Guest Editors' Introduction: The Life, Legacy, and Activism of Queen Mother Audley Moore

In 1991, “Queen Mother” Audley Moore sat down for one of her last and most lengthy interviews about her seventy-year organizing career in the global struggle for black liberation. The brilliant and charismatic activist, intellectual, and world traveler was a legendary figure in twentieth-century black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Communism who devoted special attention to fighting for the rights and dignity of black women. Born in 1898 outside of New Orleans and coming of age in black working-class communities under Jim Crow, she was critical to forging the modern radical black freedom struggle) including the Black Power and Reparations movements. Throughout the conversation, Moore spoke about the range of movements and ideas— including Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Communist Party, grassroots protests, and African liberation struggles—that she participated in throughout her life. Indeed, Moore’s political journey caused her to be one of the foremost advocates of antiracist, anticapitalist, diasporic politics that shaped the black freedom movement in the second half of the twentieth century.1 As the interview came to a close, Moore offered her recommendations for scholars of the black experience. For Moore, education, self-knowledge, and the study of history were key tools for realizing black liberation on a global scale. Categorically rejecting white supremacy, she called on black scholars to interrogate the intellectual traditions in which they worked. She advised black academics to “take stock” of the advantages and disadvantages of existing scholarly frameworks of the study of African-descended people and to use