State Surveillance and FBI Files

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Ashley Farmer to discuss the life and legacy of Queen Mother Audley Moore—an organizer, theorist, and political visionary who helped shape the very foundations of modern Black nationalism and the contemporary reparations movement. Though she was, as our guest writes, "one of the most important activists and theorists of the twentieth century," Mother Moore's figure has been largely confined to a handful of photographs and passing references, even as her ideas reverberate across generations. Dr. Farmer discusses how if Rosa Parks is remembered as the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, then Queen Mother Moore should be understood as someone who midwifed the political traditions of Black radical nationalism.

Farmer traces Moore's extraordinary life, which spanned nearly the entire twentieth century—from the aftermath of Reconstruction to the rise and fall of Jim and Jane Crow, all the way until the late 1990s. Like Du Bois, her longevity allowed her to inhabit multiple political worlds, sometimes in tension with one another. We discuss how her early experiences in Jim/Jane Crow Louisiana, witnessing lynch mobs and growing up in a family shaped by both slavery and free Black community life, forged her political consciousness. We also explore the radical sisterhood she shared with Eloise and Loretta, women who were themselves deeply involved in Black liberation struggles and who helped shape Moore's earliest political actions.

The conversation moves westward as they examine Moore's migration to Los Angeles, where the promise of escape from Southern racial terror collided with the realities of redlining, discrimination, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Southern California. We look at how these conditions transformed LA into a hotbed of Black nationalist organizing—and how this period pushed Moore toward Chicago and eventually Harlem, where her political life would take on new dimensions. A portion of the discussion centers on the state's surveillance of Moore. Targeted first by HUAC and later by the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), Moore amassed thousands of pages of government files—documents that reveal both the threat she posed to the racial order and the broader pattern of state repression directed at Black radical women. Dr. Farmer analyzed thousands of these files and discusses some of what she discovered in them.

Dr. Ashley D. Farmer is a historian of black women's history, intellectual history, and radical politics. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to this book, she is the author of Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era.

If you like what we do and want to support our ability to have more conversations like this. Please consider becoming a patron. You can do so for as little as a 1 Dollar a month.

Now, here is Dr. Farmer discussing her book Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore

Related conversations:

"Attica Is an Ongoing Structure of Revolt" - Orisanmi Burton on Tip of the Spear, Black Radicalism, Prison Rebellion, and the Long Attica Revolt

Free the Land! Edward Onaci on the History of the Republic of New Afrika

Black Scare / Red Scare 2025 with Charisse Burden-Stelly

"The Shadow of the Plantation" - Eugene Puryear on The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader