Ashley Farmer's 'Queen Mother' honors Queen Mother Audley Moore, finally

Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore is Dr. Ashley Farmer's latest contribution to Black Radical Thought and Black Women's radical intellectual history. In this carefully researched, timely volume centering the life and work of Black Nationalism's "Queen Mother," Audley Moore, Farmer offers readers an expansive account of Moore's life, her political theory, and her pioneering contributions to movements for Black reparations and sovereignty. 

This summer, I dedicated my political study to reading histories of Black Communism and The Southern Question in Communist politics. Reading Queen Mother alongside close re-readings of Robin D.G. Kelley's seminal study, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, the selections in 1804 Books' Black Belt Thesis Reader, and Harry Haywood's recently re-released classic text, Negro Liberation, situated Queen Mother Moore among her peers who all called for serious, revolutionary political considerations of and solutions to the "Negro Question." For Moore and her Black Communist peers, that solution was simple: the Communist and Socialist Left must fully support Black autonomy and self-determination as the most capacious scale of liberation for all people exploited by racial capitalism. 

Farmer's sprawling text covers more than a century of history, traversing Moore's odyssey from her birth in New Iberia, Louisiana, at the close of the 19th century, early years in the South, moves North and West to California, Chicago, and New York as a Great Migrationer, and her travels at home and abroad as a political organizer who struggled for freedom on multiple social change fronts. She begins by chronicling the lives of Moore's parents—who, despite limitations in the time of slavery, post-emancipation racial terrorism, and the early Jim Crow ruling order, achieved entrepreneurial success and middle-class status for their family until their deaths. 

Set against the backdrop of the South's socioeconomic conditions in the decades immediately following emancipation and Reconstruction, the early chapters detail the way the life and untimely death of Audley Moore's parents, St. Cyr and Ella Moore, shaped her political trajectory and eventual unflinching dedication to the Black Nationalist call for reparations. Tracing Moore's many radicalizations across her long, revolutionary life, Farmer offers readers a nuanced account that adequately holds the both/and of Moore being a woman of her time, as well as a Garveyite, a militant Black Nationalist thinker, and a Black communist organizer throughout the long 20th century. 

The text's most vital contribution to Black Studies and the wider Black Radical Tradition is that it is the first full-length study of Audley Moore's life and politics. Given Moore's position as both a cultural and political figure of high regard, who is widely known amongst students of the Black Radical Tradition and in Black Nationalist and reparations-centered organizing spaces, she has been minimally studied with the degree of rigor she deserves. Though Farmer's account offers spaces of speculation where the archive is insufficient, or Moore's direct assertions are absent, the text is not at all heavy on mythos, both in regard to Moore herself and the Black nationalism Moore's work was unflinchingly dedicated to. It is well worth the read, and is an indispensable study for those of us who have also committed our lives to the militant political struggle for global Black Liberation.

This summer, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Farmer at length about the book. Toward the end of our conversation, we spoke on the importance of releasing this work in a time of fascist resurgence and a neo-Red Scare wave of repression sweeping Left political organizing spaces, the radical press, and the education system. As a professor in the African and African Diasporic Studies Department at the University of Texas-Austin, Dr. Farmer knows firsthand the high stakes of fascist repression, as her department —along with other ethnic studies, gender studies, and humanities departments across the University of Texas system—has been targeted, censored, dismantled, consolidated, and otherwise repressed. In a time of anti-communist repression, book and abortion bans, economic hardship, contentious elections, climate catastrophe, and the erosion of any semblance of a health and social safety net, a political biography centering a Black Woman who lived, worked, organized, and theorized from the early Jim Crow years, through both World Wars, the tumultuous '60s, and the late 20th-century deindustrial urban crisis, is an essential addition to the reading rotation of anyone serious about anti-imperial struggle in these times. 

Tea Troutman: You've noted that this project is at least a decade in the making and imperative, given how understudied and under-published [work] about Moore is. Can you speak to why this is, the methods you used to accommodate Moore's story, and how doing an intellectual history of a popular figure with limited and/or scattered primary source material not only prolongs the project's timeline, but requires particular methods of care in writing and research? 

Ashley Farmer: I'll just share that when I came across Audley Moore actually in graduate school, I had not heard of her before—or, I didn't think I'd heard of her. I'd seen her in that book, I Dream a World, but it didn't resonate with me [at the time]—until I was writing my first book, Remaking Black Power, and everybody I interviewed had a story about her: "She was the first person that taught me about reparations," and "She was the one who taught me about Garvey and The RNA." But there was nothing on her when I went to look that [history] up. 

And I soon realized why, right? We, in the academy, have this idea that we have to have a certain number of sources or a certain type of source to be able to write, let alone write about someone who was entirely antithetical to the American project, as it were. And so, I think people did not want to touch it, but it seemed like something that just kept staying with me because I was like: "How is that so for somebody who lived for nearly 100 years?" As you read in the book, there's no moment where she's not there, right? The '20s, the [Great] Depression, two World Wars, McCarthyism, the rise and fall, the movement. How can it be? And what lessons does she have to teach us about organizing? 

So, basically, for the better part of 10 years, anytime and every time I came across something, I just put it away in a file, and I just started slowly collecting and building her life, until I felt like I got to critical mass, but that took years upon years of looking for other people and going in archives and talking to other people. What was really great is that as people started to hear that I was writing this, people started sending me stuff, so I might come home one day and in the mailbox would be a collection of papers, and I spent a lot of time digging through people's attics, et cetera. It was a labor of love. 

That's one part of it. The other part of it that's really interesting is that her life is also a really detailed catalog in the FBI file. The FBI tracked her for the better part of 60 years, and in that time, sometimes we have day-to-day [documentation], down to like every meeting she attended,  every phone call, et cetera. And so, you know, there's a real question when you talk about care,  starting or uncovering a life from an FBI file, what do you find in there that you should make public and whatnot? What kind of privacy do we owe these women in the afterlife, even if they weren't given it while they were there? What would she have not wanted said or found out, not by her own volition? So there were all kinds of complicated ways in which this came together over time. 

TT: Thank you for that. Yeah. I remember my own transition into black radicalism was about a decade ago, during my final year of undergrad. At the time, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) in Atlanta was starting student organizing bodies on the university campuses. And so I joined the organizing group at Georgia State and started working with the folks over in the AUC, and I remember finding out who Audley Moore was in that space and then instantly being like, where's a book from her or a book about her? And then quickly learning that that doesn't [exist], that's not a thing. And I'm like, "Oh, okay, so you have to encounter her, by extension, somewhere else." So I'm glad that you highlighted that in the method of writing the book. 

AF: Yeah, it's really a matter of, in some cases, a ton of information, but only through the lens of the state or nothing kind of of her own, so how do you balance making sure and understanding her life in that way? right? And not just her life, right? You mentioned kind of an intellectual history, right? Or intellect, or thoughts about nation-building. Her theories of freedom. You know, it's different from just, she went from point A to point B, C, D, but, you know, what was she thinking about liberation? How did that change over time? What vehicles or organizations did she use to profess those ideals? Did they change over time? These are questions that are, I think, vitally important for understanding her as a figure and as a model for theorizing, but also, you know, [are] really tough to get at. 

TT: Yeah. Thank you for that. 

TT: Audley Moore was a Southerner, and a Great Migrationer. Queen Mother chronicles quite extensively, namely the way her Southern upbringing informed her organizing and political thought, as well as the way her work in New Orleans differed from her work in Harlem and elsewhere outside of the South. Can you elaborate on Moore's odyssey and the way migration is a key feature of the narrative, and its importance in shaping her politics and intellectual contributions to Black and Leftist struggle? 

AF: Yeah, it's a great question. So Moore was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, in 1898, so about 130 miles outside of New Orleans. And, you know, it's the turn of the century. We're deep into Jim Crow, but even with that, she experiences a very different Louisiana and New Orleans than a lot of other folks, because her parents were rich, right? She is in that Creole Black elite that comes alive in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. And so at first, it seems like, in her words, not mine, she's gonna be what she calls "a bourgeois little stinker," right? And, you know, she is being trained to be among this upper class and have, you know, this really elitist politic. But everything changes when she is orphaned, and she slides down the class ladder. And she goes from one day having nannies and maids to basically being a nanny and a maid. And all of a sudden, the things that she thought she held true about, you know, the United States, and it isn't as though she didn't experience racism; it was still Jim Crow, but she was shielded from a lot. And that changed everything. 

I think that left her really open to, or searching for, some way to make sense of her world. And at that time, Marcus Garvey is the person that kind of steps in to fill that vacuum because all of a sudden she's meeting this guy who says that no matter where you are on the class ladder, right, no matter where you are in the world, no matter where you are in your skin tone, you matter; your hair and face and skin is beautiful. You descended from African kings and queens. You have a right to self-determination. And this really transforms her then and there. 

I often tell the story of her meeting Garvey, and it's a really fantastic story if folks pick up the book. But I think one of the things that is really important about it is that Garvey was kind of the inciting moment, but because there was a UNIA that was really entrenched in the South, with New Orleans being, you know, the heartbeat of the South, but certainly everywhere, you had this guy that got her riled up, and then an organization to plug into immediately after, right? I think that really shaped her. 

She does migrate to California and Chicago before getting to Harlem, and that only reinforces her nationalist politics because she realizes that the Mason-Dixon line isn't the thing that's dividing her between Jim Crow and freedom in a way that maybe she was sold coming out of the South. She was always kind of searching for that freedom. And then she bounces back and forth between Harlem and New Orleans over the course of her latter life, because it's still the epicenter of her politics and her struggle. But what she saw in New Orleans was the ability of her family to be self-sufficient and self-determining, and some of the worst racial violence that a young girl can witness. And then a group of people in New Orleans in particular, although not exclusively, rise up and defend themselves in anticipation and support of Garvey, sometimes with armed self-defense. So all of those things coming out of the South made her into the nationalist that she became known for, but also were kind of the basis of how she read the world going forward.

TT: Gotcha. I love a good Great Migration story, and we lean into that for our audience. We publish contributions from folks who may not be in the South, but are of the South, or do work of the South. And so at Scalawag, we call that "the South Deferred" because even if you aren't here or you may not have been born here, I feel like you're just a stone's throw or generation's throw from The South, and it absolutely informs the way people think politically and organize. So I really appreciated the front half of the book, sort of situating us in that she's a Southerner, and well, let's start with her being a Southerner, and this is important. 

AF: Yeah, and probably expected to be a Southerner most of her life had happenstance not shifted, right? You know, sometimes we talk about people migrating, but, you know, it isn't always that they expect to do that or that's the goal. It's just that the world pulls you in that direction sometimes too. 

TT: The fight for reparations continues today, perhaps as some may argue with renewed fervor in the post-2020 political moment. What does Moore's contribution to political thought and action surrounding reparations offer in terms of understanding "reparations" in a more capacious way, especially with respect to Black anti-imperialist struggle? 

 AF: I'm so glad you asked this question. So, for just a little bit of background, I mean, you know, Moore is coming of age when Callie House is organizing the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association, though she wouldn't have been a part of it.  She's coming of age when Garvey is talking about Europe giving back the riches of Africa and paying. She's coming of age when she's watching two World Wars where nations are paying other nations [war reparations] for wrong done to them, mainly Germany. So, you know, the idea of repayment is in the ether, but what Moore really does in the middle of the century that makes her, or makes us call her the mother of the modern reparations movement, is, one attached that to Black folks, in terms of if Germany can pay England, if the Americans can pay the Japanese, then, you know, you can do this. But also, too, that even if you can't trace that you were a slave, you have endured by the mid 1900s, the 1960s, a century of Jim Crow. And you have been degraded and dehumanized by the aftermath of slavery, right? So she disconnects it from this kind of connection of needing to be a direct descendant from slavery, right? All Black people are experiencing that. 

So, when, in the 1960s, she started advocating for it, one of the things that I think is really remarkable is that she has clear ideas about it. She thinks reparations should be used as restitution and to start a separate nation-state because she is a nationalist. But that doesn't preclude her from spreading the word about reparations and people taking it up, however they see fit. So, you know, it might be middle-class folks in Los Angeles who are petitioning the United States, but they have no designs on separation. There's others that do. There's others that see it as housing, others that see it as healthcare. And so, I say that when I think about Moore going around the country, particularly in the 1960s, I think of it as a kind of many flowers bloom approach, right? She planted the seed of repayment, whatever that looks like, culturally, physically, right? Land-wise, monetarily. And then said, "Let it bloom however you want." 

And I think that that is really reflective of how we think about reparations today, right? On the one hand, everybody knows the word, whether you believe in it, think about the processes, et cetera. But two, you see all kinds of different ways. You see state legislation. You see cultural monuments and museums, right? You see private companies getting sued. You see fights over, say, reparations for the Tulsa Race Riot victims, right? So, I think that is really one of her primary contributions; not only introducing this to our sphere of influence, but also helping people think very broadly about what repayment and restitution really means, you know? 

TT: Thank you for that. So, I know what was really animating this question. I've worked recently with the Media 2070 group  and here locally with the PeCAN Project who does reparative storytelling work, like reparative journalism. And I've really been fascinated at this notion of reparations not necessarily being just as a sort of cash repayment, but also just like a framework for thinking, like, contending with violence and understanding, like, there has to be some repair done, so you're right. Like even in the realm of preservation, for example, you see like a lot of Black folks saying, if we get nothing else, let's just say that we were here or enter this story into the archive. And I do think, in a way, following that vein of thought, that this book is very much an act of, this sort of reparative work and an act of reparative narrative strategy because of the way that Moore has been absent, you know, in the, in the proper records of Black Left history. 

AF: Yeah, I mean, I think that's really central too, because, you know, one of the things that she really emphasized when she was writing about reparations, even in like the 1960s, was that it's a psychological thing. It's a social thing. It's an educational thing. It's a cultural thing, right? And so, yes, we focus on, you know, unpaid labor or unrequited labor, which is very real. But even if you don't have that, you still have all these other ways in which Black people have been destroyed, you know? And so that repair has to look like more than just repayment in the most traditional sense. 

TT: Throughout the book, you trace Moore's unflinching commitment to Black Nationalism, and the crusade for reparations for Black folks, even and especially that commitment has been in direct tension with broader Communist thought, the Communist Party, and other Black Leftist political tendencies. How do you situate Moore and her being a "master of tactical flexibility" in the discourse on Left political revisionism, and consider her reasons for leaving the Party alongside her contemporaries like Harry Haywood, Claudia Jones, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, George Padmore, and Aime Cesare, among others? 

AF: Yeah, that's a great question. And one that I really grapple with when uncovering because, you know, so she becomes a nationalist and, she's a Garvey nationalist in the beginning, which is a particular brand of nationalism, right? It is a subset of what we call Black Nationalism. And she buys into that hook, line, and sinker until she goes to Harlem and joins the Communist Party. I think she lived a class critique, but she didn't have the toolbox to talk about a class critique, really, right? So she gets to the party and then, you know, for better or worse, the party is the place where young, energetic black women in their late 20s and early 30s are doing good works, in the most material sense of every day, but also in the larger advocating sense.

She finds it to be certainly an organizational hub, but she finds her organizing people, which is crucial, right? You can't sustain this kind of work if you're not, you know, don't have some homies in it. And then it melds her understanding of the Black Belt as well with their Black Belt thesis. But, you know, even from the beginning, she had her suspicions, right? She was like, this ain't quite, you know. It isn't quite right. It isn't quite what I want. But she thought it was a vehicle through which she could do that. And when it stopped being a vehicle that she could ride in, she hopped off. Also, it isn't just that, but she did kind of a gut check where she was like, too did I get lost in the sauce too much here, and start to betray my principles? And, so when I talk about her as a master of tactical flexibility, I mean that she was okay with organizations dissipating. She was okay with coalitions, perhaps only being for a certain moment or cause moving forward. She was okay with having kind of an overlap, but not exactly ideological congruence with people to continue a task. And I think that one, it helped her sustain her organizing to help her reach her nationalism into spaces you would never think possible, you know, I mean, a nationalist showing up in the club women's movement is also… When I saw that, I was like, "I don't know when you were thinking of this. How did we get here, girl? Oh my gosh! How confused. I was like, I don't know what to do. Um, what are you doing? You're in danger." But, you know, it worked, right? So, I think that what I mean is that she can understand. Oh, she can keep a kind of set of core values. She can see vehicles as different ways to express those core values, and she also has the ability to walk away when they no longer serve, and when she can no longer serve those values in them. But she also wasn't so limiting that she couldn't at least see the good or the value in working with other people. 

And in a moment, especially, I think, where people kind of decide what they want to do, they dig in on a particular ideology, right? Folks are loud. Nobody wants to be loud and wrong. So even when they get new data points, they wouldn't always say they're wrong, right? Uh, you know, sometimes you have to provide your thinking and that's okay. That's the mark of a thinking person. Right? You get new information and you change your mind, right? Or you go a different course, and I think that that was really one of the greatest things I learned from her. And then, sometimes she did feel like she betrayed herself, particularly in the Communist Party. She stayed, I think, she thought she stayed too long, longer than some of those folks that, you know, you mentioned and did it take the warning signs when some of them like Padmore or others who jumped ship, because of what she knew, right? And she chided herself on that too. So I think also studying that just helps us understand that sometimes like, we're not always so self-righteous. Sometimes you stay in places longer than you should. Sometimes you end up betraying things, but you also are able to still course correct. 

TT: And you know, sometimes that's the only thing that's available from an infrastructure standpoint. I mean, you know, even today, I think about the tensions between the PSL and DSA and the way that we know what we know about them, but then they continue to hold the space that they hold in our communities. And by extension, you know, for some of us, like the Movement for Black Lives and things like that, when we're all moving toward a free Palestine alignment and national organizations preoccupied with condemning Hamas' attacks and endorsing a ceasefire, you have to remember that those structures operate as parties do or with some sort of, like, institutional or state alignment, and I find it really generative, like reading the letters of black folks who quit the CPUSA, or the or the Communist Party in general, because Cesaire quit the Communist Party of France, for very particular reasons, about the Global Southern question. His was the Global Southern question, but it was the same thing as Haywood

AF: Haywood, same thing as Richard Moore, right? All of these folks do that. But, you know, I think, even within that, she still was able to take some really valuable lessons from it, and move that into what she felt was more of a solid-footed nationalist space. And so, you know, I also have always appreciated that she dogged them [The CPUSA] out for their treatment of Black folks, but was still able to say I did get some strong theoretical and organizing chops, but I then brought those chops to the causes that I felt most passionate about.. And I think it's essential that the book really makes that clear. So I was grateful for that being a through line. 

TT: The next question is about repression and surveillance. The role of state repression, surveillance, and anti-communist sentiment features heavily throughout the text for obvious reasons,[namely that] we're talking about a Black nationalist in the Communist Party. So it goes without saying. What lessons can today's organizers and scholars and cultural workers learn from Moore and, um, communist anti-imperialist struggle in the time of McCarthyism that 

 is relevant to. These moving up under today's contemporary fascist repression. 

AF: It is watching the whole thing. So then you know, especially as an academic in Texas. 

TT: Yes, that's why I asked you this question. 

AF: There's something like, every day is new, and it's news back again. I think that there's a couple things that these women understood. One is just that they accepted and moved, I think, with the understanding that surveillance was the norm. And it was to be confronted, it was to be called out, but the expectation that it was going to go away, or that one could stay silent or do the right things or behave in a certain way and weren't gonna get got was not the case. Second, is that you see them shift into different kinds of networks for survival, and other different frequencies. So, I think about that a lot, even thinking about today, you see the Communist Party may be obliterated, but they go to The Sojourners for Truth and Justice. right? 

The Sojourners for Truth and Justice is a much smaller network. It's all women. They all got the same left as politics, but we're gonna frame it around being moms, right? Because that's a little bit more palpable, but we're still gonna do what we do, right? And I think about that even in how, say, when we're organizing down here, how much we've had to move off from the traditional spaces and off the grid to a certain extent. And again, you know, in some ways, in this moment, communicating much more personally, down to reading in someone's backyard every week, instead of online, on text, because we know the level of surveillance is so high, right? The difficulty of that is that it takes, I think, a much different level of coordination and care and trust, I think, in some ways. But it is also one that brought a different sense of community as well. So that's really interesting. 

I mean, there's moments when they also just conduct the surveillance head-on and just name it. And I share that in the book as well, right? They're not unclear, and they're absolutely defiant, and, you know, sometimes it works in the case of Moore. Other cases, when I think about, say, like a Claudia Jones or an Esther Cooper Jackson, it does not work as well. And then, finally, I would say, too, that support networks, right? And that's something that, you know, we also experience today. You know it's coming. You know there's going to be repression. So how do you try to mitigate some of that harm through mutual support networks? 

Sometimes that means, you know, building up money when you know somebody is going to probably get fired, right? Sometimes that means getting legal help in place. Sometimes that means publicizing it for the act of public embarrassment, which these women also often do adopt it, right? So they have a lot of strategies, but it's very much kind of new stuff all over again, you know? 

TT: No, I understand that. It's so interesting organizing or doing scholarly work in this moment because I pay a lot of attention in my work to the "long 2010s" moment and how much of our boom, when abolition becomes popular organizing culture, then it springs this media boom, so we have all these platforms, like Scalawag or these books that are, you know, very much about radical thought and pushing things. And in a lot of ways, it does give the state, who captures us, like, a language upon which to widen their net. And, you know, I don't tell people to stop doing their work, but I'm also just like, we have to be conscious of if you do this work, then when they tune their algorithm to do the next big sweep, you're probably going to be caught up in that. You know, I think about all of my tweets, all the things I've ever written and said on record. I'm already caught. [laughs]  

AF: Well, you know, it's been that way, but also then I think one of the things that we also need to be generous with each other about is the fact that, rightfully so, we don't always blast the next step online, right? But I was watching, especially like in the 2020 level, people were like, yeah, I was like, right? You can tell, right? Almost. And so, you know, the absence of somebody blasting from the rooftops that they're doing this, taking pictures at this moment, does not mean the absence of action or organizing. And also, I think folks have to be, especially in this generative AI moment, of any kind of imagery, right? And it is a huge balance between, and I think folks like we feel, is too big in capturing what's happening because that's crucially important, so that stories like this can be told, but also not wanting to endanger anybody like this. Right? Because we know how easy it is to do that sweep in that way. 

TT: I'm thinking a lot about the Prairieland case right now, and me being from Atlanta, the Stop Cop City moment, and it's very clear and evident that what the state's doing is rounding up groups of people and whoever they can implicate using that RICO model. It doesn't necessarily have to be a RICO case, but the prosecution of mob activity is something we should always be aware of. 

AF: And where did we see that before? The Panther 21, right? People are always talking about, "where's the playbook?" Like, it's history? There's always a precedent.. There's always a precedent. But the good news is that if you're reading that history, you can start to anticipate and see some of those things, right? 

TT: The role of state repression, surveillance, and anti-communist sentiment features throughout the text. What lessons can today's organizers, scholars, and cultural workers learn from Moore and Communist and Anti-imperial struggle in the time of McCarthyism relevant to repression in contemporary fascist times? Queen Mother's release has been quite timely. Can you speak on the fascist rollbacks happening at UT, in the UT system, as well as at universities across the country, and how this political climate has played a role in the way your book has been received by the reading public? 

AF: Yes, yes, absolutely. So, the African and African Diaspora Studies department at the University of Texas in Austin was the biggest Black Studies program in the country. It was vibrant; it had art galleries, had public policy, right? A PhD, many, many students that we served. It has now been dismantled, along with Mexican American Latina studies, Women and Gender Studies, American Studies, and Asian American Studies, all of which we had at UT Austin, right? Some people think, because we're in Texas, we're not doing these things. But we are, and we're doing them quite well, right? And that's the problem, right? And so it is now the Center for Social and Cultural Analysis. What that means for the future of the work we do here, for a Black Studies curriculum, all that has yet to be seen, and is something that we are battling. 

But I think the biggest frustration I have felt is probably from the days of anti-DEI, you know, because this is just the long trajectory of that, right? It started, is that somehow people think that the Mason-Dixon line is going to save them, right? Like that the fascism stops there, and there's a look of, um, pity or concern, right? Or like, "I don't know how you're surviving that." And like, you're surviving it too? What you're going to start to see across the nation and what, you know, no amount of local or private or public, whatever is going to save anybody from, is, this idea of an austerity question, right? It's lean economic times. So if you can't put as many students in seats as, say, the engineering department, then we're gonna have to cut that. It's going to start with cutting back faculty, and then it's going to start by cutting back curriculum, and then they're going to say, well, you don't have enough, you know, and so then they start to shut it down. 

It's gonna be made as an austerity argument versus a racist argument, but that is just how white supremacy is operating on different modalities, right? I would really encourage folks to try to disabuse themselves of the notion that the South is somehow backwards or different or singular. But rather the epicenter through which, right, fascism radiates out, and if you know, right, then you can see what's happening here, and you can mark what's gonna happen everywhere? Because in the beginning it was like, I can't believe they're doing the DEI stuff in Texas, but now the whole country is like that. And everybody was shaking their heads. And so, I really hope that people understand the South as a model of repression and resistance, rather than something to kind of be put aside or quarantined in their mind. 

And then I also hope people trouble the idea that just because something like that is happening here, that people don't need to live and learn and educate and survive and haven't been doing that and are still committed to doing that, right? The answer isn't always just to quit. 

TT: Yeah. That's real. I know here in Houston, a couple weeks ago I was out with comrades, and they're in the All African People's Revolutionary Party here, and they do a Pan-African summer school every summer. Their first meeting was going to be in a room at U of H, (University of Houston), and then they got a notice from the university that their meeting space had been cut because they had "Pan African" in the title of their program, and because of the rollbacks, you know, the university can't be associated with something that says "Pan African" on it. It's apparently favoring a specific group, and I'm just like, it has gotten so quotidian on the campuses and that it, you know, doesn't just impact students, but it impacts community as well. And, I like that you situate the South as an epicenter because that is central to what we do here at Scalawag, is to remind people that, yes, by the time we get to the '30s there would be Nazis, there had been a KKK for 40 years. There had been Jim Crow for X amount of years. These folks in Europe that are doing these atrocities learned from somewhere; there was always a precedent. 

I mean, I've been doing some reading about the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and how they organized around censorship. Like, yes, they're building monuments. And yes, you have the big spectacles like the klan coming back on top of Stone Mountain or the publication of Gone with the Wind and things like that. But, you know, UDC, they have been organizing around curriculum censorship and the sanitizing of Southern history 40 years prior to Gone with the Wind, when the Lost Cause became pop culture. And so, yeah, I just want folks to just sit with history and think about what came first, like the American Civil War comes before a lot of what happens in Europe, and it sets certain precedents.

AF: Yeah, but instead of placing the South "as other" or "backwards" or "behind in time," the goal here is to say, it is both a canary in a coal mine, but also the vanguard of how to figure out how to do this right? And survive because for all that time, folks have been surviving, right? I mean, you know, we didn't build that Black Studies program in the North right? Exactly. You know, the biggest weapon isn't there, right? You know what I'm saying? And so that says something about, you know, what people are able to do, what their political commitments are, and, what folks are able to build even in what many think are impossible conditions, right? So, so yeah, so I think I think that's it. I think, you know, when folks ask us what's happening or what's coming next or how we have strategized, et cetera, I have to tell them that the first step is that you probably didn't think it was coming for you, you have to interrogate that. And then we're going to get on together and we don't do this, but first I need you to break down this dichotomy. 

TT:  I think the 2023 Student Intifada did a lot of that work because there were a lot of non-Southern universities like, "Oh my God, I can't believe my state institution is acting like a state institution. Like, I can't believe it; students' rights or faculty's rights are being violated, and it's something that, you know, always, I guess, brings me pause. It's like having to do the handholding through the "Yes, it's possible for this to happen to you without what you may recognize to be 'just cause,' or they will blatantly violate rights."

Having to deal with that anxiety around, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening to us very much hinders the ability to respond because we're still trying to bring people online and say, like, no, we're not going to fight for your rights back, because there needs to be, you know, a completely new orientation about how we do this work, you know? 

AF: So, you know, there are moments in history that really kind of make people wake up and bring folks into the fold, right? So, you know, it's important to, you know, welcome new folks in and do that kind of work while, but, also say, you know, how do we make sure that we don't get complacent, right? To where we think that, you know, a set of people isn't enjoying a certain set of rights that just because they live geographically somewhere else, they don't when we're all functioning under the same state, right? Yeah. That's not how that works. But, you know, there's a lot of beautiful stuff happening too. 

TT: Yeah, you know? Yeah, when folks are organizing around a thing, like one can expect that something beautiful may come out of it. So I have a bit of, you know, a little optimism at this moment. Like maybe it will finally push us to, you know, where we… Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I mean, the campuses are always central battlegrounds, which is fine. You know, people kind of, I think, you know, I do agree that like, you know, academics are not necessarily the vanguard, right? There is a bourgeois level that doesn't allow for that. But, um, you know, it is a battleground on which things are fought, right? And there's a reason why they live there. 

And, you know, there's a lot of people that are really committed to doing the good work. And, you know, one thing I will say that has been really fantastic is, like, the kids get it? And, um, are interested in understanding and are joining the classes, I think by, you know, numbers because they're recognizing that, you know, this is vital information and it helps them understand the world. 

TT: That's all my questions. We also published a statement from a coalition of UT students, from the Anna Julia Cooper Center for Academic Freedom, and representatives from the departments of African-American and Diaspora Studies, Mexican-American, Latin American Studies, Gender Studies, Slavic Eurasian, French and Italian, Germanic Studies. And then the division of campus and community engagement, office of community engagement. Yeah, that is going out, I think, this week. So, you know, we're offering ourselves as a space for that. 

AF: I think probably one of the main things also that doing writing on Audley Moore and coming up in this moment has been this helpful for me personally is I remind myself whatever I'm experiencing, her work, her life shows me how much of that has already been the case and that people have survived, right? But also, she still stayed the course. You set your compass to where you think freedom lies and you go there, right? And it's not necessarily glamorous, but it is purposeful and good work and a good way to spend a life, right? 

TT: I'm really excited that Scalawag  gets to cover this book because more than anything, I want our audiences to be introduced to things that they should be reading. So I've taken on this project myself. 

AF: So thank you for being such a careful reader of it; I really appreciate it. 

TT: Absolutely. Thank you for writing it!