How Audley Moore Created a Blueprint for Black Reparations

“Something that is often missing from ‘reparations talk,’ ” legal scholar Alfred Brophy observed in 2010, “is a specific plan for repairing past tragedies.” California and New York have joined the dozen or so states and municipalities that have initiated what they are calling reparations programs. As a core platform issue, presidential candidate Marianne Williamson proposed up to $500 billion in payments to the descendants of US slavery, but even that was woefully inadequate.

Enslaved Africans were the first abolitionists—seizing every possible moment to liberate themselves and their families—and they were the first architects of reparations. Other groups in the US have developed successful redress strategies—Holocaust victims, Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated during World War II, 9/11 victims, the Iran hostages, victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and many others—but black American descendants of US slavery have come up empty-handed.

The racial wealth gap is the most robust indicator of the cumulative economic effects of white supremacy in the United States. It is on average about $850,000 per black household, for a total of $14 trillion. The annual budgets of all 50 states and every municipality in the country combined is about $4.68 trillion. Only the federal government has the capacity to pay the bill, and a sufficient proportion of white Americans must support doing so.

Qualitative profiles—stories and narratives—capture people emotionally, but they often are dismissed as purely anecdotal. Numbers establish patterns that can be generalized to a larger group. Black nationalist “Queen Mother” Audley Moore understood the importance of documenting racial disparities, and she believed in taking complaints to a higher authority. In 1957, the black-power pioneer presented a petition to the United Nations demanding land for black Americans and billions of dollars in reparations, and in 1963, she launched the Committee for Reparations for Descendants of U.S. Slaves.

Pan-Africanists invoke Moore’s name because she also embraced decolonization and freedom for Africa and believed the federal government should provide funds to black Americans who wanted to repatriate to the continent. Moore appears to be consistent in arguing that reparations from the US government should go to blacks whose ancestors were enslaved here and not to blacks who migrated here after slavery ended, particularly the large number who came after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Several of her more vocal disciples, however, have used her ideological Pan-Africanism to put words in Moore’s mouth, ones that support the claim that US reparations should go to all people of African descent.

Equal parts oracle, badass, and political strategist, Moore and her collaborators launched the campaign to demand reparations in New Orleans in 1955 after concluding it was the only way “to save our people from execution.” She was not the first person to endorse a national reparations program for black American descendants of US slaves. That distinction goes to Callie Guy House, who was born into slavery around 1861 in Rutherford County, near Nashville. As her biographer Mary Frances Berry documents in My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations, House tirelessly petitioned the US government for pensions, a form of reparations, for the 1.9 million people formerly enslaved, including the more than 180,000 black soldiers who fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. White veterans received pensions from the federal government, House observed. Why not blacks?

Moore was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, at the tail end of Reconstruction, in 1898, the same year House cofounded the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association. Moore’s mother, Ella Henry, had been educated in France after a wealthy white family chose Henry as their daughter’s companion—better a black child they could control than the poor whites whom they despised. But Henry died in childbirth when Moore was five years old. Her father, St. Cyr Moore, an assistant deputy sheriff who had been run out of a nearby town for retaliating in kind against a white neighbor who had “horsewhipped” his young son, would die before Moore reached adolescence. St. Cyr’s mother was the daughter of an enslaved woman and the white plantation man who had raped her, and Henry’s father had been lynched trying to protect his land. When Moore was very young, around the time her mother died, she witnessed a lynching in New Iberia. “I remember the hollering…white men like wolves, and the [black] man’s feet was tied behind the wagon and he passed in front of our house,” she said; “his head was bumping up and down on the clay, [on] the hard crusty road.” Moore’s lived experience would define her trajectory.

An organizational zelig, Moore was a member of the Communist, Republican, and Democratic parties, as well as (she said) the Elks and the Masons; she was a Catholic, an ordained bishop, and a convert to the Baptist and Ethiopian Orthodox communities of faith, and the Apostolic Orthodox Church of Judah. “’Ive got all the religions,” she said years later. “I have one objective, win ’em for freedom.”

One might wonder if she ever worked for the FBI, which built a copious file on Moore over a 20-year period. Apparently, the agency did approach her in the 1940s to become an informant. Her account of what took place: “I’ll tell you the truth…[when I am in] my right mind, I could join the Ku Klux Klan and know why I’m there, you understand? I could join the police force if I had to.”

In 1919, during the “Red Summer,” white terrorists launched upwards of 40 attacks on black communities. The heroic military service of more than 380,000 blacks during World War I had not brought an end to disenfranchisement and segregation, debt peonage, and racial violence. White supremacy at home proved to be a more invincible foe than the German army. Blacks in Louisiana and elsewhere were desperate to see an end to the carnage and the destruction of black property. But they did not have the capacity to make this happen. Marcus Garvey believed the solution lay with blacks themselves. Like his hero Booker T. Washington, he embraced respectability politics: Blacks must accept responsibility for “improving” themselves to show white Americans they are worthy of equal rights. First, though, they must accept and celebrate their African past and be proud of their black skin.