Lodie Maurine Biggs was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and raised in Seattle, Washington.

[5] In 1932, she offered to resign from the Seattle Urban League's Health and Recreation Committee, when it moved to sponsor an all-black baseball team, which she felt was counter to the goal of racial integration: "Separate teams mean the beginning of racial feeling," she explained, "I do not approve and do not wish to be connected with an organization that would foster such a movement."

[9] By 1937, she was living in New York, and was secretary of the Harlem Citizens' Committee to Aid the Striking Seamen.

In 1942, the pair founded the Frederick Douglass Book Center, a bookstore and community space in Harlem.

[1] [12] Lodie Biggs married Richard B. Moore as his second wife in 1950;[13] they shared an apartment in Brooklyn until her death there in 1971, in her seventies.