Robert J. Moody (1828-1916)

An important post-Civil War Black educator, Moody was born to an enslaved man named Daniel and Jane Freeman, a free woman of mixed race. He farmed as a free man with his mother in Dyer County; they hired his enslaved father as labor. After Disciples of Christ ministers converted the family, Moody in 1855 attended a Disciples for Blacks in Nashville until the city closed it in 1856. Moody finished his education at Buxton Mission School in Canada before returning to Dyer County and purchasing his father at auction in 1858. He freed his father who moved to Canada, but Moody stayed to attempt to purchase and free Sarah McDamond, who became his legally recognized wife in 1866. During the Civil War he traveled to Union lines at Trenton, then Cairo, Illinois to go to Canada, returning after the war to Michigan. From 1873 to 1880 Moody was an impactful educator and missionary in Dyer County. He moved to Illinois in 1880, working as a teamster and farmer there for the rest of his life.