Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer

Prejudice Unveiled Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer

In this book of poems, teacher and poet Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer tackles the issues of living in the Jim Crow South "while being Black" with heart-rending frankness. Her poems on lynching, white hypocrisy, the injustice system, and voting rights - among others - are eye-opening for those readers who previously held only an intellectual understanding of the treatment of African Americans in the South in the not-so-distant past. Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (September 1868 - May 24, 1936) was an African American poet and a teacher at Claflin University, the oldest historically black college in South Carolina. She was born in Pickens, South Carolina and later married an Orangeburg attorney whose practice centered around defending the rights of Black citizens in the prejudiced legal system of the Jim Crow South. The Moorers were activists, and Lizelia was active in organizations like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She was also instrumental in gaining the right of women to be ordained within the Methodist Church in 1910. She died in Orangeburg, South Carolina at the age of 67.