May and June 2024 are multiple anniversaries for the SLFA Herstory Project. It’s the fifteenth anniversary of our first Herstory Project planning workshop at Womonwrites. It’s the tenth anniversary of our first special issue of Sinister Wisdom. And it’s the second anniversary of the launching of this website.

We celebrated the publication of our sixth and final Sinister Wisdom volume two years ago. The six special volumes contain a treasure trove of collected stories, interviews, timelines, and photographs from three decades of twentieth-century, lesbian-feminist activism in Southern states. Now, we are focusing on making these edited interviews available online as we continue to add new interviews.

The herstory of lesbian-feminist activism in the South was rapidly being lost as these stories of unsung sheroes were not being reported in any of the memoirs and histories of the women’s liberation movement in the twentieth century.

Interview by telephone by Rose Norman on April 12, 2013 Rose Norman:  What made you a social justice activist? Mandy Carter talked about getting turned on by an American Friends Service Committee speaker in high school. What was your “aha” moment? Joan Garner:  I grew up in Washington, D.C., during the 1950s and 1960s, the height of the civil rights movement. I was in the eleventh grade when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. That event was the aha for me. That very weekend, I was attending the annual conference of my high school sorority. Girls from several surrounding states were meeting in Washington, D.C., the weekend of April 4, at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Dr. King was assassinated, and a curfew was put on the city. We couldn’t leave the hotel. We were about 150 African American girls, and the rest of the hotel was completely white, except for some of the maids and other service staff. We were petrified about the assassination and the curfew; and we didn’t know what was happening. We could look out of our hotel window and see U Street starting to burn. Our sponsors decided …

Joan P. Garner: Fostering Social Change Read more »

Laurel Ferejohn at Table Rock Writers Workshop in 2018

A believer in the power of community-oriented periodicals, Laurel Ferejohn helped create the The Newsletter, a vital, lesbian underground publication.

Jaye Vaughn started Cedar Chest, an organization for lesbians of African descent in 1994, and later a Center for Non-White Lesbians, both in Durham, NC.