Today we’d like to introduce you to Chas Moore.
Hi Chas, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
So I was born in Houston, Texas to my mom Pam, Pamela Dale Moore. My dad wasn’t around, because he was in prison. And crazy enough, he was a two-time loser. Somebody that had been to prison two times before, and had got out, and then had some relations with my mom, and then got in trouble and went back in.
I didn’t see my dad until I was seventeen, eighteen, again. But my mom also passed when I was at the age of seven, so I was raised by my grandparents, my grandma Ella and my grandpa Lee Petitt and the older I get, the more I realize that they really, particularly my grandma, did the best she could raising a child in the early nineties, let alone a little Black boy. My grandpa then passed away, not too much longer after my mom. He died in 2003. So it was basically just me and my grandma a.k.a “granny”.
So I think a lot of that helped shape and guide me for the real world, just a lot of death and trauma at a particularly early age. Being raised by grandparents that were born in the late 20s and early 30s. So their experiences with race and racism from Louisiana and East Texas was something that was impressed upon me. I didn’t deal with racism as a young lad until I got to Austin. But when I was young, I had knew about the KKK and the civil rights movement from learning history, but I was very much aware of race, just didn’t know I was dealing with it myself until I got older and realized, “Oh, actually, everything’s about race.” I think a lot about that.
I think I was a pretty good student in school. Played football and other sports. My senior year of high school is when I decided to go play around with some knuckleheads and we got into some trouble. Long story short, I was committed of a crime that these other folks did, and at the age of seventeen, the judge told me that he wanted to teach me a lesson, which I thought was fair at the moment because I didn’t know any better… What I thought at the time was, “Okay, I get it. You’re trying to teach me “don’t be around the wrong people… in the wrong crowd…” But that sentence was eight years probation for second-degree robbery. And I had to spend two months in Fort Bend County Jail. Because the sentencing came before my senior semester of high school. I had to spend every weekend in Fort Bend County Jail. He let me go to my prom for an hour or two, then I had to come to turn myself in by midnights, like Cinderella or some sh*t. And then he let me go to graduation, and the day after graduation, I had to sit in Fort Bend County Jail all the way up into college orientation.
So here I am. My senior high school experience was just crazy, literally walk across the stage to go walk into a jail cell for two months and then out of a jail cell, headed to Austin, Texas for college orientation. So I think most people that have been impacted by the criminal legal the system can imagine just the mental toll that took on me. I was in jail during the birth of Facebook, you know what I mean? I got out and everybody’s on Facebook. I didn’t know what was going on. So add that on top of getting to UT, the University of Texas at Austin. I’m from Houston, Texas, not really particularly used to being around White people all day, every day. In Houston, you can cater a day where you don’t see white people. We go to Houston right now, we can literally not see White people for twenty-four hours. So now here I am in Austin, and still not really familiar with what is White America, because I’m not from that, so getting into just the nick of things after orientation.
It was somewhere in the first day or the first week on campus. Me and my friends were walking down San Jacinto Boulevard, or Street, whatever it’s called, and these group of White boys in a pickup truck scream, “Go home niggers.” And that was a culture shock for me because it’s 2006. At the time, I’m just like, “Oh, wow, that’s crazy.” Only other people have called me anything close to “nigger” is my peers. We say it as part of Black culture, whether you agree with that or not, but I’ve never been called that by a White person. So that’s my beginning experience at the University of Texas, which would further lead on to a bunch of racist sh*t. They would deface to MLK statue, they would do blackface and have racist-themed parties and stuff like that, which really got me thinking about how it was our turn, my turn, as a generation to continue to fight for racial justice and equity and equality.
So that’s really when I started my organizing career if that’s what you want to call it, which also led me to struggle in school, ’cause I was just all about the movement, and I didn’t really care about nothing else. And I was on probation. There’s a bunch of negative self-talk, that was like, “Man, it doesn’t matter if you do this or not. You’re gonna be a convicted felon for the rest of your life.” So I was in and out of school, then I realized I’m over school. Wanted to focus on building a better tomorrow for people. Fast forward to Trayvon Martin. That really was my personal wake-up call. I think a lot of people, not all of us, or maybe we choose to ignore, but I think some of us hear these wake-up calls, and something clicks. And for me, that was Trayvon Martin. I was like, “Man, something has to give.” So I started really hardcore organizing at that point. And then fast forward to 2015, after realizing that the NAACP and Urban League at that time, were not really understanding the frustration of the youth or young adults, I created my own organization, so we can fight the way we wanted to fight and approach things the way we wanted to approach them, and here we are. And that’s a real, real, real quick and dirty version of everything, but I think that’s the gist of it.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
So of course, initially, just coming out of nowhere, everybody’s like, “Well, who is this?” You know what I mean? Like, “Who is this kid?” So I think battling through that over the years, and even still now a little bit because I’m only important to people that do this type of work, or have some type of interest in racial social justice, right? So still trying to just make equality and treatment of Black people a moral and “popular” thing. It’s just crazy how much that ebbs and flows. I think funding is always an issue because nobody wants to fund—let me take that back. White people don’t want to fund what they see as detrimental to them, right? So here we are a Black group that’s fighting for Black health and happiness and abundance, and I think a lot of our White brothers and sisters and institutions, as they probably should because that is what we’re trying to do, they see that as a loss for them. And I was just having a conversation yesterday about how philanthropy is not set up to dismantle all these systems, you know what I mean? Philanthropy is here to keep the status quo going. So when you have organizations like mine, it’s like, “Let’s get rid of the status quo.” That causes a glitch in the matrix, you know what I mean? So funding and making that sustainable is a challenge.
I think getting people to understand that there’s a duality, or there should be a duality in life. I’m not gonna tell you to stop having fun, right?
Enjoy life as much as you can with what we got, because it just seems like it’s getting crazier and crazier every day. However, I also do think that as humans, we have a responsibility to make the world a better place, not only for the people that’s coming after us, however long the earth is gonna be here, but also to make current living situations for our neighbors and people that will inherit this earth as good as possible. And that would have already been difficult to do, just as humans on this watery rock, but when you add in layers of race and gender and sex and all these types of things, and you create these systems that put people against one another, then we have to battle through that. So I guess I can understand why people don’t want to deal with that because it’s already complicated. But just really getting people to lean into the idea that you are not here as an individual, we are here as a collective. And that’s difficult. It just is what it is. I think those are my biggest challenges man. Definitely money, people’s care factor, making people care longer than what they do.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Austin Justice Coalition?
Austin Justice Coalition (AJC) is a community organization that focuses on improving the quality of life for people who are Black, Brown, and poor. Since 2015, AJC has served as a catalyst for positive change toward economic and racial equity for Austin’s people of color by developing, organizing, and providing robust programs and events. AJC’s big four areas of advocacy are education, policing, civic engagement, and community building. The Austin Justice Coalition (AJC) serves people who are historically and systematically impacted by gentrification, segregation, over-policing, a lack of educational and employment opportunities, and other institutional forms of racism in Austin. AJC’s mission is to improve the quality of life for people of color by helping them be the driving force behind their own liberation.
When I started the Coalition, I promised that I was gonna find every Black Negro in Austin, and we were gonna be the Blackest Black Panthers, we were gonna be wearing all black everything. But then one day I woke up and realized I lived in Austin. The demographics are different, but also, as I begin to read and educate myself around, “Well, who really should be doing this work?” One, it’s everybody, right? I think everybody has to commit to being anti-racist and anti-White supremacist and just being better people. But also, when you talk about White supremacy specifically, you have to include White folks. White folks should be doing that heavy lifting of undoing racism, right? That’s their legacy. We have not benefited from it, we have been on the tail end of White supremacy and oppression, and I don’t think it’s our job to undo it.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
For me, success is defined by simply creating pathways towards a world where Black, Brown, People of color, and working-class folks are finally able to just exist and be PEACEFULLY. And while I may never actually get to witness this reality in its entirety, I would also consider it a success if I’m able to plant seeds that grow trees that provide shade for generations to follow to rest under.
I’m constantly reminded that abolition is more about the journey than the actual destination.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://austinjustice.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/igiveyoumoore/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chasmoore
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/igiveyoumoore
- Other: https://www.twitch.tv/i_giveyoumoore
Image Credits
Montinique Monroe Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon Bill Wallace
