Richard B. Moore

Barbados, Migration, and the Education of a Street Scholar

Richard Benjamin Moore was born on 9 August 1893 in Hastings, Christ Church, Barbados — the same small island that produced Frank Walcott, Errol Barrow, and Grantley Adams, an island whose modest size produced a disproportionate number of significant figures in Caribbean and Black Atlantic political history. His father died when he was young, and his mother's subsequent death left him to be raised by relatives in a household of limited means. He received a good basic education in Barbados's colonial school system before emigrating to the United States in 1909, at the age of fifteen, joining the wave of Caribbean migrants who were making their way to New York in the early years of the century.

He arrived in New York without formal educational qualifications beyond secondary school, and he spent the rest of his intellectual life compensating for this through voracious self-education — reading everything he could find, attending lectures and debates, haunting libraries, and developing through sheer autodidactic effort the historical and political knowledge that more formally educated contemporaries had acquired through universities. This self-education was not merely compensatory: it gave him a particular relationship to knowledge, a practical, activist orientation toward learning as a tool of liberation rather than a credential of status, and it shaped the character of the intellectual work he subsequently produced.

He settled in Harlem, which in the 1910s and 1920s was becoming the cultural and political capital of Black America — the place where the great migrations from the South and from the Caribbean were converging, where the intellectual energies of the Harlem Renaissance were gathering, where the political arguments about the future of Black life in America and in the African diaspora were being conducted with extraordinary intensity and sophistication. Harlem in this period was a place where a brilliant young man without formal credentials could educate himself in the most important political debates of his time by attending street corner meetings, joining political organisations, reading the newspapers and journals that circulated through the community, and engaging directly with the thinkers and organisers who were shaping the Black political tradition.

The African Blood Brotherhood and Early Radicalism

Moore became involved in the African Blood Brotherhood in the early 1920s — the secret radical organisation founded by Cyril Briggs that attempted to synthesise Black nationalist and socialist politics at a moment when the dominant tendency in Harlem radical circles was to choose one or the other. The ABB was a small but intellectually serious organisation that attracted some of the most capable radical thinkers of the period, and Moore's involvement brought him into contact with the debates about the relationship between race and class that would define left-wing Black politics for the rest of the century.

He was already making a reputation as a street orator — one of the most distinctively Harlem of political vocations, in which speakers occupied public corners and squares to address whoever would stop and listen, developing their arguments in real time against hecklers and questioners and competing with other speakers for the attention of passing audiences. Street oratory in 1920s Harlem was a genuinely competitive intellectual environment, in which speakers needed to be not only persuasive but knowledgeable and quick, capable of responding to challenges from audiences who were themselves often well-informed and politically engaged. Moore was regarded by contemporaries as one of the finest street orators of his generation — a speaker of exceptional clarity, force, and historical depth who could hold large audiences on street corners for extended periods.

He joined the Communist Party USA in the mid-1920s, drawn by the party's combination of anti-capitalist analysis and — unlike most American political organisations of the era — genuine commitment to racial equality. He worked as a party organiser, writer, and speaker throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the party's work in Harlem and its engagement with questions of Black liberation. But his relationship with the CPUSA was always complicated by the tension between his Black nationalist commitments and the party's insistence on the primacy of class analysis over racial analysis — a tension that eventually led to his departure from the party, as it did for many Caribbean-born radicals whose political identities were rooted in the specific experience of racial colonialism rather than in the European socialist tradition.

The Name Question: Language as Liberation Politics

Richard B. Moore's most distinctive and lasting intellectual contribution was his sustained campaign for the adoption of "Afro-American" as the proper designation for people of African descent in the United States — a campaign rooted in his understanding that the names by which a people are called carry political weight, that demeaning or inaccurate nomenclature is itself a form of oppression, and that the struggle for Black dignity required attention to language as well as to economics and politics.

His 1960 book The Name "Negro": Its Origin and Evil Use was the fullest statement of this argument — a careful historical and linguistic analysis demonstrating that the word "Negro" was neither a neutral descriptor nor a term of African origin but a label imposed by enslavers and colonisers as part of the apparatus of dehumanisation, and that the continued use of this label perpetuated the psychological and political damage of that dehumanisation. Moore argued for "Afro-American" as a replacement — a term that accurately described the dual heritage of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, that connected the African-American community to its African roots without denying its American reality, and that carried none of the degrading historical associations of the terms it was intended to replace.

The campaign had mixed results in Moore's own lifetime — "Negro" remained the dominant term through much of the 1960s civil rights movement, and "Black" emerged as the preferred term in the Black Power era — but the underlying argument about the political significance of naming has been fully vindicated by subsequent history. The eventual emergence of "African American" as the preferred formal designation reflects exactly the logic that Moore was articulating in 1960, and the broader understanding that language shapes consciousness and that the struggle for liberation requires attention to how people are named and how they name themselves is now a commonplace of both academic scholarship and activist practice. Moore was arguing this decades before it became commonplace.

The Afro-American Institute and the Politics of Black History

Moore founded the Afro-American Institute in New York — later renamed the Frederick Douglass Book Center — which served for decades as both a bookshop and a community institution, providing access to books on African and African-American history and culture that were unavailable in mainstream bookshops and creating a space where members of the Black community could encounter the history that the mainstream educational system systematically suppressed or distorted. The bookshop was more than a commercial enterprise: it was a political project, rooted in Moore's conviction that the recovery and dissemination of Black history was itself a form of political action, that a community that did not know its own history was vulnerable to the manipulation of those who controlled the narratives by which the past was interpreted.

Moore was himself a serious student of Black history, particularly of the history of the Caribbean and of the African contribution to world civilisation — the counter-narrative to the colonial education system's emphasis on European achievement and African passivity that scholars from W.E.B. Du Bois to C.L.R. James were developing in different registers. He lectured extensively on these themes, contributed to the intellectual life of Harlem's radical community, and used his bookshop as a platform for the circulation of ideas that the mainstream publishing industry was not interested in disseminating. The role of the radical bookshop as a community institution — as a place where marginalised knowledge circulates, where community members encounter alternative perspectives, where the intellectual life of a political movement is sustained between its public events — was one that Moore understood and cultivated with deliberate purpose.

Caribbean Independence and the Voice from Harlem

Throughout his decades in New York, Moore maintained a passionate engagement with the politics of the Caribbean — the islands from which he and so many of his Harlem contemporaries had come, and whose continued colonial status he regarded as both a practical injustice and a symbolic affront to the dignity of all people of African descent in the Americas. He was one of the most persistent advocates for Caribbean independence before American audiences, testifying before congressional committees on Caribbean affairs, writing for Caribbean-American publications, and participating in the networks that connected Caribbean radicals in New York, London, and the islands themselves.

His advocacy for Caribbean independence was rooted in both principle and personal connection — he knew the Caribbean from the inside, understood its specific social and political dynamics, and could speak about its situation with an authority and specificity that more distant observers lacked. He worked with and alongside the other Caribbean radicals of his generation who had made Harlem their political home — W.A. Domingo, Marcus Garvey, and others — while maintaining his own independent political voice and his willingness to criticise the political tendencies he was closest to when he considered criticism to be warranted.

He was particularly engaged with the question of how the Caribbean diaspora in the United States could use its position — its access to American audiences, its proximity to American political institutions, its connections with the African-American political community — to support the independence movements in the islands. This was a strategic question that Caribbean radicals in New York debated throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and Moore's contribution to those debates — through his writing, his public speaking, and his organisational work — was a significant one.

The Self-Taught Historian and the Recovery of Black Achievement

In his later years, Moore devoted increasing attention to historical scholarship — specifically to the documentation of African and African-American contributions to world history that the colonial and racist educational traditions had suppressed. He wrote and lectured on the African origins of civilisation, on the Black presence in ancient and mediaeval history, on the contributions of enslaved Africans and their descendants to the cultural and economic life of the Americas, and on the history of Caribbean resistance to colonial rule. This work placed him within a tradition of Black historical scholarship that ran from Du Bois through Carter G. Woodson — the founder of what became Black History Month — and that insisted on the right of Black communities to know and celebrate their own history rather than the history that European colonial education had designed for them.

Moore's historical scholarship was explicitly political: he understood history as a resource for liberation rather than as an academic discipline, and he wrote and lectured with the aim of building in his audiences the sense of historical identity and cultural pride that he believed was a precondition for effective political action. This approach — using history as a tool of consciousness-raising and community formation — was characteristic of the Caribbean radical tradition in which he had formed, and it connected his work to that of his contemporary C.L.R. James, whose The Black Jacobins served exactly this function at a higher level of scholarly achievement.

Return to Barbados and the Assessment of a Life

Moore returned to Barbados late in his life and died in Bridgetown on 18 August 1978, aged eighty-five — nine days after his birthday, having lived long enough to see the Caribbean independence he had championed from Harlem become reality across most of the islands he had left as a teenager. The recognition he received was limited by the obscurity that tends to overtake Black radical figures who work outside the mainstream institutions — through street oratory and bookshops and community organisations rather than through universities and publishing houses and formal political parties — and whose contributions do not fit neatly into the categories that official history uses to identify significance.

He is now recognised as an important figure in the history of Harlem radicalism, of Caribbean-American political thought, and of the intellectual tradition that insisted on the political significance of language and naming in the struggle for Black liberation. His bookshop served generations of New Yorkers as an access point to Black history and political thought. His oratory shaped the political consciousness of thousands of Harlem residents across five decades. His campaign for Afro-American as a term of dignity anticipated by decades the arguments that would become mainstream in American racial discourse. And his lifelong insistence that Black liberation required both political organisation and historical consciousness remains one of the most important lessons that the radical tradition he embodied has to offer.

Also Profiled — Jamaica, Trinidad & Barbados