“May the history we record preserve our loves as carefully as our struggles,” Blake Hill-Saya concludes in her Author’s Note (xii). In Aaron McDuffie Moore: An African American Physician, Educator, and Founder of Durham’s Black Wall Street, Hill-Saya manifests a world that many histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to overlook: a world of Black success and Black joy. As its title implies, Hill-Saya’s biography focuses on Dr. Aaron M. Moore, a talented member of Gilded Age Durham’s Black elite who used his abilities to create and sustain Black institutions in the Tar Heel State. Hill-Saya’s emphasis on Moore’s successes and legacies instructs historians to grapple with the intersecting variables of race, class, and gender when discussing Black Americans and their experiences. Moore’s life reveals what was possible for certain types of Black individuals living in specific contexts with a particular access to power.

Histories of the period following Reconstruction can often fall into the “nadir” trap when discussing the experiences of Black Americans. From a broad perspective, focusing on national and state-level laws and policies, these years were certainly a dark and depressing time for Black Americans. The confluence of the Compromise of 1877, various Supreme Court decisions in the 1880s and 1890s culminating with Plessy v. Ferguson, and the increasing violence wrought on Black bodies by white insurgent terrorists paints a bleak portrait of Black life in the United States at the turn of the century. But Hill-Saya advises caution when generalizing experiences, because doing so causes us to miss lives like that of Dr. Aaron M. Moore. His life, as this biography illustrates, was certainly filled with struggles, but his ultimate legacy was one of success.

Hill-Saya’s biography of Moore opens up new avenues for researching Black experiences during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Moore was an exceptional man who came to adulthood at a critical moment for Black Americans. Hill-Saya notes, “The years between Aaron’s birth and his entry into medical school in 1885 were some of the most complex yet promising in American history for a young black person” (12). Moore was an incredibly high-achieving man. He graduated from medical school, became the first Black doctor in Durham, North Carolina, founded the city’s first Black hospital and nursing school, and founded and co-owned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company—which an appendix notes has had a forty-billion-dollar economic impact since its founding in 1900 (221). These accomplishments were not simply the result of Moore being an exceptional man, but of the context in which he lived. His life story is a reminder to those of us studying the history of Black Americans in this era to pay attention to how windows of opportunity remained open in certain spaces for certain individuals, despite national trends toward racial injustice and the codification of Jim Crow laws. Local and regional stories, as in Moore’s case, can provide a more nuanced view of the reality of certain classes of Black Americans.

This biography relies on a broad foundation of sources from Moore’s descendants and other relations. Where specific instances of Moore’s life were missing from the archives, Hill-Saya expertly weaves theoretical narratives by using memoirs from Moore’s contemporaries. For example, many of the sketches she paints of Moore’s childhood come from the archived collections of his second cousin, Asa Spaulding, who attended the same school and lived in the same area as Moore. As the story progresses, Hill-Saya foregrounds Moore’s voice through his letters, business records, and speeches.

Hill-Saya relies on a chronological march through Moore’s life, but does so with an eye toward the broader themes of Moore’s historical moment. The chapters are brief, offering compact but detailed sketches of Moore and his world before zooming out to examine the context in which Moore lived. The resulting narrative is a pleasure to read because it is consistently returning to Moore as the heart of the book. We are never far away from the doctor and his story for too long before Hill-Saya returns to him and his exceptional story.

An important facet of this biography is just that: Moore was an exceptional figure. He and the other self-identified members of W. E. B. Du Bois’ “talented tenth” were often able to use their wealth, status, and—particularly in Moore’s case—their lighter skin as shields from many of the realities facing Black Americans. Moore’s daughter included a passage in her memoir where she recounted their oft-used strategy of passing as white, and the difficulty of traveling with both of her parents because of her mother’s darker complexion (168).

Hill-Saya is a wonderful storyteller who skillfully navigates the story of Moore’s life and legacy. The only shortcomings of this biography revolve around contextualizing Moore within the broader world of the American South in the Gilded Age and within a more thorough historiography conversant with important texts on Black history during this critical era. We see glimpses of this richer context, for instance, in the discussion of the Wilmington massacre of 1898, and Hill-Saya does connect those events to Moore’s experiences in neighboring Durham. But the analysis can sometimes fall flat, particularly when discussing the intra-community struggles of classism and colorism. There are a few brief mentions of complexion-based racism and passing, but no effort to engage with the wide literature on colorism and passing, especially focusing on this exact era. The issue of class also becomes an important factor as Moore gains more wealth and privilege throughout his life. E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie and more recent works would have certainly helped contextualize some of Moore’s later work as a community leader, philanthropist, and privileged elite.

This is a concise and well-sourced work of biography that should be read by anyone interested in the Black elite class of the Gilded Age. A handful of such works have come out recently, and we should add Blake Hill-Saya to the coterie of writers offering us a different perspective on Black America during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.