Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore - Hardcover

Farmer, Ashley D.

 
9780593701546: Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593701542 ISBN 13: 9780593701546
Verlag: Pantheon, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

FINALIST: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY • A LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2025

From an award-winning historian of Black radical politics comes the definitive biography of Audley Moore—mother of modern Black Nationalism and trailblazer in the fight for reparations

“Queen Mother is a monumental achievement, a rendering worthy of the great Audley Moore herself.”—Jelani Cobb, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism

In the world of Black radical 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, from her Philadelphia and Harlem homes, a mentor to some of America's most influential Black activists.

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ashley D. Farmer is an award-winning writer, researcher, and cultural analyst who explores Black history and its implications today. Her first book, Remaking Black Power, was shortlisted for numerous prizes, and she has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the Whiting Foundation.  Farmer’s ideas and insights have appeared in multiple venues including Harper's Bazaar, NPR, The Washington Post, and Teen Vogue. Farmer lives, reads, and writes in Austin, Texas, and is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

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Chapter 1

My People Had Pride in Themselves

The sound of a horse-drawn wagon along the dirt road was nothing new for Audley Moore. But there was something off about the familiar rhythm. Audley’s family always urged her and her two sisters, Eloise and Loretta, to be models of propriety. They were never to gawk or stare. But the eldest Moore girl couldn’t resist. She ran to the window to see what was coming down their street. Excitement quickly turned to horror when the spectacle came into view: white men on horses “hollered like wolves” as they dragged a Black man by his feet off the back of a wagon. Another gaggle of them followed close behind, yelling and screaming with animalistic fervor. Audley would soon come to recognize the screams of a lynch mob and what it meant for any Black person caught in its path.

Moore’s grandmother was all too familiar with what the young girls were witnessing. She quickly shut the windows and hissed at them to get down. “I remember Grandma allowing us to look through the shutter,” Audley later said, so long as they were careful not to be seen. Crouched down low with her sisters, Audley tried to be still and quiet her breathing as she peered through a small opening in the blinds. Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open as she watched the man’s head “bumping up and down on the clay, the hard, crusty road.” Moments like this—witnessing the horrors of white supremacy from the safety and protection of her household—defined Audley Moore’s early life.

The eldest child of St. Cyr and Ella Moore, Audley was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, on July 27, 1898. Her well-to-do family taught Audley the value of Black empowerment and the price many would pay to get it. With their twenty-year age difference, St. Cyr, born in slavery, and Ella, who came from a free Black community, made for an unlikely union. They were brought together by their families, who had willed themselves forward during Reconstruction, desperate to take advantage of all the possibilities that emancipation had to offer. As they stepped out of the shadows of slavery, both sides of Audley Moore’s family pushed against the constraints of southern racism, took pride in their ability to obtain an education and property, and defended their rights at the ballot box, all in an effort to secure a piece of the American pie.

Still, the idea that Black people could and should forge a separate nation of their own would have been anathema to St. Cyr Moore. Born in the early 1850s to Arsene and Anderson Moore, Audley’s father likely spent the first years of his life enslaved in what is now known as Iberia Parish but at the time was part of St. Mary and St. Martin Parish. Though St. Cyr could hardly imagine Black people claiming Louisiana as their own nation, plenty others already had. The land he and his family worked on first belonged to the Indigenous Ishak or Atakapa people. The French and Spanish crowns alternately claimed it as part of their empires from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, each seeking to control its rich soil, large mineral salt deposits, and proximity to the Bayou Teche—a 125-mile-long waterway that snaked through southern Louisiana’s remote interior, connecting the sole of the Louisiana boot to the Mississippi River.

By 1850, plantations lined the bayou all across the parish, and sugar production governed the Moores’ lives. Rising early and dressing in master-issued plain cotton sleeveless shirts and pants, they would have trudged from their slave cabins to the fields with knives in hand and spent hours in ankle-deep mud, slicing cane at the stalk and loading it onto mule-drawn wagons. When it was time to grind, they’d feed the cane into horse-powered mills, unless they worked for a master who had purchased a steam mill and a vacuum pan, which produced sugar faster, whiter, and of higher quality. No matter how they worked, the systematized violence of slavery made one thing clear to the Moores: they were the true engine that powered America’s sugar seat.

“My father’s father was a white man. His mother had been raped, you see, on the plantation,” Audley explained. His parentage could have brought St. Cyr either security or scrutiny. As the master’s child, St. Cyr might have lived in the “big house”—a multistory brick structure that was a unique commingling of French colonial architecture and Greek flourishes with a row of windows, a veranda on the top floor, and several large doors on the bottom. Then again, he and his mother could have been the bane of the mistress’s existence. The master’s wife would have banished them to the far corners of the plantation, where “rectilinear rows of whitewashed slave cabins seemed to stretch into the distance.”

If he was favored, then his master might have sent St. Cyr on errands to Jeanerette, a smaller town about twelve miles south of New Iberia. Down a dirt road lined with large, looming oak trees, the town took its name from the tutor turned plantation owner John W. Jeanerette. Lining the bank of the Bayou Teche, the area quickly gained the nickname Sugar City because of all the sugar plantations nearby. By the 1840s, Jeanerette attracted more young white men looking to make their fortunes on the backs of slaves like the Moores. On the eve of the Civil War, St. Cyr would have found himself surrounded by plantations in the New Iberia–Jeanerette area—the Weeks, Richardson, and Loisel estates the most “prized” among them.

Thus, it came as no surprise when these planters grabbed their guns as war broke out. Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, was a geographical and financial stronghold for the Confederacy, and slaveholders in the Bayou Teche joined their southern brethren in building an army to defend their state and their way of life. Some of them signed up when, on January 26, 1861, delegates from across Louisiana convened in Baton Rouge and voted to leave the Union. Nearly eight weeks later, on March 21, 1861, even more cheered as Louisiana joined the Confederate States of America.

Lincoln expressly excluded St. Cyr, his parents, and any enslaved person living in Teche country when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. The president intended to free only those in Confederate regions, and he, somewhat optimistically, believed the Teche to be under Union control. His soldiers had indeed made a battleground of the bayou. On April 15, 1863, federal troops stormed through Jeanerette, confiscating animals, sugar, and other staple crops. They also captured New Iberia and seized the Weeks family plantation as their headquarters. St. Cyr, now about ten years old, might have heard rumors of the Union soldiers’ imminent arrival. Perhaps he prepared to leave with them, like the hundreds of thousands of other self-emancipated men and women who set up camps near Union forces for protection and sustenance. It is also possible that the Moores changed their minds about fleeing to Union lines when the rebels recaptured the town and held it from June to October 1863. But Jeanerette was soon under Union control again, and the Moore family stayed put. With the Union army’s presence as strong as it was, they gambled on waiting to see what would become of the Teche after the war.

Many in the Moore family’s shoes turned to the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency created in 1865 to help the newly emancipated integrate into the American polity. Bureau leaders established its Louisiana headquarters in New Orleans and sent Union soldiers turned agents throughout the parishes to negotiate labor contracts, establish schools, issue marriage certificates, and locate family members. But the bureau offered...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593701542
ISBN 13 
9780593701546
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
496
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

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