Mab Segrest

Template:TOCnestleft Mab Segrest is a Connecticut academic. She is former executive director of North Carolinians Against Religious and Racist Violence, a group that monitored hate crimes in North Carolina during the 1980s.

SONG Founders

Southerners On New Ground (SONG) was founded after the 1992 LGBTQ Creating Change conference. Three Black lesbians and three white lesbians – Pat Hussain, Joan Garner, Mandy Carter, along with Suzanne Pharr, Pam McMichael, and Mab Segrest​ – all organizers who had been working in the South, were seeing the widening divide between white LGBTQ people and LGBTQ people of color and the issues that were being talked about and prioritized. They realized that there was a real need in the region, and throughout the movement nationally to broaden and connect struggles for racial, economic, and gender justice that combatted the Right Wing strategy of dividing us (as LGBTQ people) from each other along the fault lines of race, class and culture. So, they started SONG and we have been working to answer the question of how to advance a multi-racial, racial justice agenda over the entire lifespan of our organization.

SONG supporters

Mab Segrest, April 18, 2017.

This photo is from my 60th birthday party at Steph's house in Atlanta with SONG cofounders including Cherry and the then-current directors Paulina and Caitlin. Joan Garner is on the right in vibrant red and my then-new love Annie Ellman on the sofa. I have been honored and blessed to be friends over the years with these brave and wonderful people. Joan we already miss you so much. — with Pat Hussain, Paulina Helm-Hernandez, Mandy Carter, Suzanne Pharr, Mab Segrest, Annie Ellman, Caitlin Elly Breedlove, Stephanie Guilloud, Pamela Jean McMichael and Cherry Hussain.

600 Local Activists Reclaim Dr. King's Radical Legacy

According to Will Jones, a graduate student at UNC and an activist with the Carolina Socialist Forum, Internationalist Books, and the North Carolina chapter of the Committees of Correspondence.

Chapel Hill - Six hundred people came out Monday, January 20, 1998 for a march and rally in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's dedication to radical social change. The Chapel Hill/Carrboro NAACP, in coalition with more than thirty other organizations, organized this year's march to mark recent gains by the UNC Housekeepers Association and the Chapel Hill/Carrboro Black Public Works Association. According to long-time Chapel Hill activist Joe Straley, this was the largest such event the town had ever seen.

The size of the march reflected two months of dedicated coalition work. The NAACP, the BPWA, and the HKA worked with the Carolina Socialist Forum, the Coalition for Economic Justice, the Lesbian Avengers, the Feminist Alliance and other groups to build a coalition to plan the celebration. Organizers sent over 800 letters and flyers asking community and work place organizations, churches, and campus groups to spread the word and to join the march. They spoke before congregations, on the radio, and local cable access television, and passed out thousands of flyers advertising the event.

The day before the march, Carolina Socialist Forum began the celebration with a panel discussion entitled Civil Rights for the 1990s: A Call for Economic Justice. Dr. Gerald Horne, director of the Black Cultural Center, began the forum with an historical view of the relationship between racism and economic exploitation in the United States. Lesbian feminist activist Mab Segrest followed by pointing out the need for a global perspective on social inequality in the present period. Lizbeth Melendez, who is helping Guatemalan poultry workers organize a union in Morganton NC, concluded with a local view of the relationship between racial justice and the union movement. All three speakers stressed the centrality of economic justice in civil rights struggles for people of color, women, lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals, and other targets of discrimination.

Open Letter to Obama on Iran

In 2008 Mab Segrest, Professor, Connecticut College, New London, CT signed an online petition “A Open Letter to Barack Obama on Iran”.

SURJ Connectors

Our team of connectors are all people who use their platform - whether that is as an artist, speaker, author, organizer, etc - to help further the mission of Showing Up for Racial Justice, engaging more white people in our shared work for racial justice.

As of 2015 the list included Mab Segrest.

References

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