QUEEN MOTHER

Well-crafted biography of a forgotten founder of the Black Liberation movement.

“If Rosa Parks was the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, then Queen Mother Audley Moore midwifed modern Black Nationalism.” So writes historian Farmer, who adds that the distinction between the two lies in the question of assimilation; where Martin Luther King Jr. pressed for the full integration of the Black community into American society, Moore advocated separatism. Indeed, rebuffed as a speaker at a signal event, Moore denounced King’s movement, saying, “The Negro Revolution of 1963 with its anti-­climax March on Washington on August 28th resulted in little or no gains for the Negro masses.” Moore grew up as part of the privileged Creole class in New Orleans, her parents having bought a home in a neighborhood between Black and white communities “with the hope that, over time, they could move closer—­both physically and ­ socially—to white folk.” Segregation and Jim Crow foreclosed on that possibility, and when Moore’s half-brother threw her and her sisters out of the family home on their father’s death, she became an activist in the Garveyite movement, where she became an initiate in Black history, consciousness, and “contemporary struggles for liberation.” Falling in with communist activists on moving to Harlem, Moore built up a Black political movement that formed a popular front against Nazism; when war came, she advocated vigorously for the “Double Victory” campaign, “the first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within.” In the postwar era, Moore was a mentor to Malcolm X, received the title “Queen Mother” from the Asante people of Ghana, and was a pioneer in the demand for reparations, all believing that there could be “no true self-determination until Black people had built a nation of their own.”

A vigorous contribution to Black political history that restores an overlooked figure to the narrative.