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'I wanted a Communist philosophy, but I wanted us to have a chance to
organize our people': the diasporic radicalism of Queen Mother Audley
Moore and the origins of black power
Erik S. McDuffiea
a
Department of African American Studies/Gender and Women's Studies Program, University of
Illinois, USA
Online publication date: 23 June 2010
To cite this Article McDuffie, Erik S.(2010) ''I wanted a Communist philosophy, but I wanted us to have a chance to
organize our people': the diasporic radicalism of Queen Mother Audley Moore and the origins of black power', African
and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, 3: 2, 181 — 195
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‘I wanted a Communist philosophy, but I wanted us to have a chance to
organize our people’: the diasporic radicalism of Queen Mother Audley
Moore and the origins of black power
Erik S. McDuffie*
Department of African American Studies/Gender and Women’s Studies Program,
University of Illinois, USA
This article charts the extraordinary life and legacy of ‘Queen Mother’ Audley
Moore (1898Á1997). She was one of the most revered figures in twentieth-century
black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Communism. A life-long Garveyite and
a leading personality in the World War II-era Harlem Communist Party, she
understood black women across the diaspora as the vanguard in struggles for self-
determination. She broke from the Communist Party in 1950, reinventing herself
into an ardent black nationalist. Creatively formulating an idiosyncratic politics
combining Garveyism, Marxism, Third Worldism, and feminism, she was central
in forging 1960s-era Black Power and the modern reparations movement.
Recovering her life reveals the underappreciated importance of black women in
building radical, diasporic movements, the legacy of Garveyism and Communism
in framing Black Power, and the contours in twentieth-century black radicalism,
black internationalism, and black women’s activism.
Keywords: Garveyism; Communism; Black Power; self-determination; genocide;
motherist frame
Queen Mother Audley Moore was elated.1
The Organization of African Unity
(OAU) had invited the 76-year-old African American radical activist to address its
twelfth session, held in Kampala, Uganda in July 1975. A life-long Garveyite and a
former US Communist Party (CPUSA) member during the 1930s and 1940s, she had
attained a mythical status as a revered, elder mentor to young Black Power militants,
with one ranking Republic of New Africa leader asserting that Black Power was ‘the
child of Malcolm X and Queen Mother Moore’.2
She was also the founder of the
modern reparations movement. Given her impressive radical credentials, the African
People’s Party, a revolutionary nationalist Black Power organization based in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, selected her as its representative to the OAU
meeting. She proudly stood before African heads of state. They included Julius
Nyerere of Tanzania, Idi Amin of Uganda, Guinean President Se´kou Toure´, Haile
Selassie of Ethiopia, and Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the national liberation
struggle in Guinea-Bissau.3
An electrifying speaker and a brilliant organic intellectual, she opened her
address by emphasizing how ‘[m]y attendance at this gathering . . . demonstrates to
the world that the children of Africa who were kidnapped centuries ago and scattered
*E-mail: emcduffi@illinois.edu
ISSN 1752-8631 print/ISSN 1752-864X online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17528631.2010.481968
http://www.informaworld.com
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal
Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2010, 181Á195
DownloadedBy:[UniversityofIllinois]At:15:2524June2010

throughout the western hemisphere are linked by the bonds of common origin,
common struggle, and common aspirations’. Emphasizing how enslaved Africans in
the Americas were critical ‘to the very foundation of capitalism on which today
imperialism stands as a barrier to your development and our liberation’, she urged
the OAU to support Pan-African unity, the anti-Apartheid struggle, national
liberation movements across the black world, and demands for reparations. While
acknowledging Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong as brilliant revolutionary theoreti-
cians, she stressed that black people across the diaspora needed to formulate their
‘own independent thought concerning Black struggle’ for self-determination.4
Her
remarks and dignified presence before the meeting captured her radical political
sensibility that was anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and diasporic, with
special concern for the rights and dignity of African-descended women. Her long
political journey through Garveyism, Communism, and Black Power informed her
position.5
Curiously, Moore’s life and legacy remain largely shrouded in the literature of
twentieth-century black radicalism and black internationalism. Part of this was a
result of her neither writing an autobiography nor leaving a substantial cache of
personal papers. The phallocentric orientation of scholarly work on twentieth-
century diasporic movements has until recently rendered black women invisible,
further explaining her absence from the literature. This is significant. Her invisibility
not only shrouds the life of a major figure in twentieth-century black radicalism; it
also obscures the legacy of both Garveyism and the 1930s and 1940s-era Black Left
on black radicalism after the 1950s.6
Through tracing Moore’s political work, this article recovers and critically
examines the connections between Garveyism, Communism, and Civil Rights-Black
Power-era black radicalism and black internationalism.7
First, excavating her life
highlights the underappreciated impact of the Communist Party and Black Left
organizations on Black Power. To be clear, I am neither suggesting that the CPUSA’s
Marxist program was the ideological source of her thought nor am I attempting to
minimize the breaks between black radicalism before and after the height of the
1950s-era Red Scare, which decimated the Communist Left as a viable social
movement.8
To be sure, Moore moved in new political directions after leaving the
CPUSA in 1950. Growing post-World War II African American militancy, global
decolonization, and her own lived experiences transformed her politics. By the late
1950s, she reinvented herself into an ardent black nationalist. She formulated an
idiosyncratic, radical ideology, creatively weaving together Garveyism, Marxism,
Maoism, Third Worldism, and feminism. Embracing all things ‘African’, she
celebrated black culture. But she also espoused racially essentialist notions of a
unitary diasporic consciousness and a monolithic view of the black community. Her
adoption of a new identity Á ‘Queen Mother Moore’ Á solidified her ideological
transformation.
However, Moore never abandoned what she had learned from the Communist
Party. As she recounted in a 1972 interview with historian Mark Naison about her
long political journey: ‘I wanted a Communist philosophy, but I wanted us to have a
chance to organize our people’ after breaking from the Party.9
From her experiences
in the Communist Left, she forged an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist politics,
learning the importance of ideological discipline, party building, and the art of
grassroots political organizing. Most of all, from Cold War-era Black Left
182 E.S. McDuffie

organizations, such as the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) and the Sojourners for Truth
and Justice, she came to understand the struggle for black self-determination as
a struggle for human rights. She viewed white supremacy, Jim Crow, political
persecution, the oppression of black womanhood, colonialism, lynching, and the
notion of black depravity as forms of genocide. These practices, she believed,
represented a violation of universal, inalienable human freedoms, such as ‘the right
to life’, freedom of conscience, and the right of self-determination protected under
the United Nations’ human rights declarations. As such, she looked to the UN for
support in realizing black self-determination. Second, her activism provides a useful
lens for reperiodizing the postwar US Black Freedom Movement, as it reveals the
direct influence of early and mid-twentieth-century black radicalism on Black Power
and how inter-generational exchange survived the Cold War. Next, her prominent
role in mentoring young African American radicals illustrates the underappreciated
importance of veteran black women radicals in forging Black Power and diasporic
movements.
Fourth, this article looks at Moore’s gender and sexual politics to appreciate the
contours of black feminism and the tensions between nationalism and feminism
during the 1970s. As a Communist, she embraced ‘black left feminism’. Informed by
Communist Party and black nationalist positions on race, gender, and class, as well
as black women radicals’ lived experiences, black left feminism advanced black
working-class women across the diaspora as the vanguard for global, radical change.
Black women radicals also rejected prevailing gender norms defining women
primarily as mothers and as wives for making claims for social justice and women’s
equality.10
By the late 1950s, Moore adopted a ‘motherist frame’, a political
discourse and identity rooted in normative gender ideologies ‘that stress[es] the need
to fight for equality and justice with the characteristics associated with being a good
mother’.11
This stance strikingly resembled the community feminism of pioneering
Pan-Africanist and journalist Amy Jacques Garvey, as described by historian Ula
Taylor. Like Jacques Garvey, Moore embraced socially constructed ‘natural’ roles of
women as mothers and wives while at the same time challenging masculinist claims
of women’s intellectual inferiority to men and oppressive power relations between
women and men.12
Adopting this sensibility enabled Moore to forge new black
radical movements focused on protecting black women’s bodies from sexual violence
and economic exploitation while also appreciating the connections between race,
gender, and class oppression on a global scale. But maternalism also imposed serious
limitations on her work. She advocated a rigid, heteronormative sexual politics.
Eliding the complex ways of being black, her politics affirmed black feminist theorist
E. Frances White’s conclusions that black nationalism ‘can be radical and
progressive in relation to white racism and conservative and repressive in relation
to the internal organization of the black community’.13
Queen Mother Moore practiced her politics in multiple ways over a span of eight
decades, across the diaspora and beyond. By recovering and critically examining her
long, extraordinary political journey, this article not only illuminates the connections
and ruptures between twentieth-century black radicalism and the contours of black
women’s activism; her life also highlights the central role of black women in leading
struggles for self-determination across the diaspora.
African and Black Diaspora 183

Moore’s early years, Garveyism, and the Communist Party
Audley Moore was born in 1898 in New Iberia, Louisiana near New Orleans.
Orphaned as a teenager, she moved with her sisters, Eloise and Lorita, to New
Orleans during World War I. Once there, she found work as a domestic servant.
White men frequently assaulted her sexually on the job, making her keenly aware of
the economic and sexual exploitation readily encountered by black working-class
women.14
Becoming a Garveyite was a turning point in her life. Politicized by World War
I-era racial violence at home and black revolts around the world, she became a
devoted follower of Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey. His call for race
pride, self-help, and African redemption made her aware of the global contours of
white supremacy and her connection to the black diaspora. Decades later, she
claimed to have known Garvey, winning his respect when she arrived in New York to
help build his Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).15
Enlisting in the Harlem Communist Party during the early 1930s marked another
key turning in Moore’s life. The Communist-led global mass amnesty movement on
behalf of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’, nine African American young men sentenced to
death for allegedly raping white women in Alabama in 1931, was crucial to Moore’s
recruitment into the CPUSA. Communists successfully transformed Scottsboro into
a powerful symbol of Jim Crow, imperialism, and capitalist exploitation. More
significantly, Scottsboro was a key component of the CPUSA’s early Depression-era
position on the ‘Negro Question’, calling for the ‘self-determination for the Black
Belt’ in the southern United States. Drafted at the Sixth Congress of the Communist
International in Moscow in 1928, the ‘Black Belt thesis’, as it came to be called, drew
heavily from Garveyism. Framing the African American freedom struggle as a key
component of the world revolution, the Party’s militant anti-racist, anti-imperialist
program captured Moore’s imagination. She viewed the Soviet Union as a powerful
ally to black struggles for self-determination. But she never abandoned black
nationalism.16
During the 1930s and the 1940s, Moore was part of a dynamic community of
black left feminists. These women included Claudia Jones, Esther Cooper Jackson,
Louise Thompson Patterson and others. They formulated path-breaking analyses of
black women’s ‘triple oppression’, appreciating black women across the diaspora as
the vanguard for global, transformative change.17
Moore subscribed to this agenda.
Emerging as a leading figure in the Harlem Communist Party, her most significant
achievement as a Communist was assisting in the successful electoral campaign of
Benjamin Davis, Jr in 1943 for New York City Council, making him the first black
Communist elected political official in the US. Her credibility as a leader rested on
her reputation as a trustworthy, indefatigable organizer and strong, independent
woman, not as a mother or wife.18
In the years immediately after the war, Moore remained prominent in the
Communist Left. She headed the Civil Rights Congress’s Harlem branch.
Reminiscent of Scottsboro, the CRC, led by black Communist leader William L.
Patterson, built mass movements around ‘rape frame up cases’ during the early Cold
War years. These included the famous case of Willie McGee, a black Mississippi
truck driver whose white female lover falsely accused him in 1945 of rape after her
husband discovered the affair.19
The CRC also publicized the case of Rosa Lee
184 E.S. McDuffie

Ingram, a black Georgia sharecropper and widowed mother sentenced to death for
killing in self-defense her white would-be rapist in 1947.20
In 1951, Patterson
submitted to the United Nations We Charge Genocide, the most damning human
rights report on Jim Crow written during the Cold War. The petition characterized
white racial terror in the US as akin to the Holocaust and racial inequalities and
black poverty as a form ‘domestic genocide’. Given its human rights frame, the
petition looked to the UN for redressing these grievances.21
Under Moore’s
leadership, the Harlem CRC staged mass demonstrations in support of McGee
and Ingram. Moore joined the CRC-affiliated National Committee to Defend the
Ingram Family, which took her case to the UN. Moore also participated in the
Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an all-black radical women’s protest group that
centered Ingram to its black left feminist program.22
McCarthyism, however,
decimated these groups, stigmatized human rights and efforts to bring the US
before the UN as subversive, and briefly silenced many of the most committed anti-
racist activists from the global stage. Moore avoided jail. However, the FBI harassed
her, closely monitoring her activities from the 1940s through the 1960s.23
The Communist Left not only provided her with unique leadership opportunities
and links to the global stage. It also schooled her in political science and in the art of
political organizing. In a 1981 interview, she emphasized that it was in the CPUSA
‘where I . . . really learned to struggle’.24
She attended Party ‘workers schools’ in New
York, receiving rigorous training in Marxism, the ‘Negro Question’, and political
organizing. This schooling refined her skills as an organizer, impressing upon her the
importance of ideological discipline and that a party constituted the highest form of
political organization. She never forgot these lessons.25
Despite attaining national prominence in the CPUSA, she bolted from it in 1950.
She claimed that the Party’s abandonment of its position on black self-determination
during World War II, as well as sectarianism, elitism, and racism within the Party,
explained her move. At the same time, she experienced an epiphany that forever
changed her life. Similar to conclusions drawn later by black anti-colonial theorist
Frantz Fanon, Moore charged that black people had internalized their racial
oppression. Calling this condition ‘Negro-it is’, she saw it as a form of ‘mental
genocide’. For blacks to be liberated, she argued, they had to decolonize their minds
of white supremacy and to embrace ‘African culture’.26
These conclusions, she
claimed, alarmed Party officials. Viewing her with suspicion, they saw her new
positions as dangerous manifestations of black nationalism. She felt betrayed. From
these bitter encounters, she concluded that black people needed to formulate their
own independent, revolutionary agenda and to control their own movements for self-
determination. Now living in the postwar era of decolonization, she no longer saw
the Soviet Union as the beacon for global revolution. Instead, she looked to Africa
and Asia as fulcrums of transformative change. In the coming years, Moore took
what she had learned both in the Party and the Garvey movement and applied it in
new, creative ways to black nationalist organizations from the 1950s through the end
of her life.27
Forging Black Power
Following her break from the CPUSA, Moore operated on multiple fronts, both
nationally and internationally, in pursuit of black self-determination. She moved

forward in formulating her idiosyncratic black radical politics. But Marxism and the
Communist Left’s organizational strategies, particularly framing black oppression as
a form of genocide, remained central to her politics. A key link between black radical
struggles before and after the mid-1950s, Moore emerged as one of Black Power’s
most important progenitors.
Founding in the early 1950s Mount Addis Ababa, a retreat located on a farm in
upstate New York, with her sisters, Eloise and Lorita, stands both as Moore’s first
major political accomplishment after leaving the CPUSA and an early example of
Black Power activism.28
Named after the capital of Ethiopia, the retreat’s mission
reflected the legacy of Garveyism, as well as Moore’s effort to link the US black
freedom struggle with Africa. The Old Left also informed the retreat’s program.
Surely with Communist workers’ schools in mind, the retreat served as an ideological
institute, training young black militants in black nationalism and Marxism from the
1950s through the early 1960s.29
Queen Mother Moore worked closely with some of the most significant figures in
Black Power. In the late 1950s, she became an avid supporter of Robert F. Williams,
the head of the NAACP’s Monroe, North Carolina branch, whose strident call for
armed self-defense forced him to abscond to Cuba. She mentored Malcolm X.
According to Queen Mother Moore, she and her sister, Eloise, tutored him in the
history of the Garvey movement, the importance of Africa to the African American
freedom struggle, and William Patterson’s efforts in taking the US before the United
Nations for violating African Americans’ human rights. That veteran black women
radicals influenced the thought of the man widely considered as the most important
black nationalist of the postwar era highlights inter-generational exchange between
black radicals and underscores the underappreciated importance of black women in
shaping Black Power.30
Queen Mother Moore heavily influenced the Revolutionary Action Movement
(RAM), an important early Black Power organization, and its successor the African
People’s Party. RAM formed in 1961. Black college students and young people
disaffected with Civil Rights liberalism and non-violence comprised most of its
ranks. Inspired by Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, and events across the ‘Bandung
World’, RAM ‘considered itself the infantry of the African American freedom
struggle, promoting revolutionary nationalism in pamphlets, newsletters, and
journals’.31
By 1964, Philadelphia-based Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford), a
24-year-old, former college student, emerged as the leader of RAM’s semi-
clandestine, left-wing tendency. Advocating armed self-defense, it framed black
self-determination as a struggle for human rights, understood African Americans as
a ‘nation within a nation’, took part in mass campaigns in Philadelphia and in other
cities against racial inequality, and sought to raise African American political
consciousness. RAM dissolved in 1968. It reconstituted itself as the APP, with
Ahmad as its leader.32
Resembling RAM’s objectives, the APP’s program demanded
‘self-determination and independent nationhood’, charged the US with committing
‘genocide’ against black people, and looked to the UN and World Court for
redress.33
Many of these ideas came directly from Queen Mother Moore. At her West
Philadelphia home, known amongst RAM members as the ‘Black House’, she
imparted RAM and APP leadership with a political education in black nationalism,
Marxism, Maoism, party building, and the primacy of self-determination to the
186 E.S. McDuffie

black struggle. Ahmad became her prote´ge´. He remembered: ‘She was well-
developed in Marxism and understood the theoretical applications and how to
apply it to [black people].’34
She impressed upon him the importance of being well
read in works by Marx, Lenin, and Mao. But she also admonished him to ‘‘‘master
Marxism . . . don’t let it master you’’’.35
Explicitly drawing from the CPUSA’s Black
Belt thesis, she helped RAM formulate its position that African Americans
constituted a domestic colony within the US. Similarly, she helped the Republic of
New Africa formulate its call for an independent black state in Mississippi,
Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina, a position informed by the
Party’s black belt thesis.36
Indeed, while she broke from the CPUSA, its politics still
weighed heavily in shaping her activism.
Reparations
Queen Mother Moore’s pioneering advocacy of reparations stands as her most
significant contribution to black liberation. For Moore, being reared in a southern
family with formerly enslaved relatives probably cultivated her initial interest in
recompense for black enslavement, Jim Crow, rape, colonialism, and black racial
oppression on a global scale. Garveyism undoubtedly shaped her thought on this
issue. While Garvey never explicitly called for reparations, he certainly understood
slavery and European colonialism as crimes against black humanity. Her journey
through the Communist Left informed her arguments for reparations as well.37
In 1955, Moore founded the Reparations Committee of Descendants of United
States Slaves, arguably the first organization of its kind in the postwar black world.
In the ensuing years, her interest in reparations grew. In 1962, she discovered a clause
in a Methodist encyclopedia that ‘considers an enslaved people satisfied with their
condition if the people do not demand recompense before 100 years have passed’.
Realizing that the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation was rapidly
approaching, she co-founded the Los Angeles-based Reparations Committee Inc.
In 1963, she authored Why Reparations? Reparations is the Battle Cry for the
Economic and Social Freedom of More then 25 Million Descendants of American
Slaves, the first major theoretical work of the modern reparations movement.38
In its persuasive argument, Why Reparations? strikingly resembled William L.
Patterson’s We Charge Genocide. Like Patterson, Moore cited slavery, lynching,
segregation, police brutality, rape, poverty, psychological distress, and poor schools
as forms of ‘the crime of GENOCIDE’ (emphasis original).39
She also referenced
UN human rights declarations to make her case for reparations, looking to the world
stage for support in redressing African American grievances. She did not cite We
Charge Genocide. But given her active involvement in the CRC, it seems difficult to
imagine how this past work did not influence her thinking about reparations.40
At the same time, Moore’s work around reparations broke new ground in
advancing black freedom. For example, Patterson never explicitly called for
monetary recompense. She did. In December 1962, the Reparations Committee
filed a claim with the state of California against the US government for 500 trillion
dollars in monetary damages for slavery on behalf of 25 million African Americans.
It is unclear how or if authorities responded.41
Additionally, she posited reparations
as an alternative to civil rights. She criticized Civil Rights leaders for, in her view, not
appreciating the importance of reparations to the black freedom agenda. Writing

during the height of African decolonization, she linked reparations to African
independence movements. She praised Patrice Lumumba, the militant Pan-Africa-
nist premier of Congo who was assassinated in 1961 in a military coup covertly
supported by the US and Belgium. By lauding Lumumba, she defied the Cold War
political order, as US officials and the Civil Rights leadership perceived him as a
dangerous Communist. In doing so, she placed herself squarely with young black
radicals who viewed him as an African nationalist, anti-colonial hero and who
appreciated the African American freedom struggle as inextricably connected with
the Third World.42
Given this, she envisioned reparations as essential for building
economically self-sufficient, culturally vibrant, politically independent black com-
munities across the diaspora.
In the coming years, she pressed forward with grassroots education and
organizational building around reparations. In 1963, she co-founded the African
Nationalist (Alajo) Independence-Partition Party, advancing reparations. She
worked briefly with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader James
Foreman in drafting the 1969 ‘Black Manifesto’, calling for $500 million in
recompense for blacks from US churches and synagogues. Given her belief that
reparations was foundational to black self-determination, it is not surprising that the
many black nationalist organizations she was involved with, among them RAM, the
APP, RNA, Congress of African People, and the Black Panther Party, centered
reparations to their respective programs.43
She continued calling for reparations into
the 1990s. In 1994, she co-founded the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations
(N’COBRA), the largest group of its kind in the world. She deserves considerable
credit for the recent resurgence of interest in reparations across the black diaspora.
Although she did not live long enough to attend it, the 2001 World Congress against
Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban,
South Africa certainly would have thrilled her. Demanding that Western powers
acknowledge slavery as a crime against humanity, conference organizers called for
recompense to African-descended people for slavery and colonialism. In an imperial
move, the US and European Union, however, blocked both demands. Despite this set
back, the conference’s agenda mirrored Moore’s longstanding call for reparations as
vital to black self-determination.44
Becoming Queen Mother Moore
Reinventing herself into Queen Mother Moore by the early 1960s signified the
capstone of her ideological transformation after leaving the CPUSA. The Queen
Mother was a powerful position in the nineteenth-century Asante Empire, serving as
‘the royal genealogist who held the right to determine the legitimacy of all claimants
to a vacant stool [Asante throne]’.45
In the late 1950s, African college students whom
Moore had befriended in Harlem first gave her the title. By the early 1960s, she
became widely known amongst black nationalists as ‘Queen Mother Moore’.46
She not only adopted ‘Queen Mother Moore’ as her new self-identity; she also
performed this role. Years before wearing African clothing became chic in black
communities, she wore traditional African garb. During her visit to Ghana in 1972,
the Asantehene, the head of the Asante people, formally bestowed the title ‘Queen
Mother’ to her in an elaborate ceremony. The title was crucial to her quest for self-
definition as an ‘African’ woman, affirming cultural scholar Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s
188 E.S. McDuffie

observations about diasporic subjects’ search for a real and imaginary home in
Africa. She notes: ‘Despite the distance and hiatus, many diasporic subjects often
yearn for an originary past which will anchor their identity, providing emotional
stability in a world which disrupts their existence prior to any form of agency or
expression’.47
For a black woman reared in the violent Jim Crow South and acutely
sensitized to the genocidal violence experienced historically by black people,
particularly the racialized sexual violence against black women, reinventing herself
into ‘Queen Mother Moore’ surely filled a painful gap in her subjectivity. The title
authenticated her ‘African’ self-identity to her and others. Her new identity and habit
of wearing African garb also served as an effective means in her efforts in
decolonizing her mind, celebrating the dignity and beauty of the black female
body, and reclaiming the stolen African heritage.48
Her new persona contained important implications for her activism as well. By
the early 1960s, she was in her sixties and possessed little money. The Communist
Left and Civil Rights establishment ostracized her, viewing her as an eccentric, old
black nationalist woman. Contrasted with the authority and respect afforded to
mother figures across the black world, adopting the Queen Mother persona was a
strategic way for her to claim political authenticity, to assert leadership claims on the
global stage, and to challenge the agendas and sexism of black male leaders.49
Although Black Power militants and African heads of state viewed her in highly
gendered terms, the respectable role of mother outweighed the otherwise negative
capital of her gender on the political stage. Young activists often affectionately
referred to her simply as ‘Mother’. During her frequent visits to Africa beginning in
the late 1960s, African rulers treated her like a revered elder and visiting head of
state.50
Moore’s motherist frame also prompted her to build new movements centering
African-descended women’s dignity and respect. Nothing better showed this than her
founding of the New Orleans-based Universal Association of Ethiopian Women
(UAEW) in 1957. In its name and mission, she clearly sought not only to connect the
group to Garveyism, classical African civilizations, and the burgeoning African
Revolution but also to center women’s issues to diasporic struggles. The group’s
organizational strategies reflected those of the Communist Left as well. Surely
inspired by Scottsboro, the Civil Rights Congress, and the Sojourners for Truth and
Justice, the UAEW built grassroots movements in black communities in New
Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, and other cities around rape frame-up cases
involving black men and white women, interracial rape, involuntary sterilization of
black women, welfare rights, economic justice, and the death penalty. The UAEW
demanded reparations. In speeches and in published poetry, she called on black men
to protect black women’s bodies. She also criticized white women for their complicity
in the lynching of black men by lying about their consensual sexual relations with
them. Surely taking its cue from William L. Patterson’s We Charge Genocide, the
UAEW in May 1959 presented a petition to the United Nations Human Rights
Commission in New York, charging the US with violating African Americans’
human rights. The petition cited the lynchings of Emmitt Till and Charles Mack
Parker, a 23-year-old black man viciously murdered in May 1959 in Mississippi for
allegedly raping a white woman, as grounds for UN intervention. This was a bold
move. Government officials and mainstream Civil Rights leaders still equated human
rights as subversive. Given this, the FBI closely monitored the UAEW’s activities.51

Her motherist frame also contained contradictions. By the early 1970s, she often
expressed opposition towards women-centered agendas, endorsed masculinist calls
for black women’s subordination, and proffered heterosexist ideals for appropriate
sexual behavior. In a 1973 interview, she rejected black feminist assertions that black
male sexism was oppressive towards black women: ‘The Black male is not oppressing
the black woman. He owns no shipping. He owns no Wall Street stocks. So he is not
the oppressor. The black woman’s fight is for total liberation alongside her man.’ She
blasted the women’s liberation movement. Arguing that black women had no place
in it, she deemed feminism an ‘alien ideology’ promoted by racist middle-class, white
women.52
She added five years later: ‘Frankly, I don’t see any special problems for
the black woman apart from her people.’ Emphasizing that black men faced ‘special
oppression’, she argued that high unemployment, lynching, and mass incarceration
‘demeaned and emasculated’ them. In particular, she stressed how imprisonment had
caused black men to acquire venereal diseases and ‘effeminate ways’. Black women,
she argued, were to serve as supportive wives and nurturing mothers.53
She
steadfastly opposed interracial unions. Viewing abortion as a form of genocide
against black people, she also vocally advocated polygamy. Late in life, she
enthusiastically endorsed the 1995 Million Man March, an event widely criticized
by black feminists for its apparent patriarchal, heterosexist agenda.54
Multiple reasons explain her positions on these matters. As black queer theorist
E. Patrick Johnson argues, discourses and performances of black authenticity often
rely on ‘rigid constructions of gender’, promoting masculinist, heteronormative
notions of community.55
This certainly was the case for Queen Mother Moore. Her
notions of black authenticity embodied in her identity as ‘Queen Mother Moore’
constructed both a binary understanding of sexuality and gender and an exclusive
vision of community, overlooking the diverse sexual practices found historically
across the diaspora. Like many black nationalists and civil rights leaders, she viewed
homosexuality as anti-black, pathological, and alien to black communities.56
Generational issues explain her sexual politics as well. Coming of age in the early
twentieth century, she was far removed from growing shifts in traditional values
related to sex that were encouraged by the 1960s sexual revolution. Her experiences
in the Communist Left also framed her views on sexuality later in life. While the
Communist Party encouraged women’s participation in social movements and
advocated for women’s equality, it understood gender oppression largely in economic
terms. The Communist Left also lacked a political language for appreciating the
connections between sexuality, reproductive rights, domestic violence, and politics,
often dismissing these issues as ‘subjective’ and irrelevant to political struggle.57
In the context of the times, Queen Mother Moore’s positions on gender and
sexuality were hardly unique. Many Black Power and Civil Rights organizations
often equated black liberation with black male redemption, espousing heterosexist
ideals that silenced the voices of black gays and lesbians.58
Similar to Moore’s stance
on abortion, black nationalist organizations such as the Nation of Islam and the
Black Panther Party viewed abortion as a form of genocide. And many black women
shared her criticisms of white feminists’ racism and middle-class orientation.59
However, for many younger African American women who self-identified as
‘feminists’ and with ‘Women’s Liberation’, Queen Mother Moore’s gender and sexual
politics seemed reactionary. This was true for Frances Beal, the founder of the
pioneering Third World Women’s Alliance. She found it ironic and troubling how, in
190 E.S. McDuffie

her view, Moore remained ‘silent’ when black nationalist men ‘called for black women
to walk ten steps behind them when she had never done this herself’. Her iconic status
as a veteran radical, Beal believed, validated misogyny within the movement.60
This
tension arose due to generational differences. But it was also ideological. Black
feminists such as Beal believed that black liberation required fighting simultaneously
against patriarchy, heterosexism, imperialism, and class oppression.61
At the same time, Queen Mother Moore’s positions on polygamy and female
subservience did not go unchallenged by young, female Black Power militants.
Shafeah M’balia an African People’s Party leader from New York, who was in her 20s
during the early 1970s, recalled that most APP leaders, especially women, ‘couldn’t go
there with her’ on polygamy. M’Balia at the time did not self-identify as a ‘feminist’
due to the term’s association with white middle-class women. However, she had
known Frances Beal through consciousness raising sessions in New York before
meeting Queen Mother Moore, and black women’s liberation was central to M’balia’s
politics. As such, she strongly disagreed with Moore’s position on polygamy on the
grounds that it was a cover for male sexual conquest of women. (Most APP male
leaders took this same position.) She, like most APP female leaders, also refused to be
subservient to men. Despite their strong disagreements with her, APP female leaders
agreed with Queen Mother Moore’s critique of the racist, middle-class orientation of
the mainstream women’s movement. And they deeply respected her as a symbol
of confident, independent black womanhood. Standing up to her was one example of
how the APP, as M’balia put it, ‘seriously grappled’ with the role of women in relation
to the national question and with sexism within the movement.62
Queen Mother Moore’s practice during the 1970s and 1980s in many respects,
however, contradicted her provocative, masculinist, heteronormative statements in her
oral interviews. Even while advocating for polygamy and black women’s deference to
black men, she still championed black women’s full participation at every level within
black movements and agitated around involuntary sterilization, interracial rape, and
welfare rights. She also mentored countless black women across the US and world,
many of whom self-identified as black feminists. One of the most prominent of these
women was poet-activist Sonia Sanchez, who met Queen Mother Moore in the early
1970s. Like Shafeah M’balia, Sanchez dismissed Queen Mother Moore’s stance on
sexuality issues, attributing her positions to age. But for Sanchez, Queen Mother
Moore embodied dignified black womanhood. As Sanchez recalled: ‘She taught
[black women activists] how to hold the stage with men’. Viewing her as the connective
tissue between Garvey, the Black Left, Malcolm X, and present-day black struggles,
Sanchez praised Queen Mother Moore for her pioneering advocacy of reparations.63
Additionally, Queen Mother Moore remained deeply concerned about the global
status of women. Addressing the 1972 All-African Women’s Conference in Tanzania,
she also attended the first through the fourth UN-sponsored World Women’s
Conferences from 1975 to 1995. Certainly, her gender and sexual politics were
complicated and contradictory, underscoring the often contentious, uneasy relation-
ship historically between black nationalism and feminism.64
Conclusion
Queen Mother Moore passed away at the age of 98 on 2 May 1997, in New York.
Thousands of mourners, including Louis Farrakhan, Sonia Sanchez, and US

Representative Charles Rangel of Harlem attended her memorial service in
Harlem.65
Her death marked the passing of a dynamic, revered black radical activist
whose work spanned the twentieth century.
As discussed here, Queen Mother Moore’s long political journey demonstrates
not only the lasting influence of Garveyism and Communism on her politics and
how she moved in new political directions after breaking from the CPUSA in 1950,
but also the continuities and ruptures in twentieth-century black radicalism and
black internationalism. Reinventing herself into Queen Mother Moore, founding the
Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, mentoring Black Power militants,
traveling across the black world and beyond, and calling for reparations testifies to
this point. Her politics also reveal the possibilities and the striking limitations of
maternalism in making claims for women’s equality and freedom. Queen Mother
Moore’s journey also reveals the contours, as well as the generational and ideological
divides within twentieth-century black women’s radicalism. This article, which has
only scratched the surface in discussing her extraordinary life, will hopefully provide
some direction for critically appreciating Queen Mother Moore’s importance as a
major figure in twentieth-century struggles for black self-determination and as a
progenitor of Black Power.
Notes
1. In this essay, I will refer to her as Queen Mother Moore when discussing her life after she
adopted the title ‘Queen Mother’ by the early 1960s or when directly citing her
recollections of the past.
2. Jackson-Issa (1999, p. 45).
3. http://www.africa-union.org/root/au/Documents/Decisions/hog/lHoGAssembly1975.pdf.
4. African People’s Party (USA), ‘Reaches out to: The Organization of African Unity’’’
speech, 28 July 1975, The Black Power Movement, Part 3, Papers of the Revolutionary
Action Movement, 1962Á1996 (microfilm), reel 7, folder African People’s Party, 1975,
1006Á1012 (hereafter RAM Papers).
5. McDuffie (2003); Gilkes (1991) (hereafter BWOHP).
6. In this essay, the noun Black Left refers to a wide range of African American protest
groups and individuals that associated with, and to varying degrees supported, the
Communist Party’s program from the 1920s to the early 1950s.
7. This essay joins a growing body of scholarship on black internationalism. A few examples
include Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, ed. From Toussaint
to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Age of Revolution (2009); V.P. Franklin,
ed. New Black Power Studies: National, International, and Transnational Perspectives,
special issues, Journal of African American History 92(4) (2007); Brent Hayes Edwards,
Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003);
Young (2007).
8. I use the noun Communist Left to refer to a wide range of protest organizations and
individuals that associated with, and to varying degrees supported, the program of the
Communist Party.
9. Queen Mother Moore, interview by Mark Naison, 1972, Oral History of the American
Left (OHAL), Tamiment Library, New York University, 15.
10. McDuffie (2008); Washington (2003); Davies (2008).
11. Kuumba (2001, p. 57).
12. Taylor (2002); Gordall (n.d., p. 2).
13. White (1990, pp. 76Á7).
14. BWOHP, 117Á24.
15. Ibid.; McDuffie (2003, pp. 2Á21, 24Á45). No record of Moore’s relationship with Garvey
has been found in UNIA records.
16. Adi (2008); Solomon (1998); Kelley (1990, pp. 78Á91).
192 E.S. McDuffie

17. McDuffie (2008, pp. 82, 85Á6, 90Á3); Davies (2008, pp. 29Á68); Horne (2000).
18. Amsterdam News, 20 November 1943; Daily Worker, 20 November 1943; McDuffie (2003,
pp. 154Á71, 204Á15, 233Á50, 323Á40, 401Á6).
19. Authorities arrested McGee and sentenced him to death, ultimately executing him in 1951.
20. Martin (1985).
21. Patterson (1970); Anderson (2003).
22. McDuffie (2008, pp. 83Á5, 87, 91).
23. BWOHP, p. 198; Horne (1986).
24. Queen Mother Moore, interview by Ruth Prago, 23 December 1981, Oral History of the
American Left, Taminent Library, New York University, New York, 9.
25. ‘Workers School, Report-Fall Term 1934’, in Records of the Communist Party, USA,
Russian State Archive of Social History and Political History (RGASPI), Library of
Congress, Washington DC, 515/1/3817/84-93.
26. Quoted in BWOHP, 142; Fanon (1967).
27. Naison interview, p. 10; BWOHP, 135, 138, 181; McDuffie (2003, pp. 407Á11).
28. Neither Lorita nor Eloise Moore ever joined the Communist Party. However, both women
were involved in Party-led movements around Scottsboro and the unemployed movement
during the Depression. BWOHP, Amsterdam News, 11 December 1937.
29. Black Scholar Interviews: Queen Mother Moore, Black Scholar (1973).
30. BWOHP, 151; Gore et al. (2009); Moore, interview by Naison, 17; Muhammad Ahmad
(Max Stanford), interview by author, 12 June 2006, Philadelphia; Ahmad (2007, pp. 11Á
13); Smethurst (2005, pp. 168Á169).
31. Quoted in Joseph (2006, p. 60); Kelley (2002b, pp. 72Á81). The term Bandung World
references the militant anti-colonial, anti-racist, internationalist agenda of the Afro-Asian
Conference Á also known as the Bandung Conference Á a gathering of Asian and African
states that took place between 18 April and 24 April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia. The
Non-Aligned Movement emerged from this meeting (Kelley, 2002b).
32. Stanford (1986).
33. Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford), ‘‘The Role of the Pan African Party in National
Liberation Struggle,’’ n.d., RAM Papers, reel 1, Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford)
writings, 1969 folder.
34. Ahmad interview.
35. Hand-written reading list from Queen Mother Moore to Max Stanford, 1963, in author’s
possession.
36. BWOHP, 189; Ahmad interview.
37. Hill (1983).
38. Quoted in Kelley (2002a, p. 119); Moore (n.d.); Biondi (2000, p. 7; Cha-Jua (2001).
39. Patterson (1970).
40. Moore (n.d., p. 5).
41. Ibid.; BWOHP, 161, 162; Naison interview, 19.
42. Moore (n.d., p. 5); Plummer (1996).
43. Kelley (2002a).
44. Quoted in BWOHP, 163; ‘All For Reparations and Emancipation: Recommendations to
the WCAR on the Issue of Reparations’, http://www.imadr.org/project/icr/afre1.html.
45. Aidoo (1981, p. 67).
46. Jackson-Issa (1999, p. 42).
47. Bakare-Yusuf (2008, p. 148); Kelley (1998, pp. 26Á30).
48. Collins (2004, pp. 25Á35, 55Á61).
49. Jackson- Issa (1999, p. 202).
50. M’Balia interview; Saladin Muhammad interview; Delois Blakely, interview by author,
24 January 2002, New York; Sonia Sanchez, interview by author, 12 January 2009.
51. Louisiana Weekly, 14 January 1961; FBI, ‘Audley Moore’, New Orleans Bureau File, 100-
6122-73, 8 September 1960; Gordall (n.d., p. 4Á10).
52. Black Scholar (1973, pp. 47, 48).
53. BWOHP, 176.
54. M’balia interview; White (2000, p. 265).
55. Johnson (2003, p. 48).

56. Ibid., 48Á75; White (2000, pp. 82Á90).
57. John H. Bracey, interview by author, 10 January 2009; Aptheker (2006, pp. 103, 107).
58. Estes (2005).
59. Nelson (2003).
60. Frances Beal, interview by author, 12 September 2006, Oakland. McDuffie (2003, p. 487).
61. Springer (2005).
62. Shafeah M’balia, telephone interview with author, 15 September 2006.
63. Sanchez interview.
64. McDuffie (2003, pp. 485Á7); Blakely (1994); White (1990, pp. 76Á7).
65. ‘Queen Mother Moore: A Life of Struggle’, Revolutionary Worker, 25 May 1997; Daily
News, n.d., RAM Papers, Reel 11, Queen Mother Audley Moore Folder; Sanchez
interview.
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