"Queen Mother": The life and archive of Audley Moore
Ashley D. Farmer
In her book, Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore, Ashley Farmer explores the life of Queen Mother Moore. She was a leader of Black Nationalism, the founder of the modern reparations movement, and a mentor to some of America’s most influential Black activists. Farmer, a historian and former Clayman postdoctoral research fellow, was driven to write a book about her and understand “how someone so pivotal to activist memories could be so absent from our history books.” An associate professor in the Departments of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, Farmer recently discussed her book in a talk hosted by the Clayman Institute with Director Adrian Daub.
Farmer described Queen Mother Moore as “radical through and through.” Her book explores three primary questions: How does Moore help us understand Black nationalist ideology and practice? What does the lack of research and writing about Moore tell us about the state of the Black radical archives? Finally, how can Moore’s archive be a guide for conceptualizing Black radical women’s archives in the future?
The trajectory of a “radical”
To better understand Queen Mother Moore’s path, Farmer starts with her childhood. Moore was the oldest of three children. Her father, who was born into slavery, became a successful small business owner. Moore was eventually orphaned, which plunged her down the class ladder, forced her to quit school, and led her to become a domestic worker. Through her first husband and Marcus Garvey, she was introduced to Black nationalism, which Farmer describes as “the belief that Black people constitute a separate people, that we are bound together by our shared history of oppression, our shared heritage from Africa, our shared cultural traditions, and that we have the right to be a separate Black nation.”
Moore migrated north in the later 1920s and connected with the Communist Party, which at the time helped Black people advocate for fair wages, childcare, and healthcare. The party became, as Moore put it, a “vehicle that she could go to,” championing Garvey-like principles and offering direct aid to Black people. She joined a cohort of Black women organizing in Harlem, where she rose through the ranks. By the 1940s, she was at the head of the Black Popular Front, running anti-lynching campaigns and working to end fascism abroad.
After WWII, the rise of McCarthyism brought a large backlash against the Communist Party. Feeling betrayed when the party dropped its focus on issues such as Black self-determination, Moore returned to New Orleans, where she started the modern reparations movement within the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women. Farmer emphasized Moore’s perspective that “you cannot integrate into a nation-state that has not fully understood and made you whole as a human.” The movement spread across the country.
Farmer highlighted that “Moore never misses a moment to connect the failure of the American nation-state to take care of Black people.” Moore eventually began asking why Black people should continue to engage in the political project that was the United States, which was not designed with them in mind – so much so that her group began drafting the idea of a separate Black nation and exploring how they would organize themselves as such.
By the 1970s, Queen Mother Moore was an internationally known figure. She became an elder statesperson of the Black Liberation movement and a mentor to groups like the Black Panthers. She was an invited guest to heads of various nations across Africa. It was during this time in a formal ceremony in Ghana that she was installed as a "Queen Mother." In addition to this formal role, she was seen as a mentor and elder, taking on the “persona and physical manifestation of a queen mother of African descent.”
Political and archival lessons
Farmer’s exploration of Moore’s life reveals various political and archival lessons. From a political perspective, Black women came into Black nationalism through all walks of life: the movement was not simply a male-dominated space. Secondly, an organizing group does not need to be explicitly nationalist to allow members to express commitments that represent Black nationalism. Relatedly, an organization's principles do not necessarily stand in for a historical actor’s principles, which is particularly the case for Black women’s history. Finally, Farmer’s research warns against the over-simplification of Black nationalism and presents a new way to think of its evolution, one that includes women and women-centered organizations.
From an archival perspective, finding information on Moore required scouring diverse sources such as newspapers and donation histories of Black nationalist organizations. This highlights how “world building matters” via nontraditional archives, records, and evidence. Second, elder activist archives can look different and can include sources such as poetry. Furthermore, while archival collections have more records devoted to Black radical actors and organizations, they focus primarily on men versus women and women-centered collectives. In response to these various archival findings and lessons, Farmer introduces a new theory of radical archiving: the “disorderly distributed archive.” This is the phenomenon where documentation of a radical Black woman's ideas can be found anywhere and spread across multiple archives.
A call to action and reflection
A key takeaway from the story of Queen Mother Moore is that she was constantly questioning modes and expressions of power, while exploring new ideas about how Black people should organize themselves. Farmer ties this takeaway to a call to action: “What if we brought that same ethic to her archive and other radical Black women's archives? And how might this help scholars imagine a new way of collecting and writing histories of women like her?”
Unlike traditional civil rights stories that lean toward narratives of triumph, Moore’s story is about the endurance of an activist who stayed the course despite immense challenges. It is not a traditional "happy ending narrative,” but Farmer leaves listeners and readers to decide for themselves what constitutes a life well-lived.
