Dr. Charles Harrison Moore

Dr. Charles Harrison Moore died after 66 years of life on Sunday, July 11 in Atlanta, Georgia due to complications that arose in his battle with esophageal cancer. He was born in New York City, New York on July 26, 1943. At the time, his father, Dr. R. Edgar Moore and mother, Caroline Harrison Moore, were briefly away from their native land of Alabama while Edgar was working as a writer of pulp western stories. Charles and his sister Carol mostly grew up in small towns throughout the southeast, trailing their parents as they worked as educators and administrators at Methodist Church-affiliated universities in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Charles graduated from Murrah High School in Jackson in 1961, where he played varsity basketball. He attended Millsaps College from 1961 to 1965. At the time, his father and mother worked at Millsaps as the chairman of the education department and the acquisitions librarian respectively. After completing his bachelor’s degree, he received a National Defense Fellowship that allowed him to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his doctorate in Political Science. In the same year of this achievement, 1972, his wife of six years, Minnie Martha Turnipseed Moore, and three-year-old daughter Martha Andrea were tragically killed in a car accident. Dr. Moore and Spencer Turnipseed, his brother-in-law, were in the car at the time of the accident and recovered from the injuries they received. He married Patricia Ann Hoban in 1974, and they spent their 36 years of marriage as dedicated parents as well as professionals committed to education and service in public administration and policy. Dr. Moore had a long career as a professor at several colleges throughout the United States, including Wayne State University, American University, Birmingham Southern College, the University of West Florida, and Millsaps College. He was a faculty member at Georgia State University in Atlanta at the time of his passing. As a staff researcher for the Mississippi legislature’s Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) committee, he participated in a number of important investigations, such as the one that led to the recent reform of the Mississippi Department of Health. He is survived by his wife Pat Hoban-Moore of Atlanta; a son, Edward Moore, and his wife, Maureen Wishkoski, of Jackson; a daughter, Catherine Moore Lee, and her husband Garrad, of Jackson; a sister Carol Cox, and her husband Fletcher, of Tougaloo; cousins Barbara Ann Smith and her husband, Harwood, of Boone, North Carolina, and Robert Smith and his wife Carolyn, of Danville, Virginia. He was a proud husband and brother, an enthusiastic soccer dad, mentor to his students, lover of his books and records, student of American government, a stubborn southern democrat, and an ally in any fight to make the world a more equitable, civil, and just place. Memorial services will be held on Wednesday, July 14 at 2:00pm at the Atlanta First United Methodist Church (360 Peachtree St. NE) and in Jackson on Friday, July 16th in the chapel at Galloway United Methodist Church at 11:00am (305 N. Congress St.). Charitable donations can be made in Charles’ memory to Habitat for Humanity/Metro Jackson.

Dr. Charles Harrison Moore

July 26, 1943 - July 12, 2010