150 years after this Beaufort man served in Congress, his great-great grandson wants the job

Democrat Michael B. Moore officially kicked off his campaign Thursday for the 1st Congressional District with a stop in Beaufort where the bust of legendary Beaufortonian Robert Smalls stands next to the Tabernacle Baptist Church. Smalls was a Civil war hero who later represented the Lowcountry region during the Reconstruction Era. Moore is Smalls’ great-great grandson and he hopes to win the seat 150 years after his famous ancestor walked the halls of Congress.

“It’s powerful to run for the same seat my great-great grandfather held,” Moore told the Beaufort Gazette and Island Packet before he spoke to some 20 supporters who gathered at the church to hear Moore speak as he revs up his campaign for Congress.

But Moore, of Mount Pleasant, will need to get past Mac Deford, an attorney and Citadel graduate, in the Democratic primary, before he gets a crack at incumbent Congresswoman Nancy Mace, R-Isle of Palms — assuming Mace wins the Republican primary. Mace is facing her own test in the GOP primary from Catherine Templeton, a former state agency director, and other candidates.

Moore is confident, saying he has the right platform to appeal to independents, the right campaign infrastructure and a strong fundraising start to unseat two-term incumbent Mace. He described the experience of launching his campaign at the historic location where his great-great grandfather’s mighty bust looks out over downtown Beaufort as “surreal.”

In 1862, Smalls, who was born into slavery, commandeered a Confederate ship in Charleston harbor, carrying his family and 15 other enslaved people to freedom. Smalls went on to become one of the first African Americans to serve in Congress.

Moore’s campaign has been operating quietly

Moore called Thursday’s Beaufort stop the official launch of a campaign to “flip this swing district,” which covers the Lowcountry, but he’s actually been campaigning for a year. The business executive is the founding president of the Charleston-based International African American Museum.

Filing for congressional races begins March 16 and runs until April 1. Primary elections for congressional and state legislative seats are June 11. The general election is eight months away on Nov. 5.

Joe Cunningham became the first Democrat to flip a U.S. House seat in South Carolina in 30 years when he won the 1st District seat in 2018, but Mace beat him in 2020 and was reelected in 2022.

Both Templeton and Mace backed former President Donald Trump in the recent GOP presidential primary in South Carolina, which Trump won easily over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who has since left the race. But Haley took the 1st Congressional District.

Moore says the district has an unusually high number of “persuadable” voters and the campaign has a plan to “reach out and touch them multiple times.” He called the campaign’s field organization “world class” and said it includes a Barack Obama campaign official on Hilton Head who worked on the former president’s campaign in South Carolina. The campaign has raised almost $600,000 with donations coming in from 48 states.

The next phase of Moore’s campaign is building a field organization ahead of the June primary.

“I know they are going to throw the kitchen sink at us,” Moore said.

Moore bills himself as a supporter of working people and says he is talking up kitchen table issues like jobs, better education, preserving Social Security and Medicare and affordable health care. Smalls, considered by many as the father of South Carolina public schools, would roll over in his grave at the current state of schools, he says. He supports a woman’s right to choose an abortion, and what he calls common sense reforms addressing gun violence. “Thoughts and prayers are no longer good enough,” Moore says.

Environmental issues are particularly relevant to the Lowcountry because of the threat of sea level rise. “We’ve got to get serious about he environment,” he said.

Moore stood next to the Smalls bust as he spoke. Smalls was born in 1839 and died in 1915. His final resting place is the historic Tabernacle Baptist Church, built in 1840, that served as the backdrop to Moore’s campaign stop. The Rev. Kenneth Hodges, pastor at Tabernacle Baptist, prayed for Moore, and Anita Singleton Prather, the well-known Beaufort resident who plays Aunt Pearlie Sue, a character she created to recount Gullah history in performances across the state, recommended him. With Moore’s credentials, Singleton Prather said, he could have chosen another path. But like his great-great grandfather Smalls, Singleton Prather said, Moore chose public service and “chose to come back to South Carolina.”

“He has some big shoes to fill,” Singleton Prather said, “but he has big feet.”

Smalls isn’t the only well-known public figure in Moore’s lineage. Other ancestors include South Carolina lawyer and legislator Samuel Jones Bampfield, and Judge Harold Boulware — who litigated the Briggs v. Elliott school segregation case and served on the legal team that won famous Brown v. Board of Education case that found separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional.

If elected, Moore would be the fourth person descended from Smalls to serve in elected office. But he would be the first person in the family to serve in Congress since Smalls held the job.

Thursday’s campaign stop wasn’t the first time Moore has given a speech at the location where the bust of his great-great grandfather is located.

In 1976 — 48 years ago — Moore, then 13, was chosen to unveil that bust when it was presented to the public. “This place,” Moore said, “is a special, special place.”

District boundaries in dispute

Smalls served in the U.S. House from 1874 to 1879 and 1881 to 1887.

“He would be serving in this same district today if he were in Congress today in Beaufort,” Moore said.

Gerrymandering — manipulating the boundaries of a district to favor one party or class — was an issue in the district for Moore and his great-great grandfather. Smalls lost reelection to the U.S. House after the state legislature redrew his district to reduce the voting power of Black residents, Moore said.

And in January 2023, a panel of three federal judges of the Federal District Court in Columbia ruled that the boundaries of the 1st Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the constitutional prohibition on racially based gerrymandering. That case was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in October which has yet to release a decision in the case.

Moore said his campaign is proceeding as if the current lines will be in place for the election. Even if the Supreme Court comes out with a decision today, Moore said, state lawmakers would still need to redraw the lines.

“I’m just not optimistic that will happen in this cycle,” Moore said.

While Moore was born in Pennsylvania and grew up outside of Boston, he has returned to Beaufort often over the years and considers the city as his family home. After graduating from Syracuse University, Michael earned an MBA from Duke University and received an honorary Doctorate in Public History from Dickinson College. He and his wife, Karla, have four sons and a grandchild.

Later Thursday, Moore planned to travel to Charleston for a larger campaign event with family, friends, and supporters in the Poinsette Room of the Francis Marion Hotel. Grammy-winning musician and South Carolina native Charlton Singleton was scheduled to provide music, with former South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth reciting an original poem for he occasion.