A. M. Moore

A. M. Moore was born in 1846 on W. R. Sherrad's plantation eight miles northeast of Marshall, in Harrison County, Texas. His father, Jiles D. Moore, was born in Alabama, and his mother, Anna, in Mississippi; his grandmother Cherry had come to Texas with the Sherrads in the early days of settlement. The quarters, he said, looked like a little town.

He said the enslaver governed by rules and whipped people who broke them. He knew of local courts fining enslavers who failed to feed and clothe people properly. Corn shuckings were big events, and the Methodist church had separate floors for Black and white worshippers. Just before the war, Black preachers began to be allowed, along with hymn books and Bibles. His father died during the war. Some enslavers in the area refused to free people after emancipation, and soldiers stationed at Marshall and Shreveport arrested them. His mother stayed with the Sherrads three years, and he hired out as a farmhand at ten to fifteen dollars a month. He and his brother saved enough to buy five hundred acres of land.

He went on to study for four years at Wiley and Bishop colleges in Marshall, earned a county teaching certificate, and taught in Harrison and Gregg counties and in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. He began preaching in 1880, served as a district missionary for the Texas-Louisiana Missionary Baptist Association, and organized churches across East Texas. He voted in elections throughout his life. He and his wife raised six children; one son became a preacher. In old age he lived on his own farm, on land that had once been part of the Sherrad plantation.