Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer

By her own account Moorer, a teacher at Claflin University, South Carolina's first black college, decided to publish poems because she was frustrated with the way both northern and southern writers misrepresented southern blacks; and she wanted to tell "the unvarnished truth." "Seeing that the one cannot get at the facts, while the other will not, I reach the conclusion that the story must be told by a Negro --- one who is a victim to the inconvenience of prejudice." Most of Prejudice Unveiled: and Other Poems (1907) is dedicated to this mission.

Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (1868-1936), taught at the Normal and Grammar Schools, Claflin College, Orangeburg, South Carolina, from 1895 to 1899. Little else is known about her life beyond what may be inferred from her poetry. In her introduction to the facsimile editionof Moorer's Prejudice Unveiled and Other Poems (1907) published in 1988, Joan R Sherman calls the first twenty-six poems the "best poems on racial issues written by any black woman until the middle of the 20th century" because the "anger, bitterness, irony, and pain are passionately felt and genuinely integral to the verse." In Prejudice Unveiled, Moorer presents a comprehensive analysis of the sweeping nature of racial oppression. Her poetry targets lynching, debt peonage, white rape, Jim Crow segregation, and the hypocrisy of the church and white press.

Her husband, Jacob Moorer (1863-1935), was a lawyer and civil rights activist from South Carolina.

Sources: Prejudice Unveiled: and Other Poems; African-American Poets, Volume 1, edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities Harold Bloom; Witnessing Lynching: American Writers Respond edited by Anne P. Rice