Mab Segrest

(http://www.speakoutnow.org/People/MabSegrest.html)

Mab Segrest was born in 1949, and grew up in Tuskegee, Alabama. While Segrest's parents were working to set up white private schools, she was fighting segregation. For six years, Segrest coordinated the work of the North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence (NCARRV). She is the cofounder of Feminary: A Lesbian-Feminist Journal for the South and is the author of My Mama's Dead Squirrel (1985) and Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994). She also coedited The Third Wave: Feminist Essays on Racism (1997) (Brown, 2002, p. 157).

Segrest chronicles her work against the Klan with NCARRV in Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994). During her six years with NCARRV, Segrest dealt with many acts of violence perpetrated by the Klan. Many times she articulates the costs to her physical and mental health. The memory of past violence and the threat of future violence was always with her. Segrest states, "I had become a woman haunted by the dead...I was what the murderers would call a nigger lover and what they'd call a dyke" (Segrest, 1994, p.127-128).

Throughout Memoir of a Race Traitor, Segrest encourages us,

The racism, the homophobia, the hatred of Jews and women, the greed accelerate, and they sicken us all. But we do not have to accept it. There is a lot to be done, but how we go about it is also important. Because all we have ever had is each other (Segrest, 1994, p. 80).

Segrest places a great importance on relationship and movement building across traditional divisions. As Becky Thompson states in A Promise and a Way of Life, Segrest's organizing reflects these values:

In her organizing she asks African-American fundamentalist churchgoers to treat homophobia as a serious threat to humanity, and she asks members of the gay and lesbian movement to find ways to be a "bridge, not a wedge" to antiracist, anticapitalist organizing (2001, p. 211).

References

Brown, Cynthia Stokes. (2002). Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Teachers College Press.

Segrest, Mab. (1994). Memoir of a Race Traitor. Boston: South End Press.

Thompson, Becky. (2001). A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.