Segrest, Mab - interviewed by Rose Norman
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | Let me tell the tape player. | 0:00 |
Today is May 10th, 2013. | 0:01 | |
This is Rose Norman interviewing Mab Segrest via phone, | 0:04 | |
and I'm now gonna put it on speakerphone, | 0:10 | |
and put the phone next to the tape player. | 0:14 | |
Okay, go ahead. | 0:16 | |
- | Okay, let's see. | 0:18 |
I was looking at your narrative, and it said, in brief, | 0:21 | |
both Mandy and Suzanne say that SONG came out of | 0:25 | |
a Creating Change conference in Durham, 1993. | 0:27 | |
Mandy describes organizing that | 0:29 | |
at the request of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force | 0:31 | |
which had lost a site recently planned. | 0:33 | |
This is the first time Creating Change was in the south. | 0:36 | |
Mandy speaks of anti-Southern bias of attendees | 0:39 | |
who called us asking questions about Durham. | 0:41 | |
Is there an airport? | 0:42 | |
It's where Jesse Helms lived. | 0:43 | |
She said that that is what led her to organize the workshop | 0:45 | |
that you and the other SONG co-founders led | 0:48 | |
about doing social justice activism in the south, | 0:50 | |
leading to what became SONG. | 0:53 | |
Let's see. | 0:58 | |
So, my memories of that, I don't remember, | 1:00 | |
like, there were lots of workshops organized. | 1:03 | |
So the workshop I remember | 1:05 | |
I mean, my part of this, there was, | 1:08 | |
I don't think any one of us originated SONG | 1:12 | |
or any one of our works originated SONG. | 1:15 | |
But it was a conversation, | 1:19 | |
and it was a conversation that was, | 1:21 | |
in the context of the times, | 1:24 | |
it was '93 would've the beginning of Clinton, | 1:28 | |
it was all those | 1:33 | |
- | Early Clinton. | |
- | Ballot initiatives all over the country, | 1:34 |
homophobic ballot initiatives that were using | 1:36 | |
rabidly racist language and homophobic language | 1:39 | |
in black communities to try to stir up | 1:42 | |
black people, including black church people, | 1:45 | |
against gay people, | 1:47 | |
and pulled 'em into a conservative coalition and so forth. | 1:48 | |
So that was a set of circumstances | 1:51 | |
that it concerned a lot of us | 1:55 | |
who had been working for ten years, at least, | 1:57 | |
if not longer, 15, | 2:00 | |
in both lesbian, gay, then bi, | 2:03 | |
and what became LBGTQ organizing, | 2:09 | |
although those distinctions weren't so important back then. | 2:12 | |
I think at various parts, | 2:15 | |
but had been doing organizing in both the left | 2:17 | |
on queer issues and in LG, et cetera organizations | 2:20 | |
on broader social justice issues: race, class, gender, | 2:28 | |
for the men, nationality, and so forth. | 2:33 | |
So in the south, we were networked with each other, and. | 2:35 | |
- | Those other organizers were networked? | 2:43 |
- | Yeah, I mean, the people who were eventually | 2:46 |
the first six in SONG, | 2:49 | |
but there were also nationally some efforts | 2:51 | |
to pull together the queer left. | 2:53 | |
And I think that one happened before Creating Change | 2:56 | |
that we were somewhat drawing on | 3:00 | |
because we knew each other from various national formations, | 3:01 | |
including the Creating Change conferences, | 3:05 | |
but there had also been a queer left conference | 3:08 | |
that I think the Funding Exchange in New York | 3:12 | |
and maybe Australia had helped to organize. | 3:14 | |
Kathy Acey was one of the key players, | 3:17 | |
Ellen Grasinski I think maybe had been at Funding Exchange | 3:20 | |
at the point, but I think Kathy Acey was involved in it, | 3:23 | |
Scott Makadawa, Amber Hollibow, lots of people, | 3:26 | |
and for the queer left conferences | 3:33 | |
we had them two different places, I think. | 3:36 | |
One was in upstate New York, | 3:40 | |
and maybe the other was in Florida. | 3:43 | |
I can't quite remember, | 3:45 | |
but those were really designed | 3:46 | |
to let us get to know each other, to consolidate, | 3:48 | |
to see what kind of issues should be raised and so forth. | 3:50 | |
So we already knew each other a lot nationally | 3:53 | |
from those conversations, from the kind of alliances | 3:58 | |
that were happening within some of the nonprofits, | 4:01 | |
social movement pieces we were organizing on, | 4:04 | |
and through Creating Change, | 4:08 | |
which was a great networking opportunity, | 4:09 | |
particularly for the kind of left part | 4:15 | |
of the NGLTF coalition, which is kinda center left; | 4:18 | |
whereas, what's the other one? | 4:22 | |
You know the other equal mark, | 4:30 | |
this is why I give interviews off the tape. | 4:32 | |
- | The majority of something. | 4:35 |
- | Yeah, but anyway, it was much more centrist | 4:37 |
and much more wealth-oriented to gay, white donors | 4:42 | |
to get people elected in high office and to get equality. | 4:47 | |
So the left of the queer movement | 4:52 | |
worked in a part of NGLTF | 4:56 | |
and had access through that to conferences and programs | 4:59 | |
and things like that. | 5:03 | |
So those of us in the south who were lesbians and gay men, | 5:05 | |
but SONG was a lesbian organization, | 5:10 | |
so I had been in North Carolina, | 5:12 | |
came to graduate school in 1971 or '72, | 5:17 | |
graduated '72 at Duke. | 5:24 | |
Finished my degree in '79 | 5:27 | |
but came out in the middle of that, '76, '77, | 5:29 | |
and then got involved in feminary | 5:32 | |
and also very vibrant lesbian feminist organizing | 5:35 | |
at the time that was contrary to the kind of | 5:38 | |
identity politics, bad rap | 5:41 | |
that a lot lesbian feminism got in retrospect. | 5:44 | |
It was like they were doing prison work | 5:48 | |
and anti-capitalist work, in solidarity | 5:50 | |
with women prisoners and doing lots of very radical | 5:53 | |
local work in the mid-70s, | 5:58 | |
coming out of the really revolutionary movements of the 60s. | 5:59 | |
So I was very excited to come out into that | 6:04 | |
and started doing feminary and helped to shape that, | 6:06 | |
and worked with the feminary collective into the 80s, | 6:09 | |
and then left my job at the Southern Baptist College | 6:13 | |
in probably '83 and started doing anti-Klan volunteering, | 6:17 | |
and then started working with, | 6:22 | |
starting putting North Carolinians | 6:25 | |
Against Racist and Religious Violence in place | 6:27 | |
with a coalition, very multi-racial coalition. | 6:29 | |
So with feminary, I had known other, | 6:35 | |
I started getting into networks: | 6:39 | |
lesbian feminist networks, lesbian networks, gay networks. | 6:42 | |
And I think I met Pam McMichael in '85 | 6:46 | |
when she had me, my first book, My Mama's Dead Scroll, | 6:51 | |
came out in '85, so I did some touring around that. | 6:55 | |
I had been in feminary for awhile then. | 7:00 | |
So some of the contacts were from feminary, | 7:03 | |
from Woman Rights, which we had helped to start, | 7:06 | |
been on the local, first organizing committees for that, | 7:10 | |
but I went to Louisville, | 7:14 | |
and Pam sponsored me there, I think at '85. | 7:18 | |
I can't remember the Louisville organization, | 7:23 | |
but she and Carla Wallace were working with Anne Braydon, | 7:24 | |
anti-racist, white woman, | 7:27 | |
and Anne was mentoring them in a very progressive, | 7:29 | |
multi-racial, anti-racist movement | 7:33 | |
that they were integrating LGBTQ issues into, | 7:35 | |
and at the same time, encouraging the Kentucky, | 7:38 | |
the Fairness Alliance, I think, | 7:44 | |
Kentucky Fairness Alliance, I think that was the name of it. | 7:45 | |
- | I've got that from Pam. | 7:48 |
- | To take anti-racist stances. | 7:49 |
So that was a connection with Pam, | 7:51 | |
and I think she came to Woman Rights, too. | 7:55 | |
I'm not exactly sure. | 7:56 | |
- | She did. | |
- | Suzanne, I met, I think through Creating Change. | 7:59 |
I was also on the Board of the National Anti-Klan Network, | 8:04 | |
which became the Center for Democratic Renewal in the 80s, | 8:08 | |
and I was integrating work against homophobia, heterosexism, | 8:13 | |
into a broadly kind of anti-racist | 8:19 | |
organization and coalition at that point. | 8:23 | |
Mandy was working out of Durham, as I was, | 8:27 | |
through the War Resisters League, | 8:30 | |
then doing various kinds of work in black communities, | 8:32 | |
organizing black queer communities | 8:38 | |
and also organizing in progressive black coalitions | 8:39 | |
against the kind of homophobia the right was trying | 8:45 | |
to drive the wedge issue there. | 8:48 | |
Joan Gardner I think at the time was the director | 8:51 | |
of the Fund for Seven Communities in Atlanta, | 8:55 | |
and Pat had been a co-chair | 8:58 | |
of the National Gay and Lesbian March on Washington, | 9:03 | |
maybe in '87, not sure, | 9:06 | |
and then had led the Olympics out of Cobb Campaign | 9:09 | |
for the Olympics, not sure when that was. | 9:13 | |
It's whenever the Olympics were in Atlanta. | 9:18 | |
- | We've got an interview with her. | 9:19 |
We have an interview with Pat. | 9:21 | |
Lorraine Fontana interviewed Pat this week. | 9:23 | |
- | Yeah, so anyway, we were all doing this kinda stuff. | 9:26 |
I had never met Pat until | 9:28 | |
that Durham Creating Change conference. | 9:30 | |
So anyway, making a long story long, | 9:36 | |
another one of the structures that we used | 9:40 | |
was the pre-conference event to Creating Change, | 9:43 | |
and there was the Thursday event, | 9:48 | |
and Sue Hodney's been doing this for years. | 9:50 | |
Sue would be an interesting person to talk to. | 9:53 | |
She might have a different memory on this, too, | 9:53 | |
and if you wanted to do it, to archive the NGLTF, | 9:56 | |
which may be online now, some of this stuff. | 9:59 | |
But SONG, when Pat, not that would've been later, | 10:02 | |
I was just saying SONG was doing that. | 10:07 | |
So it was pre-SONG, but I think Suzanne, | 10:08 | |
they were Thursday day-long workshops | 10:11 | |
around progressive issues, anti-racism, and LGBTQ movements. | 10:19 | |
And the Creating Change archives would say who did that, | 10:26 | |
but it's my memory that Suzanne did a lot of that, | 10:29 | |
and she was very well networked. She was the oldest of us, | 10:33 | |
and if anybody shaped SONG it was Suzanne. | 10:36 | |
And she was very well networked in NGLTF. | 10:39 | |
She did those workshops for a long time. | 10:45 | |
So people would come early to those workshops. | 10:47 | |
So it was the progressives and the more leftists | 10:51 | |
in the LGBTQ movement who would show up on Thursday | 10:56 | |
and hang out and get to know each other and so forth. | 11:01 | |
So I think that in terms of the Durham event, | 11:03 | |
I organized, the group that I was working with in Durham, | 11:07 | |
which was Southerners for Economic Justice, | 11:13 | |
which became Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network, | 11:16 | |
was working on issues of kind of globalization, | 11:21 | |
which by 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, | 11:25 | |
capital just went global and started doing lots of | 11:30 | |
new, strong, weird things like the NAFTA, | 11:34 | |
North American Free Trade Act, and so forth. | 11:38 | |
So I had been working in the anti-Klan organization with, | 11:40 | |
so there's economic justice. | 11:47 | |
And in 1992, just remembering another event, | 11:49 | |
was the 500th, the quincentenary, the 500th anniversary | 11:53 | |
of Columbus' unfortunate advent in the Americas. | 11:56 | |
So there had been lots of America-wide organizing | 12:00 | |
around that, | 12:04 | |
and some of us at Economic Justice had done, | 12:05 | |
maybe the first or second of many, of a succession | 12:10 | |
of annual events, gatherings outside of Atlanta | 12:13 | |
that was quincentenary observance, | 12:18 | |
and it was attended by people from Mexico and the Caribbean | 12:22 | |
and people all across the country. | 12:28 | |
It was translated, as I remember it, | 12:29 | |
into Chinese and Spanish, | 12:32 | |
and I had been working for awhile then | 12:35 | |
to integrate questions of sexuality in that context | 12:39 | |
into race, class, gender. | 12:43 | |
So there was a campaign against | 12:45 | |
North American Free Trade Act. | 12:51 | |
There's the beginning of globalization | 12:53 | |
and a new kind of capitalism and so forth. | 12:55 | |
So we did a workshop, I think, on that Thursday. | 12:57 | |
When I say we, it was the organizations | 13:00 | |
that I was working with around Southerners Economic Justice, | 13:03 | |
bringing that analysis of capitalism. | 13:07 | |
It wasn't just an analysis of class. | 13:09 | |
It was an analysis of capitalism. | 13:11 | |
And I would say, as I remember and winnow out | 13:13 | |
what contribution I might have made, | 13:17 | |
it was calling the question on capitalism | 13:19 | |
that we had been doing in various ways, | 13:23 | |
but that brought a group of, a very mixed group, | 13:25 | |
but heterosexual-led, African American-led, | 13:29 | |
working class analysis and practice | 13:33 | |
to be shared with the people, I think, on the Thursday, | 13:37 | |
and then I was invited to give the keynote on Friday, | 13:41 | |
or keynote on Thursday. | 13:44 | |
Anyway, I did the keynote, too. | 13:45 | |
So a version of the keynote is called | 13:47 | |
The Bridge, Not a Wedge, | 13:51 | |
in the back of Memoir of a Race Traitor. | 13:52 | |
- | Right. | 13:55 |
- | So I knew that everybody was freaked out | 13:56 |
at being in the south who wasn't southern, | 13:57 | |
and was expecting us to be the most backward kind of folk. | 14:00 | |
So I kind of gave a fairly radical critique | 14:03 | |
of North Carolina, of the landscape there, | 14:12 | |
of how Jesse Helms in his homophobia fit | 14:15 | |
into this broader kind of racist and capitalist worldview. | 14:18 | |
I described going across the US-Mexico border | 14:24 | |
into barrios there where people were coming to work | 14:28 | |
in maquilladoras right at the border, | 14:31 | |
which was really the beginning of structural shift | 14:32 | |
in the economy, all this kind of stuff. | 14:35 | |
And I said, here I'm standing on this hill in Mexico, | 14:36 | |
and I've written about it, | 14:39 | |
and I look out on this sea of cardboard houses, | 14:40 | |
and I think what does this do? | 14:43 | |
What does that do to gay people? | 14:44 | |
So anyway, it was a call to really look at capitalism, | 14:46 | |
look at globalization, take stands on that, | 14:50 | |
understand ourselves in material contexts. | 14:53 | |
So subsequent to that, what I remember in terms of SONG | 14:57 | |
was a very intense conversation, | 15:01 | |
and I can see us, it was me, Suzanne, | 15:04 | |
Carla Wallace from Louisville, Pam from Louisville, | 15:07 | |
and Irva Shee, and I think I have pictures, | 15:11 | |
like the North Carolina Independent took a sequence, | 15:14 | |
and there's a whole sequence of the conversation, | 15:17 | |
very animated conversation, | 15:19 | |
in which the idea of SONG came about, | 15:21 | |
and Pam had been doing an anti-ballot initiative, | 15:26 | |
I think in Cincinnati, | 15:30 | |
and so she wasn't doing that anymore. | 15:31 | |
So she had time. | 15:34 | |
She was a very talented organizer. | 15:35 | |
So I think Suzanne was trying to think, | 15:37 | |
well what could Pam do? | 15:38 | |
But also we were just like, | 15:40 | |
well what can we do in the south? | 15:41 | |
How can we consolidate the work that various of us | 15:43 | |
have been doing in the south | 15:46 | |
around the legacies and remnants | 15:48 | |
of the civil rights movement and radical organizing there, | 15:54 | |
the work we've done in queer movements, | 15:58 | |
how can we consolidate that in the south? | 16:02 | |
So we came up the idea of a new organization, | 16:04 | |
and besides Irva Shee, as I recall, | 16:07 | |
that conversation right then had been all white women, | 16:10 | |
so it was very clear we would need a set of folks. | 16:13 | |
So Joan, Mandy, and Pat were pretty easy to come to. | 16:19 | |
I hadn't known Pat, but I certainly knew Joan and Mandy. | 16:24 | |
And then Mandy was doing another set of organizing, too, | 16:27 | |
but that's what to me, | 16:31 | |
the conception of SONG was in the conversation. | 16:32 | |
Very soon it spread out from that, | 16:36 | |
and people brought their various work into it. | 16:38 | |
But that's my memory of what the origins of SONG were. | 16:41 | |
- | Okay, and you stayed involved with it for how long? | 16:48 |
- | Let's see. | 16:58 |
'92, I don't know, I don't know. | 17:00 | |
Probably six or seven years, | 17:06 | |
but I'm not sure. | 17:10 | |
I was still on the board when Pat dropped out, | 17:13 | |
and then there were a succession of other people. | 17:19 | |
We, the original board saw it needed to step down | 17:21 | |
and allow for rotation. | 17:27 | |
We had not been a nonprofit organization. | 17:30 | |
We had only gotten grants through other people | 17:33 | |
as fiscal sponsors. | 17:39 | |
So there was a move towards, I think, this could be murky, | 17:41 | |
Pam would really be the authority on this, | 17:45 | |
and there should be SONG archives, too, | 17:47 | |
but 501(c)3 status and bringing in actual board people | 17:49 | |
who had to then have more responsibility | 17:54 | |
than we had been able to have. | 17:56 | |
We could raise money fairly fast | 17:58 | |
because of our various reputations and contacts, | 18:00 | |
and it also started to be more | 18:04 | |
predominantly people of color. | 18:05 | |
So I rotated out somewhere in there, | 18:09 | |
and I wanna say towards 2000, but '99, | 18:12 | |
somewhere around there. | 18:18 | |
- | Okay. | 18:20 |
- | But that's pretty murky. | 18:22 |
- | Okay, I'm not sure if this is gonna be | 18:25 |
the official history of SONG or anything. | 18:30 | |
We're just trying to get people's stories down. | 18:34 | |
And getting, we will have heard from all six of you now, | 18:39 | |
the different stories, | 18:43 | |
and it's funny how not so different, | 18:45 | |
but every story has brought in something new. | 18:48 | |
So I can fill in, when I type these notes, | 18:54 | |
I'm gonna fill in some answers | 18:57 | |
I have from Pam McMichael's interview. | 18:59 | |
I just interviewed her. | 19:01 | |
- | Yeah, I would like to go back, I would like to see, | 19:03 |
another reason I'm reluctant to give interviews | 19:07 | |
is when it actually gets transcribed it's unintelligible. | 19:10 | |
I don't speak in sentences. | 19:12 | |
I write in sentences, but I don't speak in sentences. | 19:14 | |
So anyway, what have you come up with from notes from mine? | 19:17 | |
I'd love to see it, | 19:20 | |
and however it is getting translated, | 19:20 | |
I also wanna see that, too, | 19:23 | |
just to be sure I haven't said south instead of north | 19:24 | |
or up instead of down or something key. | 19:27 | |
- | What I actually do, | 19:29 |
we haven't got anybody who's a professional transcriber | 19:31 | |
so what I've been doing is I just, | 19:34 | |
I type notes while we're talking, | 19:37 | |
and then I go back and listen to the tape and edit my notes, | 19:39 | |
and just keep what I think we can use. | 19:43 | |
And I do edit it, | 19:45 | |
so sometimes it won't be exactly what you said. | 19:46 | |
It might've taken you three sentences to say it, | 19:49 | |
and I'll just condense it. | 19:51 | |
- | Right. | 19:53 |
- | Basically I do what you would probably do | 19:54 |
if you were gonna edit these notes. | 19:56 | |
- | Right, well I do have some of this | 19:57 |
that I started writing on. | 20:00 | |
So I can send those to you. | 20:01 | |
- | Okay, that would be good. | 20:05 |
- | Yeah. | 20:06 |
- | And I especially want to reference your other books. | 20:07 |
We'll reference Race Traitor for the Bridge Not Wedge, | 20:13 | |
and there may be some other things | 20:18 | |
that you want to, we're gonna have footnotes, | 20:22 | |
so might as well mention if there's the story of feminary, | 20:25 | |
for example, do you tell that somewhere? | 20:30 | |
There's a thesis about it, but do you tell your story | 20:31 | |
of feminary somewhere that I could footnote? | 20:35 | |
- | Well, not really. | 20:39 |
There was in the North Carolina Literary Quarterly, | 20:40 | |
the person who did the thesis did an article. | 20:43 | |
- | Okay. | 20:47 |
- | And I've got the reference somewhere, | 20:49 |
and I think I've got the journal at home. | 20:52 | |
- | I can probably find it by searching. | 20:54 |
- | And Minnie Bruce really worked very scrupulously | 20:56 |
to get the dates right in all of that and everything. | 20:58 | |
'Cause we're all going back and forth to Atlanta. | 21:02 | |
It's a bunch of very rich networks from that period | 21:07 | |
that kind of blur together, | 21:11 | |
but anyway that would be a source of information. | 21:12 | |
- | Okay, North Carolina Literary Journal. | 21:15 |
- | North Carolina. | 21:18 |
- | Something like that. | |
Probably if I search on her name as author, it'll come up. | 21:20 | |
- | Pardon? | 21:24 |
- | If I search MLA on her name as author, | 21:25 |
it'll probably come up. | 21:28 | |
- | Mmhmm. | |
- | That thesis author. | 21:29 |
Okay. | 21:33 | |
- | I'm curious though, like, | |
are there contradictions or just different pieces | 21:36 | |
or what's the? | 21:38 | |
- | Well, I think, | |
I'm trying to remember who, which one. | 21:42 | |
It's not contradictions, no. | 21:44 | |
But what people remember and what sticks out in their mind. | 21:48 | |
Somebody brought up the movie. | 21:52 | |
I can't remember who it was, | 21:54 | |
might've been Joan Larson or Suzanne, one of them. | 21:56 | |
The movie Gay Rights, Special Rights, | 22:01 | |
apparently that was being distributed widely. | 22:04 | |
- | Right, right. | 22:06 |
- | And that was sort of a touchstone for going out. | 22:07 |
- | Right, that's the kind of homophobic campaign | 22:13 |
in the black community, in those anti-electoral campaigns, | 22:15 | |
and stuff like that, yeah. | 22:19 | |
- | Yeah, not everybody remembered that. | 22:20 |
And also, I mean, trying to put in | 22:25 | |
little autobiographical things, | 22:27 | |
like I got Suzanne's story about growing up, | 22:28 | |
basically in an all-white community outside of Atlanta, | 22:31 | |
farming community. | 22:34 | |
- | Mmhmm. | |
- | And of course, you've told that story, | 22:37 |
your story of growing up in several plays and places, | 22:39 | |
so I don't need to go back to that. | 22:43 | |
Although I did wanna see, | 22:44 | |
I like to ask that aha moment question, | 22:45 | |
if there was an aha moment when you realized | 22:48 | |
about all you had to do something, about racism. | 22:51 | |
I mean I went back to Race Traitor to see | 22:58 | |
if the Alciella's head story was it, | 23:01 | |
and it didn't seem to be it so much as part of the struggle. | 23:04 | |
- | I mean partly, pretty soon, | 23:10 |
coming out in the mid to late 70s, really coming out, | 23:15 | |
not just having a closeted lesbian woman-lover, | 23:21 | |
not necessarily the lesbian lover, | 23:24 | |
as soon as I could do that and name myself, | 23:27 | |
then I could go back and articulate a race politics, | 23:29 | |
and I could locate myself. | 23:31 | |
Until then, I really didn't have | 23:33 | |
an explicitly anti-racist politics. | 23:35 | |
I had sensibilities, I had longings, I had guilt, | 23:37 | |
I had all that kinda stuff. | 23:40 | |
So coming out was really crucial to me, | 23:41 | |
and then, there was a very progressive community in Durham, | 23:51 | |
integrated, anti-racist | 23:55 | |
that I pretty soon located myself in. | 23:58 | |
I do remember when I started to do the anti-Klan organizing | 24:00 | |
in 1983 when I left teaching at Campbell College University, | 24:03 | |
I realized that I had left Alabama | 24:13 | |
kind of running away from racist violence, | 24:15 | |
and it was time to do something about it. | 24:17 | |
I mean that's a very big aha moment for me. | 24:19 | |
But my big aha moment, I call a crack in the cosmic egg | 24:21 | |
was 1963, which the 50th anniversary is coming up, | 24:25 | |
of desegregation of Alabama schools, | 24:29 | |
including my high school, | 24:31 | |
and kind of seeing the black kids | 24:33 | |
walking across the breezeway | 24:36 | |
where I had been walking for the past nine years | 24:38 | |
of my school life and how isolated they were, | 24:43 | |
and the sense of identification with them. | 24:47 | |
So that probably was the biggest aha moment of my life, | 24:50 | |
like ooh, this is something really, really off here. | 24:54 | |
- | And you write about that somewhere, I'm remembering. | 24:58 |
- | Yes, that's both in, it's in Memoir of a Race Traitor, | 25:00 |
it's in, I come back to it in Point of Belonging. | 25:03 | |
- | That was 1963 did you say? | 25:11 |
- | Yeah. | 25:13 |
- | Because my high school was not integrated until 1966. | 25:14 |
- | Where was that? | 25:19 |
- | Lowndes County. | |
- | Yeah, that's intense, Lowndes County. | 25:21 |
- | Oh yeah. | 25:25 |
- | Selma? | |
Was that Selma? | 25:29 | |
- | Oh, no, Lowndes County the biggest town is Fortaposit, | 25:31 |
1,500 people, that's where I lived. | 25:35 | |
The county seat is Hayneville, | 25:38 | |
that's where those people were murdered. | 25:39 | |
- | Okay, yeah. | 25:41 |
- | Let me see if I can send you. | 25:46 |
Well, thank you for persisting on this. | 25:50 | |
So it's gonna be a history, | 25:54 | |
remind me again of the focus, whole history of SONG? | 25:58 | |
- | It's the whole thing is the Herstory Project | 26:02 |
is recovering memories or memoirs. | 26:05 | |
We originally wanted people to write their stories | 26:08 | |
about their lesbian feminist activism | 26:11 | |
in the south in that period. Can't get 'em to do that, | 26:14 | |
so we're interviewing people. | 26:16 | |
And mostly we're not trying to interview people | 26:18 | |
who've published things about it | 26:19 | |
because it's a recovery project, | 26:22 | |
but I was originally only gonna interview Mandy and Suzanne, | 26:25 | |
and they all said, oh no, you gotta get the story from. | 26:30 | |
So we've done all six of you now. | 26:32 | |
So this is just a chapter, | 26:35 | |
and we really have a big, book-length project here. | 26:38 | |
It's over 100,000 words. | 26:43 | |
So I'm not sure exactly what | 26:45 | |
Sinister Wisdom is gonna tell us | 26:47 | |
about how much and in what form they wanna publish it. | 26:49 | |
Like the Landikes chapter, we might just publish that | 26:53 | |
with May's or something. | 26:57 | |
They've offered to publish that separately. | 26:59 | |
But we won't know until the summer. | 27:03 | |
But I wanna be able to send them somewhat edited versions | 27:05 | |
of what we have. | 27:10 | |
Now I'm gonna work on this immediately, | 27:12 | |
as soon as I hang up, I'm gonna start work. | 27:14 | |
- | I just sent you the file, so. | 27:16 |
- | Excellent, okay. | 27:19 |
- | Okay. | |
- | Well I will send you what I have this afternoon. | 27:20 |
And we'll just stay in touch over email. | 27:23 | |
- | Okay, thanks a lot. | 27:27 |
- | Okay thank you. | 27:28 |
- | Uh huh, bye-bye. | 27:28 |
- | Bye bye. |
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