Queen Mother Moore
PUBLISHING DATE coming soon
"Queen Mother" Audley Moore: Mother of Black Nationalism
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” Audley Moore: Mother of Black Nationalism, 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.
EARLY AWARDS & PRESS
Radcliffe Fellowship for New Book on Queen Mother Audley Moore
2021 Whiting Foundation Creative Non-Fiction Grant Winner. Foundation video.
Grant recipient from National Endowment for the Humanities to support upcoming biography
The Black Woman who Launched the Modern fight for Reparations
advanced praise
“An essential book: this is a biography of not only an extraordinary and understudied figure but an entire movement. Queen Mother Audley Moore gives the fraught, feminized, and often unglamorous work of organizing its due, and it contributes to our working knowledge of the history of civil rights, filling in the gaps between the World Wars. Farmer’s groundbreaking and tenacious research allows her to build what other writers claimed was impossible: a full length biography of the mother of modern Black nationalism.”