Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore

When thousands of African American men heeded Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan’s call for a Million Man March in October 1995, organizers honored a few elder women activists. One was Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow; another was Rosa Parks. A third was “Queen Mother” Audley Moore. Organizers featured Moore because she created or was involved in many of the major movement moments and organizations now considered to be central to twentieth-century black radical organizing. Indeed, if Rosa Parks was the mother of the civil rights movement, then Audley Moore midwifed modern black nationalism. She adopted an expansive vision of radical black liberation that set her apart from her civil rights counterparts and linked her struggle with that of other radicals around the world. Despite her pioneering role in fostering and sustaining the movement, Moore is all but forgotten from the historical record. 

As the first full-length biography on Moore, Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore, documents her incredible life and offers insight into the questions of how, why, and at what cost Moore has been omitted in histories of the radical Black Freedom Movement. The book examines Moore’s life from the 1890s until her death in 1997 and argues that she was an important but overlooked progenitor of twentieth-century black radical thought whose organizing approaches and ideas became the architecture of modern radical black activism. Using Moore as a thread, the book offers a wide-ranging history of twentieth- century black nationalist movements, moments, and organizations, foregrounding a sustained ideological tradition along the way.