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

by Ashley D. Farmer

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Politics, Activism

Audible Audio

Published November 4, 2025

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025
Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: From an award-winning historian of radical Black politics comes the definitive biography of Queen Mother Audley Moore—foremother of the Black Nationalism movement and trailblazer in the fight for reparations

In the world of radical Black 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 a mentor to some of America's most influential Black activists from her homes in North Philadelphia and Harlem.

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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Listen to the author on the Smarty Pants podcast!

Black nationalism. Reparations for slavery's ongoing horrors. A long lifetime of refusing to sit down and shut up, refusing to be a good girl, declining to accept partial and insincere and less-than sops and stop-gaps. "Queen Mother" is a very good title for Audley Moore and a good character analysis of her.

It pains me I knew little about her until now, until someone pulled together threads her proteges had deliberately unpicked and appropriated. She was truly unforgivable to the PTB within and without the Civil Rights movement because she was that powerless victim, a woman; yet her every act and every word gave the lie to that characterization. No one anywhere ever comes across less like a victim than Audley Moore.

She got done wrong to all the damn time, but that did not make her a victim...an identity she rejected, along with mainstreaming, assimilation, and capitalism. It's no wonder she was ignored by historians of the movement until now. She is guaranteed to scare, offend, and even radicalize the very kind of white guy who will commit racist violence. Since those guys are already doing it, empowered by the kakistocracy presently in government in the US, along comes Author Farmer to be introduced to Queen Mother Audley Moore as a child; galvanized by her Presence, her affect on those around her, Author Farmer became her biographer in due course. Outrage at not finding any records cache or archive of her life, the biographer took her considerable powers of persuasion and of study to pull back together the deliberately unpicked threads of an incredible life.

If you care at all about why, how, and at what our country needs to look honestly at itself, use some of your holiday pilf to procure this excellent, easy-to-read, necessary to understand book. Rescuing a major force from calculated desuetude is the act of a true apostle of truth.

[Andre(Read-A-Lot) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally! Queen Mother Moore is celebrated in print! What am amazing life she lived. From watching Marcus Garvey’s ascendancy to her presence at the Million Man March. Queen Mother spent decades in the struggle for freedom and self determination for African people. She was front and center for myriad battles. Prison advocacy in Louisiana, the battle for community school in Brooklyn, NY, and of course her pet passion, the fight for reparations for African people in the diaspora.

She was really a pioneer in the Reparations movement, she was pushing for reparations when many wouldn’t even conceive of it in private, much less than uttering demands in public. Against all odds, she remained a steadfast Black nationalist, sincerely expecting to bring about a separate autonomous nation of Black peoples in the southern United States. This often put her at odds with the mainstream Black organizations, that believed the key to freedom was integration with the mainstream in the US.

Queen Mother Moore remained committed to her principles throughout her life but was flexible enough to move in/out of organizations, as long as she saw an avenue to push her agenda forward. She was an early comrade within the Communist party, and other leftist outfits until she saw the lack of support for Black nationalism amongst these groups.

Queen Mother was a vocal supporter of African independence movements and may have had a dalliance with Idi Amin, even when he was branded a pariah to much of the world. Queen Mother was unbothered by the criticism and commented that she admired Idi Amin’s dedication to his people.

Ms. Ashley Farmer should be commended and praised for toiling for years to bring to us this extraordinary, extensive biography of Queen Mother Moore. What a tremendous contribution to the world.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ashley D. Farmer’s “Queen Mother: Audley Moore, Black Nationalist, and Mother of the Reparation Movement” opens with a problem that is also a provocation: how can someone so omnipresent in twentieth-century Black radical politics have been so thoroughly sidelined in public memory? Farmer’s answer is not only to recover Audley “Queen Mother” Moore’s story but to use her as a throughline connecting Garveyism, Black communism, anti-lynching campaigns, welfare rights struggles, Black Power, Pan-Africanism, and the modern reparations movement. What emerges is both a biography and a counter-history, a book that insists that a century of Black radicalism looks different if you start from the vantage point of a working-class woman who never stopped calling herself an African.

Farmer structures “Queen Mother” as a mostly chronological narrative, but she keeps circling back to a single image: Moore in her Harlem apartment, surrounded by stacks of papers and young men in thrift-store chairs, lecturing about history as if she is holding court in an improvised university. The book shows us how a girl born in Jim Crow New Orleans in 1898 became that woman – an elder whose titles (queen mother, abbess, minister, mother of New Afrika) are at once ceremonial and earned. The movement rooms change – Garvey halls, Communist Party meetings, Danneel Street living rooms, Newark church basements, Tanzania conference centers – but Moore’s presence is remarkably consistent. Farmer’s narrative never lets us forget that for three-quarters of a century, wherever Black radicals gathered, there was a serious chance Moore was in the room.

The early chapters are particularly strong in showing how a foundation laid in the Garvey movement continues to shape Moore’s politics long after Marcus Garvey himself is gone. Farmer traces Moore through tobacco factories, domestic work, and the crowded tenements of New Orleans and New York, into the Universal Negro Improvement Association and later into Communist organizing. She is attentive to the material conditions that produced Moore’s radicalism – the precarity of Black working-class life, the routine violence against Black women and girls, the constant experience of white contempt – without reducing her to a sociological type. The portrait that emerges is of a woman drawn to organizations that offer both a language of Black pride and concrete tools for confronting exploitation, and quick to break with those that treat race as an afterthought.

One of Farmer’s central arguments is that Moore’s life forces us to collapse some of the neat divides historians have drawn between “integrationist” and “nationalist,” civil rights and Black Power, domestic politics and foreign policy. In the Louisiana chapters, Moore is a Garveyite turned abbess entering Angola prison under the auspices of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, working alongside her sisters and a handful of comrades to investigate death-row cases and challenge racist rape laws. That work grows into the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, a women-led organization headquartered in the reclaimed Danneel Street house. Farmer handles these scenes with care, showing how Moore builds an analysis of the state – its prisons, its welfare departments, its courts – from the perspective of women whose daily lives are entangled with those institutions.

It is from that vantage point that Moore arrives at reparations. Farmer is at her best when she recreates the painstaking intellectual labor behind what can sound like a simple demand: somebody has to pay. She shows Moore and her sisters spending late nights poring over reference books, church encyclopedias, and government documents, comparing ex-slave pension campaigns, postwar German reparations, Native land claims, and the limited property compensation granted to Japanese Americans after internment. Reparations, in Farmer’s telling, is not a slogan Moore plucks from the air but the product of years of study and comparison, a legal and moral argument that grows sharper as she digs.

Those chapters in which Moore confronts the United Nations and later builds the Reparations Committee in Los Angeles give the book much of its intellectual heft. Farmer allows us to see the conceptual leaps – from the language of genocide in petitions to the UN, to the insistence that the United States has violated its own constitutional promises, to the idea that Black Americans are an African people whose grievances ought to be understood in the same frame as colonialism in Kenya or apartheid in South Africa. It is in these pages that the subtitle’s claim – mother of the reparation movement – feels least like publisher’s shorthand and most like a precise description.

“Queen Mother” is also, crucially, a book about the politics of form: how Moore comes to inhabit the persona of “Queen Mother” and why it matters. Farmer lingers on clothes and gesture – the bright printed robes, the stacked bangles, the towering headwraps – without treating them as mere costume. In a movement world that increasingly valorized young, male, often armed militancy, Moore’s decision to appear as an African elder is a kind of theory in practice. It allows her to be simultaneously above and inside the fray, to chastise, bless, and instruct without vying for the same authority as the men around her. Farmer is particularly sensitive to how Moore’s care work – feeding African students from her storefront kitchen, housing activists, listening – is bound up with that persona; “queen mother” is a job description as much as a title.

Farmer does not shy away from Moore’s contradictions. The book is clear about her suspicion of white feminism and her insistence that Black women’s horizons rise and fall with those of Black men. Her advocacy of polygamy, rooted in a belief that racism and violence have thinned the ranks of Black men, reads today as both startlingly radical and deeply patriarchal. Farmer neither sanitizes nor caricatures these positions. Instead, she shows how they emerge from Moore’s reading of history – a reading in which the central fact is the systematic destruction of Black families – and from her attempt to imagine communal arrangements she understood as African and therefore corrective to American individualism. The book’s nuance here is one of its great strengths: it asks readers to sit with Moore’s gender conservatism without casting her as an enemy of Black women’s liberation.

As the narrative moves into the late 1960s and 1970s, the book widens out into a kind of group portrait of Black Power and Pan-African currents with Moore as a persistent presence. The chapters on the National Conference on Black Power in Newark, the founding of the Republic of New Afrika, and the Gary convention are among the most vivid. Farmer gives us Moore cheering the most secessionist resolutions while younger delegates squirm, or watching thousands of people in a high school gym shout “Nationtime!” along with Jesse Jackson. These scenes are written with a tight, cinematic eye and carry the energy of the period without dissolving into nostalgia.

The Pan-African chapters – Moore’s trips to Guinea and Ghana for Kwame Nkrumah’s funeral, her ceremonious installation as a queen mother among Asante elders, her participation in conferences in Tanzania and her uneasy proximity to heads of state like Idi Amin – are more ambivalent by design. Farmer captures both the exhilaration of an African American elder finally touching African soil and the disorientation that follows as Moore confronts the distance between diasporic fantasy and postcolonial reality. Independence brings coups, party states, security services, and debt; the Organization of African Unity is as much club of presidents as revolutionary vanguard. Moore’s ideal of “Africa for the Africans” has to be revised to account for African citizens subject to their own leaders’ abuses. The book does not entirely resolve this tension, but it makes the reader feel the force of Moore’s disappointment and her refusal to abandon either reparations or Pan-Africanism because of it.

In the final chapters, Farmer walks a careful line between hagiography and indictment. She is unsparing about the material conditions of Moore’s old age: the fires that destroyed her belongings, the precarious housing, the reliance on small speaking fees and community donations, the strokes that left her dependent on others in a Harlem nursing home. It is hard not to read these pages as a critique of a country – and a movement – that could celebrate Moore on stages and at marches while leaving her poor and vulnerable at the end of her life. Yet Farmer also refuses to frame this as simple tragic irony. She shows us students and activists rallying to help, archivists and historians working to preserve Moore’s papers, younger organizers seeking her blessing at N’COBRA conventions. The “lasting resources” of the title are as much intellectual and affective as they are financial.

Stylistically, “Queen Mother” sits in a productive space between scholarly monograph and narrative nonfiction. Farmer writes with the authority of an historian who has lived in the archives – letters, FBI files, organizational minutes, oral histories – but she resists the temptation to flatten the story into argument alone. She is willing to stage scenes, to pause on gestures and textures, to reconstruct conversations when the sources allow. The prose is precise, often lyrical, but rarely showy. There are stretches, especially in the middle third of the book, where the density of context – the lists of organizations, conferences, committees – can feel overwhelming, and readers unfamiliar with the landscape may wish for a few more signposts. Occasionally Moore recedes into a crowded backdrop of acronyms and personalities just at the moment when one wants to know more about her interior life.

Those are, in the end, minor reservations. The constraints Farmer faced are real: Moore left behind no memoir, no neat cache of introspective diaries, no trove of love letters. Much of what the book reconstructs about her feelings must be inferred from speeches, interviews, and the testimony of those around her. There are moments when one wonders what a slightly looser narrative, more willing to speculate about emotional texture, might have revealed. Yet the discipline Farmer maintains – her refusal to overreach beyond what the record can bear – is part of what gives the book its power. It is an honest biography of a woman who spent most of her life pouring her energies into collective projects rather than personal confession.

What “Queen Mother” does, beyond rehabilitating Audley Moore as a central figure in Black freedom struggles, is reorient the reader’s sense of how those struggles unfolded. It asks us to see the twentieth century not only through charismatic male leaders and landmark legislation but through the work of a woman who organized from kitchen tables and living-room chairs, who studied legal precedents late into the night, who insisted that Black people in the United States were Africans and that the crime of slavery had never been settled. It links contemporary debates over reparations to a much longer genealogy and reminds us that arguments now circulating in policy circles were hammered out decades ago by people without institutional backing.

This is, in other words, a book that will likely shape how scholars write about Black nationalism and reparations for years to come, but it is also one that an engaged general reader can follow with profit. Farmer’s achievement is to make Moore’s long, complicated life feel both singular and representative, a lens through which to grasp a century’s worth of struggle. For all its occasional density, “Queen Mother” is a deeply absorbing, often moving account of a woman who refused to be quiet, to be reasonable, or to be programmed anymore. On balance, it is the kind of work that earns, in this reader’s view, a 92 out of 100.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think our history lessons need revised and expanded. There is such a rich history of people and so much that we never hear about. I know I am a yt person speaking here, so it could just be me, but I've never really heard of Audley Moore until I read Queen Mother by Ashley D. Farmer. It is the one reason I wanted to read about her. The beauty of books, so much knowledge right at our fingertips. 

    What a read it was! Farmer chronicles so many steps in Moores life, and man, what a life. Uphill battles and struggles the entire way. But you know what? She didn't stop. The fact that Moore worked tirelessly on behalf of her people for her people is so admirable and a reminder of what we all have the power within to do. 

    I was struck by how so many historical events happened that she was included in and/or at. But again, never mentioned. An absolute sad disservice to her, and brings up questions of who else was there in the background that we never learn about.

    The real tragedy is how her life ended after all of that uplifting of her community, it somewhat echoed for me, that of Zora Neal Hurston. I am beyond grateful to Farmer for writing this book, for introducing me and so many others to Queen Mother. 

   I know one thing is for sure, she was a force to be reckoned with, a mentor to the giants we hear about in the Civil Rights Movement and her legacy of work is still being felt all these years later.

     

[Ms. Nedy Librarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Queen Mother is an extraordinary and necessary biography. Ashley D. Farmer gives long-overdue recognition to Audley Moore, a transformative yet frequently sidelined leader in Black radical movements. Farmer captures Moore’s life with clarity and depth, illuminating her influence on liberation struggles across decades. From Moore’s early years in Louisiana to the expansive global scope of her activism, the narrative is both engaging and deeply moving. An inspiring and enlightening read from start to finish. Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the review copy, every opinion here is entirely my own.
Thanks for the copy Goodreads & Penguin Random House.

[Tia Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Queen Mother is a powerful and essential biography. This book restores the legacy of Audley Moore, a vital but often overlooked figure in Black radical history. Ashley D. Farmer brings Moore's life into sharp focus. This book traces her impact on liberation movements. Starting from her beginnings in Louisiana and her later global reach. A truly inspiring read. Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the review copy all opinions are my own.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

We get a fantastic biography of a woman who was central to the Civil Rights movement and especially to the more radical elements, as well as being the founder of the reparations movement and a mentor to several activists while she was at it. Fantastic biography of someone the movement has overlooked in the past.