Moore, Audley (1898–1997)

African-American activist and organizer for civil rights, women's rights, and Pan-African nationalism. Name variations: Queen Mother Audley Moore. Born Audley Eloise Moore in 1898 in New Iberia, Louisiana; died on May 2, 1997, in Brooklyn, New York; daughter of Henry Moore (a former sheriff's deputy) and St. Cyr Moore; completed third grade; married; children: one son.

For over 80 years, Audley Moore was a driving force behind many economic and political efforts to better the lives of African-Americans. Her fierce devotion to these causes earned her the title of "Queen Mother" from the Ashanti people in Africa, a mark of respect so appropriate it became part of her name. Moore was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, in 1898, and began learning about the oppression of African-Americans at an early age from her own family's experiences; her great-grandmother, a slave, had been raped by her white owner, resulting in the birth of Moore's grandmother, and her grandfather had been lynched before his wife's eyes.

After her mother died when Moore was five, she and her younger sisters Eloise and Lorita Moore went to live with their maternal grandmother in New Iberia. Their father moved to New Orleans, where they joined him a few years later. The reunion was brief, however, as he died when Moore was in the fourth grade. Forced to drop out of school to care for and support her sisters, Moore lied about her age and became a hairdresser. Living in New Orleans in the early years of the 20th century meant she experienced racial violence and segregation firsthand, but she also witnessed the beginnings of racial pride.

During World War I, she and her sisters went to Anniston, Alabama, where she saw how badly black soldiers were treated. The sisters canvassed the black community for food and supplies for the soldiers, and Moore credited her sister Eloise with organizing the first USO in an abandoned church and becoming the first unofficial member of the Women's Army Corps (WAC). In Alabama, Moore continued to support her sisters primarily through her hairdressing and sewing skills. They later returned to New Orleans, where Moore married and opened a store with her husband.

In 1919, Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican activist who called for the establishment of an independent black nation and who had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, attempted to lecture in New Orleans. The first night police broke up the event and detained him. The following night, 3,500 blacks armed themselves (Moore herself carried two pistols) and marched to the hall, where Garvey had returned. As he began to speak, the police threatened to break up the lecture again. "At that point," Moore told an interviewer for Black Scholar, "everybody stood on the benches, every gun came out. Every gun said 'Speak, Garvey, speak.' … Just in case you think the white folks had us cowered down in those days in the South. And then Garvey said: 'And as I was saying.' … The police filed out of there like little puppy dogs…. [N]obody was afraid to die. You've got to be prepared to lose your life in order to gain your life." It was with this event that Moore began her lifelong struggle for civil rights, black consciousness, and nationhood. In the early 1920s, she joined Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and supported his "Back to Africa" movement.

Like many other African-Americans, Moore, her husband, and sisters fled the South looking for better conditions and opportunities. After traveling to California and Chicago, in 1922 they settled in New York City's Harlem. Harlem, known then as "Black Manhattan," was a mecca of black culture, but under all the glitz most of its inhabitants lived with crowded housing, widespread unemployment and job discrimination, and poor health conditions. Moore was especially upset over the plight of black working women, most of whom were poorly paid domestic workers in white homes. Likening their situation to slavery, she founded the Harriet Tubman Association and helped to organize these women.

In 1933, Moore joined the Communist Party because of its involvement in the defense of the notorious Scottsboro case (in which nine black youths had been falsely convicted of raping two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price ), and because of the party's advocacy of voters' rights and civil rights. While active in the party, she fought racial segregation, helping to integrate major league baseball and the Coast Guard, fighting evictions, and organizing the first rent strikes in Harlem. Moore also joined Mary McLeod Bethune 's National Council of Negro Women, and was present at its organizational meeting in 1935. In the 1940s, she worked as the campaign manager for Benjamin E. Davis, Jr., an African-American Communist who served two terms on the New York City Council. But by 1950 she had become disillusioned with the party and resigned, declaring it to be "racist to the core."

Returning to Louisiana, Moore became an advocate for poor people in the South and formed the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, Inc. This group was responsible for restoring to the welfare rolls 23,000 black and white families who had been wrongly removed, and it also saved several African-American men from execution by the state of Louisiana. In the 1950s, Moore's Pan-American nationalism encompassed issues such as economic reparations for slavery, cultural identity, and education. She was responsible for establishing the Eloise Moore College of African Studies in Mount Addis Ababa, New York. Named for her sister, the school promoted African identity and vocational training for students who would then go on to teach others their skills. (The school burned down in 1961.) Moore was instrumental in making reparation a central issue before the rise of the civil-rights and Black Power movements, and in 1962 she met with President John F. Kennedy to discuss the subject. Moore was also responsible for forming the African-American Cultural Foundation, which spearheaded the movement to use the term "African-American" instead of "Negro" or "black." In addition, she was the founder of the World Federation of African People and a founding member, with her sister Lorita, of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church of North and South America, of which she became an abbess in 1969. (She later became an archabbess, and remained active in the church throughout her life.) Moore was also a founding member of the Congress of African Peoples (1970) and of the Republic of New Africa. These last two organizations were in part a result of her visits to Africa, to which she had traveled for the first time in 1966. She returned there often, visiting Ghana, Uganda, Guinea, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania, among other countries, meeting with heads of state and participating in conferences. It was while she was in Ghana that she was initiated as "Queen Mother" of the Ashanti, in recognition of her service to the African people.

In her later years, Moore concentrated on the issue of reparation for slavery, while also campaigning to establish a national monument in memory of Africans who died during the centuries in which slavery was legal in the United States. She attended the anti-war Women's Encampment at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1983, and in 1990, in South Africa, she was present at Nelson Mandela's triumphant release from over two decades of imprisonment. Moore was with Betty Shabazz , the widow of Malcolm X, when Shabazz met with Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam and X's vocal detractor, in 1995. That same year, Moore attended the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., with Jesse Jackson, still righteously angry and pursuing her goals well into her ninth decade. Queen Mother Audley Moore died in Brooklyn in May 1997, at age 98. "Those who seek temporary security rather than basic liberty deserve neither," she once said. "We didn't want to be second class citizens. You would have sworn that second class was in the Constitution. Also that citizens have to fight for rights. Imagine a citizen having to fight for civil rights! The very thought of it is repulsive."

sources:

Black Scholar (interview). Vol. 4. March–April, 1973, pp. 47–55.

Igus, Toyomi, ed. Book of Black Heroes. Vol. 2, Great Women in the Struggle. Just Us Books, 1991.

Smith, Jessie Carney, ed. Notable Black American Women. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1992.

collections:

An undated vita on Queen Mother Audley Moore, published by the World Federation of African People, Inc., is located in files at the Fisk University Library; see also the Black Women Oral History Collection at Radcliffe College.

Jo Anne Meginnes , freelance writer, Brookfield, Vermont