ON SALE 11/4/25
Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
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.
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.”
– Judges Citation, Whiting Foundation
“Queen Mother is a beautiful, brilliant, and important book. It’s as if an essential puzzle piece in Black history had been missing and Ashley Farmer has filled it in, perfectly, with meticulous research and stirring prose. Unforgettable.”
— Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize winner for King: A Life
“Queen Mother is a monumental achievement, a rendering worthy of the great Audley Moore herself.”
—Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism
“Queen Mother is a deeply researched, beautifully written epic recounting Audley Moore's landmark, unsung life.”
—Edda L. Fields-Black, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War
“Queen Mother is a tour de force. Ashley Farmer has masterfully reconstructed the life of activist-intellectual Audley Moore from a scattered, unruly archive. What emerges is an immersive narrative that honors Moore—a political visionary and tactician—who fought tirelessly for the liberation of Black people around the globe. Our Queen is getting the recognition she has long deserved. And we, the heirs of her labors, will be blessed by this powerful reclamation of our collective past.”
—Tanisha C. Ford, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Our Secret Society and Liberated Threads