Frederick Randolph Moore was born on 16 June 1857, in Prince William County, Virginia. He was the son of Evelyne (or Evelina) Moore, an enslaved house servant, and a white father, listed on the son's death certificate as Eugene Moore and sometimes said to have been related to the Virginia Randolphs.
Fred Moore was brought to the District of Columbia at an early age and was educated in the public schools.
Like many enterprising blacks in the nation's capital, Moore spent his youth on the street selling newspapers. At eighteen, he became a messenger in the Treasury Department, a position he retained from the Grant administration through the first presidential term of Cleveland; he is said to have served Secretary of the Treasury Daniel Manning as a confidential aide. Leaving the Treasury Department at about the same time as Manning, Moore became a clerk in the Western National Bank, of which Manning was president. In 1904, Moore moved to New York City, where he immediately entered the most powerful class in Negro society, a small, often light-skinned elite. Booker T. Washington, the nationally influential Alabama-based Negro educator, chose him to serve as a traveling organizer for the National Negro Business League, which sought to encourage black economic development. Moore urged Negroes to "learn to value money. " "Jews support Jews, " he told the league's convention in 1904, "Germans support Germans and Negroes should now begin to support Negroes. " Moore served as a district captain and, for five months in 1904, as Deputy Collector of Internal Revenue, and running for the state assembly in 1905; though defeated, he made a good showing. At the request of Booker T. Washington, Moore in 1904 also assumed the editorship of the Boston Colored American Magazine, which he promptly moved to New York. In 1907, when Washington secured financial control of the New York Age, the country's leading Negro newspaper, Moore became its editor and part owner.
As his influence in journalism grew, Moore remained active in the Republican party, attending several national conventions as a delegate or an alternate and receiving an appointment in 1912 as United States minister to Liberia. He did not actually assume this office, however, either because the incoming administration of Woodrow Wilson was expected to make the customary patronage changes or because of the press of business activities. During his years in New York, Moore developed a strong loyalty to the Harlem community. As Negroes moved northward from midtown, he moved the location of his newspaper office with them. He was active in the National League for the Protection of Negro Women, the Katy Ferguson Home, the Committee for the Improving of Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York, and the National Urban League. In 1915, he was in the forefront of the black protests against the motion picture The Birth of a Nation. With other black leaders, he held discussions with the American Federation of Labor in 1918 in fruitless attempts to expand wartime job opportunities for Negro labor.
Moore was an investor and an officer in the Afro-American Realty Company, a short-lived firm (1904 - 08) which was instrumental in opening up the new community of Harlem to Negro residents. He was instrumental in bringing national Negro leaders such as Congressman Oscar DePriest of Chicago and Bishop Reverdy Ransom to New York to campaign for black candidates.
Moore was active in Republican politics in Brooklyn.
Even though Moore supported Washington's goals of race pride, economic nationalism, and self-help, Moore frequently challenged the Tuskegee leader's facade of moderation by attacking lynching and the lukewarm racial policy of the Republican party, and by supporting Northern black radical groups such as the Niagara Movement.
Like many prominent Negroes of his day, Moore maintained a keen interest in the urban, progressive, interracial social service organizations active in New York City. But he also retained his early faith in Washington's ideal of a thriving black capitalist economy and society and served on the board of the city's Dunbar National Bank.
In April 1879, Moore married Ida Lawrence, sister of Mattie Lawrence of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, who bore him eighteen children, of whom six lived to adulthood: two sons, Eugene and Gilbert, and four daughters, Ida, Marion, Gladys, and Marjorie.
