creation that Moore began to consider running for office. The museum is built on the wharf where many enslaved Africans, including Moore’s great-great-great grandmother, first stepped foot in America.
“The museum was an amazing project,” he said. “I really started to be able to see the potential to engage politically much more clearly.”
Moore held that role from 2016 to 2019 — ahead of the museum’s opening in June 2023 — and then returned briefly to the private sector before launching his bid for Congress.
“I had long been concerned about just how much more complex the world seemed to be for my kids coming of age than for me,” he said. “I felt like I needed to try and make a difference for them and for their generations.”
With Vice President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket — Moore was among those who called for President Joe Biden to step aside as the nominee — he thinks there is a unique opportunity this cycle for him to represent the same part of the state that his ancestor, Smalls, did.
“It’s a historical and a personal frame that goes around this journey,” Moore said. “It just helps to make this an even more special experience than it otherwise would be.”