ON THE MORNING OF June 23, 2014, a 79-year-old retired Methodist minister, Charles Moore, parked his Volkswagen hatchback in a strip mall parking lot in his old hometown of Grand Saline, Texas. For most of the day he stood in the lot, watching the cars go by on U.S. Highway 80. Sometime after 5:30 p.m., Moore set a small foam cushion on the parking lot asphalt, knelt on the cushion, poured gasoline over himself, and set himself on fire.
That act of public suicide provides the starting point for the PBS Independent Lens documentary Man on Fire, available for viewing online starting Dec. 17. The hourlong film is a sustained reflection both on Moore’s life as an especially stubborn perennial dissident and on the life of the town where his journey began and ended.
When Moore died, he left behind a neatly typed testimony tucked under a windshield wiper of his car, which portrayed his suicide as an act of solidarity with the untold numbers of African Americans lynched and brutalized in a town that was still largely unrepentant. On the dashboard of Moore’s car was a copy of his high school yearbook, presumably to prove to Grand Saline authorities that he was in fact one of their own, although he hadn’t really lived there for decades.
On its face, Moore’s suicide sounds like the tragic act of a man mired in depression and possibly even delusions. But the story becomes more complex when you read Michael Hall’s long article, also titled “Man on Fire,” from the December 2014 issue of Texas Monthly.
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