Mandy Carter

Mandy Carter

Mandy Carter, born in 1948, speaks from her fifty-five years of activism as a Southern, African American, lesbian activist, organizing for social and racial justice. Carter highlights the importance of allies, and she spreads a message of hope that is deeply important in our lives today. Raised in two orphanages and a foster home for her first eighteen years, she attributes the influences of the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee, the former Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, and the pacifist-based, War Resisters League for her sustained multiracial and multi-issue, intersectional organizing.

A lifelong social and economic justice organizer, Mandy Carter has an impressive record. She moved to Durham, North Carolina, in 1982, where she organized many LGBT pride events. She served on the steering committee for the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987. In 1990, she was campaign manager for the North Carolina Senate Vote ’90 PAC that attempted to defeat longtime Republican Senator Jesse Helms. She cofounded Southerners on New Ground (SONG) in 1993 with five of her friends, also Southern lesbian activists. In 2003, she was a cofounder of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC).

Mandy Carter was nominated in 2205 for the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005, which aims to recognize, make visible, and celebrate the impressive and valuable, yet often invisible, peace work of thousands of women around the world (see www.1000peacewomen.org). In 2008, she served as one of five national cochairs of Obama LGBT Pride, the historic LGBT initiative of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign.

Mandy Carter was inducted in 2012 into the International Federation of Black Pride’s Black LGBT Hall of Fame. She is currently national coordinator of the Bayard Rustin 2013 Commemoration Project of the National Black Justice Coalition.

Mandy Carter coedited We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America
(2012).  Mandy Carter is one of nine elders whose oral history is part of Jane Fleishman’s award-winning book, The Stonewall Generation: LGBTQ Elders on Sex, Activism, and Aging.

See also

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

Carter SLFA audio with unedited machine translated transcript: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/slfaherstoryproject/4ea1bc2b-0325-4007-a273-4d1ff4b8c574