ON THE MORNING OF June 23, 2014, a 79-year-old retired Methodist minister, Charles Moore, parked his Volkswagen hatchback in a strip mall parking lot in his old hometown of Grand Saline, Texas. For most of the day he stood in the lot, watching the cars go by on U.S. Highway 80. Sometime after 5:30 p.m., Moore set a small foam cushion on the parking lot asphalt, knelt on the cushion, poured gasoline over himself, and set himself on fire.
That act of public suicide provides the starting point for the PBS Independent Lens documentary Man on Fire, available for viewing online starting Dec. 17. The hourlong film is a sustained reflection both on Moore’s life as an especially stubborn perennial dissident and on the life of the town where his journey began and ended.
When Moore died, he left behind a neatly typed testimony tucked under a windshield wiper of his car, which portrayed his suicide as an act of solidarity with the untold numbers of African Americans lynched and brutalized in a town that was still largely unrepentant. On the dashboard of Moore’s car was a copy of his high school yearbook, presumably to prove to Grand Saline authorities that he was in fact one of their own, although he hadn’t really lived there for decades.
On its face, Moore’s suicide sounds like the tragic act of a man mired in depression and possibly even delusions. But the story becomes more complex when you read Michael Hall’s long article, also titled “Man on Fire,” from the December 2014 issue of Texas Monthly.
Turns out Charles Moore had been metaphorically setting himself on fire for several decades before he made it literal. He left a promising career as a young Methodist pastor because he couldn’t keep quiet about racial injustice. For years, he lived and worked among the urban poor, as a white man in the virtually all-black West Side of Chicago during the angriest years of the late 1960s, and later amid the shanties of what is now called Mumbai, India. When he eventually returned to a Methodist pastorate, Moore became an early advocate for gay rights and undertook a long hunger strike to pressure his denomination to become accepting of LGBTQ people.
But, as his sobbing stepdaughter tells us in the film, Moore didn’t just sacrifice himself. He didn’t think about the consequences of his actions for the people who loved him, she says. He didn’t just go to the West Side of Chicago himself, he brought his two young sons and his first wife, Pat, who in the film maintains that Moore compromised the safety of his family with that move. And that was just the beginning. In the mid-1970s, Moore took Pat with him to India, leaving their 11- and 16-year-old sons on their own to stay with families of various colleagues. Both boys’ lives fell apart during that time, information in the Texas Monthly article that we don’t get from the documentary film.
However, the film’s portrait of Grand Saline does give viewers a good idea how the young Charles Moore’s prophetic outrage was ignited. Most of the townspeople interviewed are still doggedly evasive about the town’s racist history. Some insist that Moore took his life in protest of conditions that never existed, while others simply discount any responsibility for the past. A white Grand Saline Baptist preacher actually says, “You can’t pay for someone else’s sins.”
Still, I’d have to give the last word on Charles Moore’s self-immolation to one of his Grand Saline detractors who, rather smugly, points out the incontrovertible fact: “You’re not a martyr if you do it to yourself.”
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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