
08/10/2022
Queen Mother Audley Moore was born right before the turn of the century in 1898 in New Iberia, Louisiana to St. Cyr Moore and Ella Henry.
In the early 1920s Queen Mother joined the UNIA or Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League as many Blacks did in the Post World War Era.
As Moore later acknowledged “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.”
Queen Moore was extremely active in the UNIA despite never holding a formal position. She was a fierce defender of the Pan African Movement, a proud member of the African Diaspora and a Garveyite.
After Garvey’s deportation in 1927 she turned to the Communist Party before leaving in 1950 due to the Communist Party’s unwillingness to address racism and s*xism. From 1951 to 1952, she was a member of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice led by Black Communist Women. Shortly after her brother’s transition in 1954, she returned to Louisiana and the tight knit Garveyvite community of the Sons and Daughters of Ethiopia—an auxiliary of the UNIA’s New Orleans Division that tackled the economic needs of Black communities. After the dispersement of that organization she established the grassroots Pan African organization, Universal Association of Ethiopian Women in 1957. Moore and the UAEW organized a series of grassroots political campaigns, lobbied for Black women’s economic rights, campaigned for reparations, provided legal aid for incarcerated Black men facing in*******al r**e charges, as well as being a platform for Black Nationalism.
Queen Moore also was a founding member of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) along with Betty Shabazz and others in 1968. Taking the first of many trips to Africa in 1972, Audley was given the chieftaincy title of “Queen Mother” by the Ashanti people of the Kumasi region in Ghana.
Queen Audley Mother Moore transitioned in Brooklyn in 1997 at the age of 98.