When researcher and professor Ashley D. Farmer learned that there were no full-length biographies of Black nationalist Audley Moore (1898-1997), she decided to right the omission. The result, Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore, not only tells Moore’s personal story but also charts twentieth-century Black nationalist thought in the United States and beyond. It’s a fascinating look at a complicated woman and a contentious political movement.
The book opens in New Iberia, Louisiana, where Moore was born into relative privilege. Her community, Farmer writes, was stratified by “class, not color.” Even the unexpected death of Moore’s mother in 1904 was less cataclysmic than it might have been because “extended family guided Audley and her sisters through their gilded adolescent years.”
Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
By Ashley D. Farmer
Pantheon, 496 pages
Publication date: November 4, 2025
But this comfort proved short-lived when, in 1917, her father’s death catapulted her into a downward spiral that resulted in her eviction from the family home. According to Farmer, “les bons temps turned to bad times.”
Suddenly, Moore had to scramble to find work. But she got lucky: World War I opened doors, including a romance with Josiah Leopold Spraggs, a Jamaican-born soldier-turned-grocer whom she married in 1920. While the marriage did not last, Spraggs had a profound intellectual impact on his bride, introducing her to Marcus Garvey in 1922.
Within days of hearing Garvey speak, Moore joined the New Orleans division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which Garvey had founded. She was a quick study. “During the first twenty years of her life, Audley had witnessed the daily injustices that segregation, unequal schooling, and racial violence had wrought upon Black people,” Farmer writes. “But the relative security she enjoyed had exempted her from some of the injuries many faced. The UNIA helped her develop an awareness of Black people’s plight beyond her own circumstances and hometown.”
Schlesinger Library
Audley Moore.
As part of the Great Migration, Moore eventually moved to New York City, which was teeming with Black luminaries and activists. But rents were high, and Moore soon found her way to the Depression-era Communist Party (CP), whose leaders were demanding economic justice and zeroing in on Black Americans—people they called “an oppressed nation within a nation.” Moore was intrigued by this assertion. Moreover, her job as manager of the Harlem People’s Bookshop positioned her to support community struggles.
Still, as time wore on, Moore became disenchanted with the party. Its subsequent repudiation of the “separate Black nation” concept rankled her, but she remained a member until the late 1940s, pouring her energy into supporting Harlem tenants and promoting laws benefiting Black workers.
Eventually, however, she’d had enough. Her departure from the party coincided with Joseph McCarthy’s election to the U.S. Senate, and when the FBI called her for questioning, she affirmed that she had been a party member. “The CP was not sincerely interested in Negro equality,” she told the agents. She then refused to say another word.
The following decades brought Moore into contact with many organizations dedicated to Black liberation, from the Ethiopian Coptic Church to the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women. She also had contact with the Nation of Islam, including Malcolm X.
Throughout her life, she opposed the NAACP and integrationist efforts. Instead, she worked to build support for financial reparations to benefit the descendants of enslaved Africans.
After Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965, Moore’s work expanded to include support for community-controlled public education, and she became a frequent speaker on campuses—where students dubbed her “Queen Mother”—and at conferences nationwide. She drew additional sustenance from multiple visits to various African countries.
She also attracted criticism: Contact with Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin—whose flattery stoked her ego and blinded her to his brutality—shocked many of her contemporaries, but she ignored the detractors.
Farmer has introduced, or perhaps reintroduced, an outspoken, brash, vain, and intrepid leader to contemporary readers. Her book is stimulating, thought-provoking, and insightful.