Overview
- Wisconsin Free Beacon reporting cites Episcopal church records and contemporaneous newspapers that describe Rev. Josiah Johnson Thomas’s December 13, 1924 move to Jamaica as a public transfer to replace a deceased pastor, not a secret flight from the Ku Klux Klan.
- Fox News Digital and Townhall amplified the archival claims, with Fox noting it has not independently verified the Free Beacon’s findings.
- Moore spokesperson Ammar Moussa declined to debate the account, emphasizing that intimidation and racial terror were pervasive in the Jim Crow South and often left little documentation.
- The Free Beacon notes no record of Klan activity in Pineville, South Carolina, and says available diocesan histories do not show conflicts tied to Thomas’s ministry.
- Conservative commentators seized on the report and linked it to prior questions about Moore’s biography, as the governor’s aides dismissed the scrutiny as partisan and unusual.