Queen Mother
Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY • A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025
From an award-winning historian of Black radical politics comes the definitive biography of Audley Moore—mother of modern Black Nationalism and trailblazer in the fight for reparations
“Queen Mother is a monumental achievement, a rendering worthy of the great Audley Moore herself.”—Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism
In the world of Black radical politics, the name Audley Moore commands unquestioned respect. Across the nine decades of her life, Queen Mother Moore distinguished herself as a leading progenitor of Black Nationalism, the founder of the modern reparations movement, and, from her Philadelphia and Harlem homes, a mentor to some of America's most influential Black activists.
And yet, she is far less remembered than many of her peers and protégés—Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ahmad, to name just a few—and the ephemera of her life are either lost or plundered. In Queen Mother, celebrated writer and historian Ashley D. Farmer restores Moore's faded portrait, delivering the first ever definitive account of her life and enduring legacy.
Deeply researched and richly detailed, Queen Mother is more than just the biography of an American icon. It's a narrative history of 20th-century Black radicalism, told through the lens of the woman whose grit and determination sustained the movement.
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Historian Farmer (Remaking Black Power) offers an impressive biography of pioneering Black Nationalist Audley "Queen Mother" Moore. Born in 1898 Louisiana to a formerly enslaved father, Moore witnessed the horrors of lynching and Jim Crow, and became a committed activist after hearing Marcus Garvey speak in 1922. Affiliated throughout her long life with a staggering variety of organizations, particularly after she left the Communist Party in 1957 following its disavowal of Black Nationalism, Moore nonetheless never wavered on her core tenets: reparations as "the linchpin of every other policy," Black nationhood, and pan-African solidarity. She served as an important "maternal" mentor for younger activists, among them a reverent Malcolm X. Farmer doesn't shy away from Moore's ideological blind spots, like her ironically patriarchal views on women and her gushing admiration for Ugandan dictator Idi Amin ("He's warm, he's beautiful... he's sweet"). While the volume's wealth of detail is enlightening, both about Moore and the seven decades of activism in which she participated, it's Moore's own words that most vividly capture her staunch personality, including her defiant poem penned in tribute to Malcolm X ("And send our oppressors, where they belong/ IN HELL") and her movingly concise plea before her death in 1997 for continuing the fight for reparations ("Keep on. Keep on. We've got to win"). It's a commanding account of a tireless firebrand.
