Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 73
They Owe Us More Than They Could Ever Pay: An Ode to Queen Mother Audley Moore
Happy Thursday!
It’s the last day of Women’s History Month, so it’s fitting that today’s Hot Takes section lifts up the life of the woman who is credited with sparking the modern reparations movement; Queen Mother Audley Moore.
I started research on Queen Mother Moore back in 2018 for a piece that I was invited to write for Narratively.
Despite the significant role Queen Mother Moore played in Black radical organizing, “Moore is all but forgotten from the historical record,” according to historian Dr. Ashley Farmer, who is writing a biography on Moore.
As Farmer noted in this 2019 Washington Post op-ed, Moore was often the “singular voice in the call for reparations. From 1955 until her death in 1997, she consistently produced tangible models for how the federal government might reconcile and redress the atrocities of slavery.” You should follow and read all Dr. Farmer has written about Moore.
The Narratively piece never got published (a lesson learned in missing deadlines), so I’m dusting it off and using an excerpt of it for today’s Hot Takes section.
It’s a creative nonfiction piece — I researched her life heavily, even getting my hands on decades-old FBI clippings of her, but added fictional details to add color to the story.
You can also hear directly from Queen Mother Moore in the below 1985 interview.
Some reparations-related news I’m paying attention to:
Members of the California Reparations Taskforce decided on Tuesday that state compensation will go to those who are the descendants of free and enslaved Black people in the U.S. in the 19th century, as reported by NPR. The vote was split 5-4.
Tomorrow, FirstRepair, African American Redress Network, and the International Center for Transitional Justice will host the Reparations 2022 Conference at Howard University School of Law (both in-person and online).
Families, both Black and white, are tracing their history to better understand who their descendants are.
A commission was created to review the names of more than 750 military signs and markers commemorating members of the Confederacy.
The Black News Channel, which was launched just two years ago, shut its doors last week after it couldn’t make payroll, and its billionaire funder declined to provide more funding.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
New York Times: Descendants Trace Histories Linked by Slavery
The Guardian: Black News Channel shuts down after backer declines to fund it further
New York Times: In the Face of Black Pain, Elizabeth Alexander Turns to Art
Democracy Now: Nikole Hannah-Jones Call for Slavery Reparations in Speech to U.N. General Assembly
NAARC: Who Should Receive Reparations and In What Forms?
Equal Justice Initiative: Antilynching Act Signed into Law
The Hill: John Oliver calls Tucker Carlson a ‘vessel … for white supremacist talking points’
The Root: Is the Race-Wealth Gap About To Get Worse? Part Deux
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Black households never recovered from the Great Recession, a UW-Madison report on racial wealth gaps suggests
Axios: Fed's inclusive recovery put to the test
Rolling Stone: The Viral Classroom Nazi Salute Video Has an Even Darker Backstory. I Lived It
Military Times: The list of military ‘items’ named for Confederacy is more than 750 long
Bloomberg Law: IRS Needs to Boost Its Role in Racial Justice
MSNBC: This architect went from creating luxury malls to imagining a world without prisons
Jezebel: With $1,000 a Month, Low-Income Black Moms Get a Chance to Dream
Regional News
NPR: California group votes to limit reparations to slave descendants
Reuters: L.A. is investigating 50-year-old police gangs, finally
Philadelphia Inquirer: How a Philly-born brand of TV news harmed Black America.
WBEZ: For some people, Evanston’s reparations program remains incomplete
WBUR: Black and Hispanic people are more likely to be denied mortgage loans in Boston
WHYY: City Council members call for wealth tax in Philadelphia
WESA: A local art exhibit exposes the overtaxing and undervaluation of Black-owned homes in Pittsburgh
Politico: New Jersey bill to banc critical race theory has no chance, but Republicans still pushing it
Seattle Times: Seattle finalizes Indigenous Peoples Day, Juneteenth as city holidays
New York Daily News: The governor’s plan will create more Kalief Browders
LA Times: LA County's Guaranteed Income Program: How to Apply
International News
The Grio: How Black American activism inspired the United Nations’ recent fight for racial justice
The New Yorker: The British Empire Was Much Worse Than You Realize
Hot Takes
“Ever since 1950, I’ve been on the trail for reparations. They owe us more than they could ever pay. They stole our language; they stole our culture. They stole us from our mothers and fathers and took our names away from us. They worked us free of charge eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, under the lash, for centuries. We lost over 1000 million lives in the traffic of slavery.” -Audley Moore.
The following is an excerpt from a longer piece unpublished piece on Queen Mother Audley Moore.
Born in 1898, in New Iberia, Louisiana, to a “half-white man who was the product of the rape of her grandmother,” Audley Moore witnessed the racist cruelties of the South her entire life.
Her grandfather was lynched for standing up to white townspeople who tried to overtake his property. Her father was a sheriff in Jeanette County, Louisiana, but was run out of town for daring to arrest a white man who sexually assaulted a black farmhand. Her parents died while she was very young, leaving her as the oldest to watch over her sisters, Eloise and Lorita.
White America loves to whitewash this period of systemic anti-black violence and oppression and point to the civil rights legislation passed in the 60s. The cold hard reality is that wealth was either stripped or deprived, as in the case of Moore’s family and never returned.
During her adolescence, Moore stumbled on the speeches of Frederick Douglass and political activist Marcus Garvey, the originator of the Black Is Beautiful movement and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which advocated for Black pride, self-help, and the Back-to-Africa movement. Listening to Garvey, Moore became increasingly convinced that uniting Black people from different cultures was the only proper way to address racism.
Moore quickly gravitated toward the world of political organizing and the Black Nationalist movement, becoming a staunch advocate for Black liberation. Her dream was to hear Garvey speak in person. In 1920 she traveled to New Orleans, where Garvey was set to give a speech, but the event almost ended in bloodshed. Garvey faced significant pushback from the New Orleans mayor and local police force, who arrested Garvey just as he was set to give his speech.
Garvey returned to the same location the next night to deliver his speech, and members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) were prepared. Every member was armed, and when the police attempted to arrest Garvey, every Black person in the room pulled out their guns. “I had two guns with me,” Moore said. “One in my bosom and one in my pocketbook.”
There’s little record of what Garvey said that night in Louisana, but it left Moore hopeful and invigorated. “Garvey brought me a new consciousness in relation to Africa and the connection with the Caribbean. I didn’t know my connections with the West Indies, and neither did I know my connections with Africa,” Moore said.
This first meeting with Garvey lit a fire inside her to discover the history behind her people and sink her teeth into political activism. “Garvey brought something very beautiful to us – Africa for the Africans. He made us conscious of the fact that we belong to a big continent, with all of its gold and diamonds and riches. That was our inheritance,” she would say later in life. Multiculturalism, leaning into the diaspora, teaching Black Americans about their roots and history, became her calling card.
Shortly after that incident, Moore became deeply involved in the New Orleans Universal Negro Improvement Association. She was enamored with Garvey’s messages of self-fulfillment and black pride at a time when Black people were being told to be anything but proud of their blackness. And while the racism in the South was deeply embedded in every aspect of life, the renaissance that was beginning in Harlem, where Black poets, creatives, and intellectuals were shaping a new Black cultural movement, a movement that was calling Moore’s name.
She moved to the thick of the Black political and cultural action. She settled in Harlem in 1922, where she would become heavily involved in activities within the UNIA and the Communist Party, which would lead to her eventual surveillance by the FBI, who had increased the scrutiny on Black political leaders, particularly Garvey, who was convicted of mail fraud in 1923.
The intense scrutiny of Garvey started with no other than J. Edgar Hoover, who was the driving force behind the surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. decades later. In 1919, shortly after race riots had erupted in various cities across the country, Hoover sent a memo that admitted that while Garvey had “broken no federal laws to warrant deportation,” he was increasingly worried about his radical racial politics and proposed a fraud investigation into Garvey’s shipping company. Hoover hired the FBI’s first Black agents in 1919 to go undercover to investigate and infiltrate the UNIA. By 1927, President Calvin Coolidge had ordered Garvey deported, leaving the UNIA without a leader.
Despite the UNIA dissipating, Moore continued her journey into political activism and, in the early 1930s, volunteered for a campaign to help a Black Republican councilmember get elected.
Beaming with excitement, Moore showed up to a victory party to celebrate the hard work of everyone involved with the campaign. But, as she started to walk into the party, a few white women who stood by the door let her know that, despite the newly elected councilmember being Black, this party was not for Black folks this party was not Black folks. Stunned with confusion and embarrassment, Moore left the party and, at that moment, knew she was in the wrong place. A few days after, Moore’s sister had told her that “the Reds” were having a demonstration in Harlem for the Scottsboro Boys, the name given to the group of nine teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama.
“I didn’t know who the reds were,” Moore stated in a 1970’s interview, but when she arrived at the demonstration, she stood there in amazement. “I had never in my life seen such an outpouring of people. I saw signs, and I saw a young white woman carrying a sign that said, ‘death to lynchers’.”
Moore walked straight up to the young lady, pointed to the sign, and demanded she give her the sign. “You can walk beside me, but I must carry the sign. I am the Black woman.”
By the end of the rally, Moore had somehow ended up right next to the organizers who were speaking. “I didn’t need any coaching; I didn’t need anything; this is what I wanted, freedom for my people, free the 9 Scottsboro boys and death to lynchers.”