Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley MooreAshley D. FarmerPantheonISBN: 9780593701546
Inspired by Marcus Garvey, surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover, mentor to Malcolm X, eulogized by Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan — someone with this sort of résumé deserves to be a household name, not to mention a dream subject for anyone seeking a window into a century of Black liberation movements. But, somehow, Audley Moore has escaped the acclaim of her fellow travelers.
Rectifying this oversight is Ashley D. Farmer’s mission in Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore. The University of Texas historian follows Moore’s life from her birth in Louisiana at the tail end of the 19th century to her death three years shy of the new millennium.
Moore’s childhood was spent in a precarious middle ground between extreme racial violence and an emerging Black middle class. Her father’s untimely death cut short the family’s prospect of upward mobility, and she bounced between unfulfilling jobs before eventually ending up in Harlem. But it was her encounters with Garvey before leaving New Orleans that proved foundational to Moore’s political life, throughout which Black Nationalism served as her North Star. Farmer writes that “it was only after she became a Garveyite that she began to see herself as part of a global Black community.”
Moore spent much of the 1930s and 40s advancing communist organizing. The Communist Party spent much of this same period as part of a popular front (alongside liberals) focused on countering fascism, although communists were quickly pushed to the margins as the Red Scare took hold. In the first iteration of the race-versus-class debate that would recur all her life, Moore never felt fully convinced that communists had the interest of Black people at heart, and their ultimate disavowal of Black Nationalism prompted her departure from the party.
After a spell back in Louisiana that included organizing on behalf of people incarcerated at Angola (the nickname of the Louisiana State Penitentiary), Moore charged full force into campaigning for an independent Black republic within the territory of the United States, remaining skeptical of the integrationist aims of much of the Civil Rights Movement.
With the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation serving as a key marker, Moore called for reparations both because of their moral justification and for their potential to serve as the financial engine of a thriving Black nation. She urged Malcolm X to take up this call. (He was among the first to call Moore by the title she would be remembered by, “Queen Mother,” which elders from Ghana’s Asante tribe later officially bestowed upon her.)
Queen Mother adopts an impressively transatlantic perspective, contributing to a growing canon on the ties between Black Americans and African-independence leaders that includes Howard W. French’s The Second Emancipation. Not only did the growth of the Black Power movement lead Moore and others to embrace their African cultural heritage, she developed close personal and political ties to figures like Sékou Touré and Julius Nyerere.
It was also in this period that Moore became infatuated with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, one of several blemishes on her record that — as with her regressive views on gender — Farmer does not shy away from. Moore remained connected to the African continent for the rest of her life. She struck up a friendship with Nelson and Winnie Mandela after Nelson’s release from prison and ultimately passed on her title of “Queen Mother” to Winnie.
Moore’s later years were marked by a continuing commitment to the cause even as her body slowed down. She had a small speaking role at the 1995 Million Man March and witnessed the growth of movements like the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, leaving her with a sense of optimism at the time of her death. While Moore never saw her aspirations fulfilled, Farmer writes that “her life was a master class in striving for a dream she knew would likely never come true.”
Farmer managed to produce this extensive biography despite the archival limitations that contributed to Moore’s erasure. While Moore’s artifacts are largely missing — and a fire destroyed many of her records — Farmer nonetheless pieced together information through interviews with Moore’s family and acquaintances, government surveillance files, and previously undiscovered records from her childhood in Louisiana. Although this allows Queen Mother to convey the events of Moore’s life in thorough detail, the broader narrative can, at times, get lost in the minutiae.
Still, reading Queen Mother leaves one with a sense of amazement that a single person could’ve woven her way into so many nooks and crannies of 20th-century history. Farmer’s book may well ensure that future accounts of that history give Audley Moore her due.
Tim Hirschel-Burns is a policy advocate and writer based in Washington, DC. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and has written for publications including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and African Arguments. Find him on Bluesky at timhirschelburns.bsky.social.
