Remembering Tom Moffett: 94 years for racial justice, peace, and red sweaters

Tom Moffett, sans a red sweater but with his classic
tartan hat, taking a bus to a protest circa 2015.

Louisville anti-racist and peace activist Tom Moffett was an accountant, scholar and ordained Presbyterian minister, but as his careers changed, his unrelenting work to help people overcome oppression never wavered.

Born in 1924 the youngest of five children of an American Presbyterian missionary in Pyongyang, in Japanese-occupied Korea, where he lived until age 12, Tom died in May 2018 in Louisville, where had lived since 1966. Here and in previous hometowns of Kansas City, Mo., Wheeling, W. Va. and other places from Los Angeles to New Jersey, Tom daily would march, speak, organize and learn on the matters of racial justice, international disarmament, LGBT rights and justice for workers – always while maintaining a lively and fun demeanor.

Tom also served as the unofficial fashion leader of Louisville’s left, known as the dapper red-sweater and Tartan hat-clad protestor, a style that made him a recognized character at rallies, government meetings, marches, and on frequent city bus rides he would take alone on into his 90s to attend progressive actions wherever he was needed.

The sweater, and passionate 

arguments for justice marked 

Tom Moffett's City Hall visits.

A resident of the African-American section West Louisville during most of his more than 50 years in the city, Tom came here during the rising Civil Rights tide of the ‘60s to pastor a then-integrated Presbyterian church.

Tom’s schooling also was an eclectic mix. After childhood education in the missionary community of Pyongyang (which today is North Korea’s capital), he attended high schools in low, middle and upper income areas from California to New Jersey, then studied Christian theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey and Wheaton College in the Chicago area, and accounting at Jefferson Community College and the University of Louisville.

Tom, the son of Madison, Ind. native Samuel A. Moffett and Lucia Hester Fish Moffett of Santa Barbara, Cal., talked in 2015 about his life and activism with FORsooth editor emeritus Brian Arbenz.

            Brian Arbenz: How did spending your first 12 years in Korea shape your teen and adult life in the United States, including your work against oppression here in Louisville?

            Tom Moffett: I grew up in an occupied country, like the West Bank and Gaza.

            Korea… had always been a small beleaguered country between China and Japan, the giants, and fought over.

            There was a war where China and Japan were fighting. There was a war where Russia and Japan were fighting.

            My father was there right in the center of it. Those wars tended to center in Pyongyang.

            He moved there in 1890…. He had already achieved some degree of acceptance by the Koreans, and he solidified that because… he took sides very strongly with the people, supporting them when they were oppressed by whichever power.

            And so they saw him and Americans as their friends.

            It gave me a really different perspective on the world. I intuitively knew that the United States was not the center of the universe -- even though I thought it was the best country in the world and I was glad to be an American. And my folks were there for reasons of caring about everybody in the world.

            BA: Did you learn Korean and do you currently speak any of the language?

            TM: No. By the time I was born, there were a relatively large number of Americans and other missionaries in Korea, and particularly in the city where we lived…. We were pretty well a self-contained community.

            But there was also a school that drew children from all over Korea and North China. It was a small school and it was right across the street from where we lived.

            BA: You moved to your family’s native U.S. at age 12 in the mid-1930s. What was the transition like, and how did you develop social justice concerns in America?

            TM: My first experience in America was four years in… Monrovia, Calif., which was just 18 miles outside of L.A.  The first day I went to school in Monrovia, in the 7^th grade, they asked me where I was from. I said, Korea. They said, ‘What state is that in?’

            I was interested in sports so I started listening to UCLA football games. They had a star running back who was African-American, and that, at that time, was noteworthy, because most of the country didn’t have integrated sports.

            Kenny Washington was kind of a lightning rod for the African-American community. Because of my natural interest in minorities, I just became fascinated with that. And we had one football and one basketball star of African-American descent in our high school.

            We moved to Newark, N.J. [six years later]. Newark was a somewhat segregated city, not rigidly…. I graduated one of the top people in the class.

            After a couple of months, I did well on some test, and got some attention.

            One of my classmates said, ‘Congratulations. I’m glad you got it. I’m glad a Christian got it.’ I thought to myself, how does he know I’m a Christian? Then, I realized all of a sudden, three quarters or more of the students were Jewish.

            BA: Did that further energize you about the issue of discrimination?

            TM: I wouldn’t say that it consciously did. None of this up to that point consciously did.

            BA: What did energize you?

            TM: I followed my older brother to Princeton Seminary…. In my senior year at Princeton I had an ethics course.

            I was assigned to write a paper on the view of private property in the Old Testament. I didn’t know a thing about that.

            And I discovered that the Bible, the Old Testament, has a number of chapters… built around the idea that there really is no such thing as private property. It doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to God, and we are the stewards of it.

            The principle that was very clearly spelled out in The Bible was: no matter what happens… you don’t get permanent title to [land] just by buying it. It belongs to God, and it belongs to the people. I had grown up a Christian who took the Bible very seriously, but I had never come across that idea before.

            BA: How did these Biblical principles play out in the West Virginia communities where you served early in your church ministry work?

            TM: That started my real social consciousness, you might say, with help from what happened before. I served four different mine camps. There could be 500 people in the mine camp.

            They were in a battle for respect and decent treatment by the mine owners.

            The black miners were relegated to the less attractive houses on the top row. The others were sorted by authority and so forth among the other rows, with the managers getting the big houses on the bottom row. This was my first direct experience with racial and class segregation, and also of the industrial labor relations aspects of the working people of America…. In Wheeling, it was similar, but in a metropolitan sense.

            And it was a very different experience. I grew up a privileged white person in a Republican, relatively wealthy family, well educated. Both my mother and father were college educated, had advanced degrees.

            BA: When you moved to Louisville in 1966, what was it like?

            TM: During that period, from ’66 to ’72, the whole dynamic of the civil rights movement was changing from, let’s see if we can integrate, to: let’s build our own, let’s be ourselves. The temporary existence of integrated congregations in white churches came to an abrupt closure.

            BA: Was this a big part of why you decided to leave the ministry?

            TM: No, that was only a small part of it. I was not especially successful as a pastor.

            I hadn’t really been that good a counselor as a pastor. I’d been more of an organizer.

            I said to myself, if you’re having trouble achieving what you set out to do, maybe you ought to see if maybe that’s not what you are the best at…. I not only resigned as pastor. I demitted as a minister. I preferred being a church member to being the ex-pastor.

            I’d always been good at math. Even as a pastor, I’d always paid attention to the finances of the church…. So I took accounting classes.

            I was at the zoo with my daughter and someone I knew came up to me and said: ‘The place where I work, the Park DuValle Health Center, is looking for an accountant.’.... And its purpose was not just to provide health care, but job training for underemployed African-Americans, or anybody. That just appealed to everything I was involved in.

            I was immediately hired as a junior accountant.

            That was my day job. I felt much more on top of it than I had been as a pastor…. But I still had plenty of time to be active in the church and active in the community. I quickly became active in the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Then in ’75 busing came to Louisville and I hooked up with Progress in Education, which was the local response to the anti-busing protests which erupted very big. And it was thanks to PIE and the Black Protective Parents and the other forward thinking people in the African-American and white communities that we were able to, rather quickly, put down that violent negativity and move ahead with busing.

            Black Protective Parents was a black organization that formed to protect their children in this situation. And PIE and Black Protective Parents worked very closely together. Progress in Education was black and white.

            Busing has not been without its problems, but it has been more successful in Louisville than in most of the country.

            Although we won the battle against the violent protests… we didn’t win the battle in the schools. Resistance continues to this day. African-American children in integrated schools still get the shaft and have not benefited in the same way as white children have.

            The main benefit of busing in this community has been for whites and the greater community, not the black children. White children have discovered the world, the way it is. They didn’t have any clue.

            Black children already knew…. And they have had to bear the brunt of it, because to keep (busing) going, every compromise has been in favor of the whites.

            BA: Ending wars and excessive military spending is a cause that has brought you to the streets as much as racial justice. How much is militarism tied in with domestic social justice?

            TM: It is totally tied in.

            The use of military force for ‘America’ to dominate the world is not really for ‘America’ to dominate the world, it’s for multi-national global corporate interests to dominate the world…. It hinders every effort at social justice.

            BA: Why is it so hard to get global peace activism included with activism on domestic issues?

            TM: The repression against that has been greater than anything else.

            That’s what made Martin Luther King so courageous.  We have to keep working for that. We can’t give up.

            BA: Through all your public commitment to intense issues, your dress and manner also are well known. One person in a letter to the editor upon your 90^th birthday referred to Tom Moffett as ‘the man in the red sweater.’

            TM: I like red and I got a sweater like this a long time ago and I wore it occasionally, and then within the last 10 years or so I had gotten another one like it.

            I discovered it has pockets, which some of my sweaters don’t have…. I’ll take out my hearing aid and I’d just get frantic because I could not find what I had done with it. I’ve acquired the system of always putting it into this pocket.

            After I discovered that, the red sweater became not just a trademark that people recognize me with, but it became a necessity in my life.

            BA: Have you always worn the Scottish Tartan hats?

            TM: I just happened to pick up a similar one about 15 or 20 years ago…. It wore out. It was kind of floppy.

            I had gotten so that I liked it and my daughter had noticed that, so she said ‘would you like to have another one like it?’ It took her almost a year to find one!

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            Brian Arbenz was an assistant editor and editor emeritus of FORsooth when he interviewed Tom Moffett for the Louisville progressive newspaper in 2015.