What People Don’t Understand About Black Nationalism

Dara T. Mathis, The Atlantic

The long-overlooked activist Audley Moore knew that achieving radical goals sometimes required cooperation and dexterity.

Midway through William Greaves’s documentary Nationtime, which follows the 1972 National Black Political Convention, a woman named Audley Moore stands in a busy hallway preaching to people’s backs. She is clad in a burgundy-and-navy-floral kaftan and matching headwrap. Her voice rings out amid the bustling crowd of convention-goers: “Now let me tell you: Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Those who seek temporary security rather than basic liberty deserve neither.’ I’m demanding reparations. That’s all I can see now. That’s the answer for our people.” She is paraphrasing Franklin’s quote, one whose meaning is frequently misconstrued, but the invocation of the Founding Father lends both heft and irony to her calls for redress from the American government. Moore catches a few passersby and jokes with them, shoving a typewritten paper in their hands as they walk away. A few stay to listen. This scene aptly encapsulates the life of Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, an often-overlooked Black-nationalist organizer who fought vociferously for Black self-determination until her death in 1997.

A laudable new biography, Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore, by the historian Ashley D. Farmer, uses Moore’s story to chart a trajectory of Black-nationalist activism in the United States, from Garveyism in the 1920s (Moore belonged to the New Orleans chapter of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, or UNIA) to the 1995 Million Man March for Black-male unity and self-empowerment. Moore’s radical ideas—including her desire for a separate Black nation in the South—earned her ridicule at times, but her sharp critiques of American white supremacy also found purchase, influencing activists such as Malcolm X, Muhammad Ahmad, and Charles J. Ogletree Jr.

Despite her prolific political organizing and wide reach during her lifetime, Moore has largely been omitted from the history of civil-rights activism. Her exclusion from traditional archives is a familiar story to scholars of Black American life, especially those who study the contributions of women. Farmer writes that her book, which she spent a decade researching and writing, required painstaking effort to locate traces of Moore in personal papers, land deeds, files from the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, oral-history tapes, and lingering memories (much of Moore’s ephemera were lost in a house fire). The resulting work, which examines her involvement in a strikingly diverse roster of organizations, is a portrait of a woman with uncanny savvy and flexibility.

Moore worked with nationalists, Communists, and moderate liberals, white and Black alike—whatever it took to pursue goals such as fair housing regulations, just labor laws, and equitable resource distribution. She was sometimes self-contradicting as an activist, which isn’t to say she wasn’t singularly dedicated to her cause. She seems to have simply understood that achieving her objectives—in all their multiplicity—required maximal fluidity.

Read Moore’s story to learn how the Black-nationalist movement included people who were willing compromise to get the job done.

Discover June Jordan, another woman activist of the time.

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