English: Biography: Audley Moore, known as Queen Mother Moore, for many years has been active in the struggles of Black people in the United States and Africa. She completed school only to the third or fourth grade, but later in life was encouraged by Mary McLeod Bethune and Lawrence Reddick to begin public speaking on behalf of Black liberation. Learning of Marcus Garvey in 1919, she became a member of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, bought stock in the Black Star Line, and was planning to move to Africa. Because of family concerns, she stayed in the United States and in 1922 moved to Harlem. She became involved in street meetings and demonstrations, boycotts, and from 1930 to 1950 was a member of the Communist Party. She worked for the defense of the Scottsboro boys, was on the Committee to End Jim Crow in Baseball, and worked in two campaigns to elect Benjamin Davis to the City Council of New York. She was founder-president of the Reparations Committee of U.S. Slaves, which filed a claim in a California court in 1962; founder-president of the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women; and a founding member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Coptic Church of North and South America. She has traveled to Europe, the West Indies, and to Africa several times, attending Nkrumah's funeral, FESTAC in Nigeria in 1977, and in Ghana being initiated as Queen Mother of the Ashanti tribe.

Description: The Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African American women between 1976 and 1981. With support from the Schlesinger Library, the project recorded a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society during the first half of the 20th century. Photograph taken by Judith Sedwick
Repository: Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
Collection: Black Women Oral History Project
Research Guide: http://guides.library.harvard.edu/schlesinger_bwohp

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