How Queen Mother Moore constructed black communities and identity

Abstract

This essay contends that Audley Moore (commonly known as Queen Mother Moore), an understudied civil rights activist, built both ideological and physical spaces of Black empowerment in response to the racism she encountered in the places she visited. After a brief literature review, this essay turns to the author’s research on a 1978 oral history interview with Moore. Using this archive as a foundation, this essay follows Moore to three locations in the U.S.: Louisiana, Harlem, and the Catskills. This article starts with Moore’s home state to elucidate how seeing Marcus Garvey speak in 1919 equipped her with the necessary tools to confront inequality. Next, it examines how Moore constructed a soup kitchen for African American students in Harlem. This haven served as a precursor to her later founding of the Eloise Moore College for African Studies in Catskills: an institution for higher learning, mutual aid, and above all the decolonization of the mind. By placing these case studies into a single narrative for the first time, this essay evinces how Moore developed her plan for autonomous, African spaces within America. Above all, this college marked the culmination of Moore’s goal to bring freedom to Black youth by feeding their bodies and minds. Fueled with a vision for a potential utopia, Moore created literal and metaphorical communities outside American political and social norms.