Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street by Blake Hill-Saya (review)

Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street is a readable, lyrically written biography of Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore, one-third of the “Mighty Triumvirate” who founded Durham, North Carolina’s famed Black Wall Street and established the city as the capital of the African American middle class in the post-Reconstruction era (p. 106). The book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the Black professional class that sustained African American communities in the former Confederacy during the post-Reconstruction era. Written by Blake Hill-Saya, Moore’s great-great-granddaughter, Aaron McDuffie Moore is the product of a multiyear initiative sponsored by the Durham Colored Library, an institution established by Moore that operates today as one of the city’s oldest nonprofits. Hill-Saya imbues this work with love and admiration for the physician, entrepreneur, and educator that has endured across generations.

Organized into six parts featuring punchy, concise chapters laced with compelling historical narratives and occasional fictional scenes, this book offers readers glimpses into Moore’s rise from an intellectually curious, industrious country youth to Durham’s first practicing Black physician. It also highlights Moore as a cofounder of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company and other businesses that made the once thriving, middle-class Hayti community the envy of the New South. Hill-Saya’s study deftly straddles the line between memoir and biography, transporting readers into a lost world and revealing the personal costs and sacrifices required of Black leaders who navigated the dangerous, illogical culture of Jim Crow and performed the difficult task of uplifting and advancing the race.

Although pitched as an analysis of Moore’s life, the book represents the collective memory of Durham’s Black elite, drawn from collections housed at Shaw University and other African American archives in the Research Triangle. Descendants of the Moore, Spaulding, and Merrick families also contributed documents and memories, illustrating the closeness of the Black professional class who raised their families within the “Hayti Cocoon,” somewhat distant from the racial horrors endured by those they served (p. 213). Relative safety came at a high personal cost, as Moore and other Black leaders repressed themselves emotionally in the face of constant affronts, worked exhaustively, and sacrificed family bonds to improve their communities. Hill-Saya’s somewhat melancholy depiction of the final weeks of the lives of Moore and John Merrick gives readers an appreciation of the sapped powers, of body and mind, required of Black leaders who strived to claim self-conscious manhood and, as W. E. B. Du Bois once put it, “to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde” (The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches [Chicago, 1903], p. 5).

Hill-Saya’s book preserves the history of Durham’s founding Black elite for future generations to buttress a renaissance in this southern city that remains a hub for Black entrepreneurship and community building. An accessible, popular history of one of Black Durham’s founding fathers, Hill-Saya’s biography of Aaron McDuffie Moore is an excellent companion to broader social histories of Black Durham written by Walter Weare and Leslie Brown and, one hopes, will inspire future projects on other notable Black leaders in the city such as John Merrick, John Avery, and Charles Clinton Spaulding. Intimate histories of the women in their lives, who often supported their work and were talented organizers themselves, are also warranted. Broader studies of how Moore and his colleagues spread the gospel of Black wealth across the Deep South and the Black Atlantic, a phenomenon hinted at in the author’s intimate descriptions of her ancestor’s visits to Tuskegee Institute and Haiti, would also be welcomed. A collective history of Black Wall Streets across...