Muhiyidin Moye

Moye, an African-American, was born in Poughkeepsie, New York and as a teen the family moved to Hollywood, South Carolina. He attended University of South Carolina and in 2006 suffered severe burns from an arson attack at a house he was staying at. He went on to attend Winthrop University, finishing in 2011. That fall he appeared at Occupy Eugene. Back in Charleston he found and joined the Baháʼí Faith around 2014 and soon was visible in the news following the shooting of Walter Scott and being known as a Black Lives Matter activist in 2015. After some more work in 2016 Moye became involved in a February 2017 Bree Newsome speaking engagement that drew protestors and counter protestors during which he made a leap crossing police lines to take down an oversized Confederate battle flag that happened to occur during a news broadcast and so was caught on live television. A year later Moye went to New Orleans and while riding a bicycle through the midnight streets on February 6, 2018, he was shot, traveled on some blocks, left his bike and called for help to which police responded and took him to the hospital. However he had lost too much blood and died in the morning.

Moye rose to local prominence after the shooting of Walter Scott by North Charleston, South Carolina, police in 2015. Moye arranged a meeting in which Scott's family first viewed eyewitness Feidin Santana's video of the shooting.[1] Also in 2015, Moye met with Bernie Sanders - where Sanders said "Let me be very clear. Nobody will fight harder to end institutional racism and to reform our broken criminal justice system." Moye said "Bernie's going through his own evolution. Coming from Vermont and being in the space of white privilege that he's enjoyed, he's gonna go through an experience of learning."[2]

But Moye's activism goes back at least to 2011 when he was visible at the Occupy Eugene event in October.[3] In 2016, Moye was arrested for disrupting a North Charleston City Council committee meeting while petitioning for a citizens board to review police actions. The city later formed the Citizens Advisory Commission on Community-Police Relations.[1] Moye was called a hero for things he did but he demurred and observed of protest tactics “much more action, a lot less social media talking and organizing on social media. A lot less getting together at marches and yelling at inanimate objects, and a lot more action and interrupting.”[4]

A Bree Newsome speaking engagement was set in early February 2017 and drew protestors and counter protestors. In the situation before the leap with the Confederate oversized battle flag waving, he said "And I looked at our elders and I saw, like, fear in their eyes. And I saw them back up, almost. That was the moment for me. We're not going to pass this on another generation. Not another generation of people are going to be intimidated by this flag."[5] Moye spoke afterwards about it saying "We have been able to experience this kind of oppression and this intimidation because we don't resist it.… And we learn how to tolerate it and we learn how to normalize it. That's what my impetus was to take down that flag" in an interview with MTV News.[6] Both the flag waving protestor and Moye were then in a fundraising situation - the protestor's efforts had stagnated but then rose to $4,000 while Moye's raised $10,000.[5] David Meyer Lindenberg was less impressed with the leap and wrote to suppress the fundraising for Moye.[7]

In March 2017, following his leap for justice, a concert was arranged in Charleston, "a community festival and multicultural celebration of music, art, food, activism, and community,"[8]

Jelani Cobb, Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, writing for the New Yorker, called him "a complex, vexing, and, to his opponents and to some portion of his admirers, an exasperating figure. He was not, however, insincere, lacking insight, or, as had been apparent to me since that afternoon in the Circular Congregation Church, easily forgettable."[9] Cobb encountered Moye during the taping of the PBS special America after Charleston with Gwen Ifill at which he appeared.[10] Cobb's view was the Ifill did not like Moye's participation from the audience.[9]

In April 2017 the Charleston City Paper asked Moye's advice on community organizing:[11]

1. "don't prescribe unless you can describe"[11]
2. "build out of our needs"[11]
3. "Organizing friend networks and leveraging social media connections"[11]
4. "…we don't need more people to raise awareness. We need more people to start working on actually developing solutions and organizing our presence within spaces where decisions are made."[11]
5. "we want to have organizing that centers natives"[11]
6. " The centering of women's voices is absolutely critical."[11]
7. "Where you live and the neighborhood association and what's happening in your geographic location, in your neighborhood school, those are the spaces that we need a lot more organizing happening."[11]
8. "community communication across front lines"[11]
9. "create platforms that are collaborative"[11]
10. "We want to express in physical reality then we want to bring that expression back into virtual reality to reflect on and to have that generate some more energy so we can express it in physical reality. There is a dance there that we're learning how to do …"[11]
11. "paying young people" (to canvass, engage)[11]

Moye was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. At age 13, he moved to Hollywood, South Carolina.[12][13] He attended University of South Carolina as a freshman in 2005 where he met Justin Bamberg, who became a lawyer and state lawmaker. Bamberg was the attorney for Scott's family after the shooting.[1]

In a case of arson,[14] in June 2006 Moye was one of the victims in the house who suffered severe burns.[15]

Moye graduated from Winthrop University with a Masters of Arts degree in May 2011[16] and then went on to the Occupy Eugene event in October.[3]

His experience with the fire was called a near death experience,[17] and later found the Baháʼí Faith in South Carolina, the second largest religion there.[18][19] His mother is also a follower of the Baháʼí Faith but his father was a Nation of Islam[20] Muslim.[21] Moye picked up the Twitter handle @daBlockUp under the name "Muhiyidin d'Baha" in 2014 and it currently features the Baháʼí ringstone symbol.[22]

In a recorded short talk he speaks of "oneness of humankind, equality of men and women, the togetherness of religion and science that just click in a way that's - oh - this is an integrated reality" and why he "embodied" himself as a Baháʼí; he said: "Baháʼu'lláh has given me the freedom to consort and be friendly with anybody of any religion of any race from anywhere on this planet because I know the oneness of human kind is a reality."[20]

In December 2016 Moye appeared as part of a panel at the College of Charleston about the death of Walter Scott.[23] The coverage of the death of Scott including mention of Moye won the Charleston Post and Courier a Pulitzer in breaking news.[24]

• Alfred J. Cotton III (2016). Do black lives matter in American mainstream news media? Two case studies of police-involved shootings of black men explaining a racist media environment (PhD). College Communication and Information, University of Kentucky. Retrieved February 12, 2018.

• Muhiyyidin D'Baha, Calvin Logan (October 31, 2016). Muhiyyidin D'Baha Black Lives Matter Charleston (Television). The Logan Power Show.