Mab Segrest

Mab Segrest

Mab Segrest, born in 1949, has organized, taught, and written for progressive movements for over forty years. She is dedicated to create intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class as laid out in the Combahee River Collective Statement. She worked on the Feminary collective to make it a “feminist journal for the South,” emphasizing “the lesbian vision,” providing crucial, early, feminist and lesbian analysis of southern culture. In 1995, she helped to found and served as staff for North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence (NCARRV), a defense against the virulent, far-right movement. 

Mab Segrest worked for the World Council of Churches Urban-Rural Mission in the 1990s. She cofounded Southerners on New Ground (SONG) in 1993 with five other lesbians who remain beloved friends. In 2002, she took a position as professor of gender and women’s studies at Connecticut College (in Connecticut), from which she retired in 2014. 

Mab Segrest’s second book, Memoir of a Race Traitor, became a classic, antiracist text. In it, she describes that era, bringing in memories from childhood and family histories to construct a critical narrative of whiteness. Her most recent book, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry, uses a history of the asylum in Milledgeville, Georgia, to reflect on problematic American “sanity.”

Mab Segrest moved back to Durham, North Carolina, four years ago, where she currently works with BluePrint NC to track the militia movement in the state. She enjoys helping to care for her grandson, Julian.

See also

Segrest SLFA edited transcript: http://www.sinisterwisdom.org/SW93Supplement/Segrest

Segrest SLFA audio with unedited machine translated transcript: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/slfaherstoryproject/57a9f727-e9e7-4ad0-8a55-e8f0bedd2996

Segrest website with information about her work, including books: https://mabsegrest.com/