Audley Moore, a civil rights leader & Black nationalist, adopted the name Queen Mother in the 1960s as a symbol of both her matriarchal presence in Black organizing spaces as well as the connection to Africa that was key to her politics. But today she''s far less well-known than her contemporaries.

Yesterday, from @josephinelee.bsky.social: Institutions like Houston's storied public school, the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, might no longer be open to everyone under a new plan for Houston magnet schools which has education advocates up in arms.

From @josephinelee.bsky.social: "From Texas to Florida, Louisiana, and New Jersey, the film reveals how librarians across the country have become victims of a crisis manufactured by national organizations bent on infiltrating and disrupting local school boards."

"TCU is a private institution. The Texas Legislature didn’t force this decision. No law required the school to close these departments. They did it willingly." Powerful testimony about the state of academic freedom and higher ed in Texas.

I'll be there talking about my book, come and say hi, Austinites!! 😊

I’ll be out there with @txfreedomread.bsky.social and @authorsabb.bsky.social raising awareness of those political attacks on books and recruiting book lovers to help fight back. Come see us!

New from Sharman Apt Russell: "I want to slow down, bend down, look, and really see. Humans have been doing this for millenia: matching shapes on the ground to meaning and story."

Our top story: “The decision of these Texas agencies to enter into such agreements will lead to an erosion of safety … in addition to increases in racial profiling and targeting of immigrants, which are symptoms of this excessive, punitive and cruel mass deportation agenda.”

Previously: At Alienated Majesty Books, the "screamo bookstore," volumes from small and indie publishers, plus works in translation, comics, and poetry stand side-by-side with shoegaze, noise and hardcore punk bands.

This weekend, the Texas Book Festival, which will gather some 250 authors in a bibliophilic tent city out front of the state Capitol, ironically the launching pad of myriad political attacks on supposedly intolerable tomes and sinful librarians.

Our top story: “We’ve heard reports from around the state already about local police working with ICE and kind of conducting these kinds of racial profiling stops where they see brown people driving a work van, and they’ll pull them over on a pretext, and then just immediately call ICE.”

Born in 1897 in New Iberia, Louisiana, to a mother from a free Black community and a father born into slavery, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore bore witness to the dying breaths of Reconstruction in the South. Then she became a vital part of the Black liberation movement.

New from @josephinelee.bsky.social: Each year, 1000s of students apply for a seat at one of the top performing magnet high schools in Houston through a lottery system. But that opportunity could end under a proposal to turn 7 of Houston ISD’s top public high schools into private partnerships.

Yesterday: Alexandra Edwards lays out the simple, four-step plan extremists can follow to dismantle vital University programs like the one she used to work for.

Are you interested in covering politics in the Lone Star State? The Texas Observer is hiring an intern to help us cover the 2026 elections! Apply here: www.texasobserver.org/jobs/

Out today: “The decision of these Texas agencies to enter into such agreements will lead to an erosion of safety … in addition to increases in racial profiling and targeting of immigrants, which are symptoms of this excessive, punitive and cruel mass deportation agenda.”

New from Alexandra Edwards: There’s a particular kind of despair that comes from watching an institution abandon its principles in real time. It’s not the dramatic betrayal of a single moment. It’s slower than that.

Previously: "Texas public schools are part of our identity as Texans. They are enshrined in our constitution, and [Greg Abbott] has turned his back on them because he doesn’t care anymore."

In books: From her roots in southern Louisiana to her years pounding the pavement in Harlem as an organizer for the Communist Party to her reignition of the modern reparations movement, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore’s story offers potent lessons for today’s organizers.

New from @francescadnunz.bsky.social: The Texas Department of Public Safety and ICE recently signed a pair of agreements that will authorize some state police within DPS’s Criminal Investigations and Highway Patrol divisions to effectively operate as ICE agents, on a statewide basis.

In poetry: May the world not die of bread or a lost Messiah or the oil smeared desert or a fire washed sky but ripen into childhood ...

Featured story: “If you go, like, to a shopping center, just to the store or a market, you will find a lot of military trucks full of soldiers. I work with people who are homeless, and the stories that they told us are very awful.”

"It’s a tough time to be an Austin property taxpayer. Nothing seems to make sense. ... In the past couple years home prices have actually plummeted, and yet your taxes are still increasing."

Our top story: “The general public doesn’t always understand the ramifications of what they are voting for. All they see is the term ‘violent felonies,’ and I don’t think the public understands how that affects those with mental health issues.”

In our magazine: From a chronicle of America's Black-owned bookstores, to the untold stories of the MKULTRA project, @liseolsen.bsky.social takes us on a tour of unique titles from the Texas Book Festival ...

From our 'Books' issue, by @capaciousmood.bsky.social: The life of Pan-African activist Audley “Queen Mother” Moore's has been boiled down to a few dramatic photos and footnotes elsewhere. Now a UT-Austin historian brings us the full story of this vital political theorist.

From Caroline Collier in 2024: “Especially in our community, where there is a facility that treats every kind of animal imaginable, the state would argue that if you want to be the worst veterinarian & never have any reason to worry about your liability, come work for us. That’s what this invites.”

“An appointed board of managers is beholden not to local citizens. They’re beholden to Mike Morath and ultimately, Greg Abbott.” Featured story from @josephinelee.bsky.social: Despite months of protest, TEA announced that the takeover is coming.

Still open for applications!

Photojournalist @harmonli.bsky.social captured this "cute" photo of me, while we were on assignment for @texasobserver.org at Barking Springs. I wrote about a trans "takeover" day that took place after a brutal attack. Look for the story and photos in the Postcard feature in the Nov/Dec 2025 issue.

Trump’s Federal Cuts Are Hitting Texas Food Banks Hard www.texasobserver.org/trump-cuts-t... - via @texasobserver.org

Out today: “When I went into this project, I knew I had a really big responsibility—there were so many Black booksellers & historians who were & who are counting on me to tell the story right. It truly is the first full-length book to chronicle the history of Black-owned bookstores in this country.”

Last week: "About 11.4 % (nearly 3.5M) of Texans will lose access to healthy, complete meals. I will no longer be able to buy meat or fresh vegetables. I will lose the only reliable way I have to eat lunch."

And our friends at @texasobserver.org on Proposition 3, a legislatively referred constitutional amendment in Texas that would require judges to deny bail to defendants accused of certain crimes punishable as a felony. prospect.org/2025/11/03/b...

Election day is tomorrow, but Edward Brown, and other advocates for the mentally ill, worry that voters will choose to further criminalize some of the most vulnerable people.

Election Day is tomorrow & @prospect.org is your source for the most critical races. Here's our lineup: Harold Meyerson on the urban-to-rural ideological continuum that runs left to right, how it takes a range of Democrats to win in a range of political terrains, & how some Dems don't get that.

New from @liseolsen.bsky.social: Visit the 2025 Texas Book Festival with the Observer, and discover some of the most interesting, innovative and thought-provoking new books from Lone Star authors ... www.texasobserver.org/texas-book-f...

In poetry, by Robin Davidson: May the world not die of bread or a lost Messiah or the oil smeared desert ...

Last week: “Because of overcrowding, the jail system is already the largest warehouse of people with mental illness in the state of Texas. We cannot keep punishing our way out of this mental health crisis.”

“An appointed board of managers is beholden not to local citizens. They’re beholden to Mike Morath and ultimately, Greg Abbott.” From @josephinelee.bsky.social: Despite months of protest, TEA announced that the takeover is coming.

From @jlbuch.bsky.social: The San Antonio-area enclave of Castle Hills agreed to pay $500,000 to former city council member Sylvia Gonzalez, who had alleged that political opponents in the local government orchestrated criminal charges to silence her.

Editor-in-Chief @gusbova.bsky.social introduces our Nov/Dec 2025 issue: "Books. That’s right—it’s 2025, and I’m using the medium of a print magazine to talk to you about the even longer words-on-paper form that is the book. Why?"

Featured story: His wife visited him in ICE detention on his 50th birthday. She couldn’t even bring him the card she’d made. They could only speak through a phone, divided by a thick pane of glass. It was one of few times she’d ever seen him cry.

"On Nov. 1, ... I will no longer be able to buy meat or fresh vegetables. I will lose the only reliable way I have to eat lunch."

“The current system is failing workers in that it’s too slow, especially with many Texans living paycheck to paycheck.” Our top story: Texas Workforce Commission is struggling to respond to a staggering number of wage-theft complaints.

Wednesday: “Because of overcrowding, the jail system is already the largest warehouse of people with mental illness in the state of Texas. We cannot keep punishing our way out of this mental health crisis.”

“That’s not structure-building. That’s just a game.” Featured story: The Texas Majority PAC is the latest deep-pocketed initiative meant to turn our state blue. But have its dollars just brought more discord?

Happy Halloween! 🤠🎃 #ICYMI, catch up on everything we shared from the September/October 2025 issue of our magazine. From the "screamo bookstore" to the horrors of prison healthcare, there's plenty to keep you awake at night: www.texasobserver.org/issues/septe...

“When people can’t get their SNAP, they’re going to go to the food banks. There isn’t enough food in the food pantries to handle this need. I mean, they’re all saying we’re going to run out of food. There’s no way we can replace everybody’s SNAP benefits.”

Our top story: Researchers found that Texas Workforce Commission ordered $99 million in wages ordered due across over 57,000 cases between 2010 and 2020, but 80 percent of those wages had yet to be recovered as of 2024.