Jewel of the Week: Mandy Carter
Born in New York, Citizen of the World

As we close out Black History Month, we celebrate the contributions of a well-respected colleague, activist, friend, and mentor—Mandy Carter.  She is a legend in the LGBT community, the Black community, and to all of us concerned about peace.  Carter has sought to bring to the national LGBT rights movement the lessons she’s learned in her 42 years of building the multi-issue, multi-racial progressive coalition. 

“I’ve been a bridge-builder all of my movement years,” she tells us.  “A bridge-builder between white LGBT, Black, and people of color LGBT movements.  A bridge-builder between our Black LGBT community and Black non-LGBT community.  I’ve always been willing to be ‘the only one’ of color in the predominantly white women’s peace and social justice movements because the work was too important not to be.”

“Mandy has earned her place in history,” said Dr. Sylvia Rhue, NBJC Director of Religious Affairs.  “Martin Luther King wanted to be remembered as a drum major for justice. Mandy has certainly led the band.”

“HerStory”

Mandy Carter was raised in two orphanages and a foster home for her first 18 years as a ward of the state of New York. It was in a high school social studies class that the pacifist-based American Friends Service Committee representative addressed the class that was the genesis of her involvement in peace and social justice organizing all these years, in addition to the influences of the former Institute for the Study of Nonviolence run by Joan Baez and Director Ira Sandperl.

She learned the tricks of the trade with the War Resister’s League (WRL) —a group founded in the 1920s by men and women opposed to World War I—by organizing anti-Vietnam War civil disobedience action.  Carter worked in the WRL’s regional field office in San Francisco, where she became skilled in the tactics of the movement, particularly the principles of civil disobedience.

“Something about those ideas—working for change, activism, non-violence—intrigued me,” Carter told Frankie Lennon, a writer for BLK, a monthly newsmagazine that targeted its coverage of people, events and issues to African American LGBT readers.

It was her participation in the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., she says, that solidified her life-long commitment to social, racial and LGBT justice organizing.

In the late 1970s, Carter returned to San Francisco and became active in the city’s gay and lesbian political movement.  It was at this time that she became more drawn to community organizing. She maintained her commitment to nonviolent resistance, while she also began to see electoral organizing as a catalyst for social change—a clear example of this being the election of Harvey Milk to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.

In 1982, Carter moved to Durham, North Carolina working in WRL’s Southeast office.  It was here that her organizing to build a stronger progressive coalition really took shape.  She served on the planning committee for the annual Lesbian and Gay Pride March, and worked as a National Steering Coordinator for the Lesbian and Gay March on Washington in 1987. She was also involved in Rhythm Fest, an annual festival of music, art, and politics for Southern women. 

At the time Carter moved to Durham, the city’s mayor and city council were conservative amid a sizeable but racially divided progressive community.  The problem, they realized, was not in their numbers, but in their division.  “Perceptive, far-thinking activists in both groups realized ‘We can't do this independently, but together we can change our communities,’” she wrote in Peacework magazine.  This led to joint meetings of the two groups and their LGBT counterparts, who also had a seat at the table.  Most importantly, it led to a strong voting coalition that elected progressive Black and white candidates.  They created an agenda for change, and would soon run candidates in Durham city and county seats that won.

These experiences prepared her for the next challenge that she took on—unseating North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who notoriously championed segregationist, racist, and homophobic policies.  At the behest of National Gay and Lesbian Task Force staffer Sue Hyde, Carter and several Durham activists formed North Carolina Senate Vote ’90, the first statewide political action committee of LGBT people and allies, united to unseat Helms.  Carter served as campaign director.

“We needed to work from a broader framework of equality and justice for all. Asking the rhetorical question, ‘Are we about justice, or just us?’ we figured out who our coalition partners would be by looking up Helms' voting record,” she wrote.

The coalition partners working to defeat Helms included arts, environmental, and pro-choice advocates, along with LGBT, minority, youth, and senior citizen communities. Helms managed to win re-election in 1990, with the help of the campaign worker James Meredith—the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi and an important symbol in the history of desegregation—and a white gay man who despised Helms but could not bear to vote for a Black man, challenger Harvey Gantt.

Helms won again in 1996, but the lasting legacy of these campaigns was “a statewide infrastructure needed to organize in all 100 counties in the state and helped build progressive multi-issue and multi-racial coalitions,” she wrote. “Now I tell people, ‘Jesse Helms has come and gone. But as a community and a movement, we're still here. We've outlasted Jesse Helms.’”

The Ultimate Honor: “1000 Women for Peace”

Carter continues to break down barriers across the country and in her hometown. 

“An historic first happened at the Durham-based North Carolina Central University (NCCU) with the screening of ‘Brother Outsider-The Life of Bayard Rustin’ during NCCU’s Black History Month,” she said.  The screening at NCCU, one of North Carolina’s 11 historically Black colleges, was sponsored by the school’s LGBT student groups NCCU COLORS and NCCU Duke Outlaw, in collaboration with Shades of Pride/Triangle Black Pride 2010, for which Carter serves as a board member. 

From those early days with WRL to working on the campaigns to unseat Jesse Helms, Carter has been involved in just about every aspect of activism and organizing within the LGBT Equality Movement.  The organizations she’s helped to found are numerous, including Southerners On New Ground (SONG), which she co-founded along with five other progressive lesbians in 1993 at the Creating Change conference in Durham.  The SONG founders intentionally included three southern white progressive lesbians (Pam McMichael, Suzanne Pharr, Mab Segrest) and 3 southern black progressive lesbians (Joan Garner, Pat Hussain, and Carter).  SONG integrates work against homophobia into freedom struggles in the South while it connects activists in the South who believe in liberation regardless of race, class, culture, gender, and sexuality.

If that weren’t enough, we are proud to note that Carter is also an NBJC founding board member.  “Mandy is phenomenal. In the 15 years I have known her, I have seen a consistent laser beam focus on the issues of peace, LGBT rights and oppressed constituencies,” said Dr. Sylvia Rhue.  “When I need counsel, I call Mandy. When I need information, I call Mandy. When I need a friend, I call Mandy. She has always been there giving support, guidance and occasional humor.”

Carter’s leadership and activism garnered her a nomination for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize as part of the 1000 Women for Peace project.  She was one of 41 women from the United States included in the 1000 peace women, as was Barbara Smith, another Black lesbian and co-founder of Kitchen Table Press with Audre Lorde. 

In addition to this extraordinary honor, her numerous awards and accolades include the 1990 North Carolina Lesbian and Gay Pride Community Service Award; the 1993 War Resister’s League Peace Award; the 1993 Gay and Lesbian Attorneys of Washington, D.C.’s Distinguished National Service Award; the Mab Segrest Award from North Carolinians Against Religious and Racist Violence (NCARRV); the North Carolina Independent’s Humanitarian Award; the Bayard Rustin Award for Political Activism in 1999; the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) 2006 Spirit of Justice honoree; the Susan J. Hyde Activism Award from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) in 2008, and a long list of others. 

A member of the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus and its Gay and Lesbian Caucus, Carter was named as then-Senator Obama’s LGBT steering committee co-chair during the 2008 Presidential Campaign. She is optimistic that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) will be passed under the Obama Administration.

“In my opinion, this has always been the key issue for our LGBT community, just as equal access to employment was for women and race and ethnicity was for people of color.  We must have federal protection for employment.”

Political Trouble Making

When asked about who she looks to as her hero/heroine, she cites Bayard Rustin and Audre Lorde.

“They were both 'out' and left an amazing historic legacy, each in their own right,” she said.  “Bayard for his role in the 1963 March on Washington and being a pacifist and multi-issue organizer like I am today.  Audre for being a Black lesbian author/activist who co-founded Kitchen Table Press.” 

“My major regret is that when I was coming out in high school as a young Black lesbian, I didn’t know of any Black gay men or Black lesbians. And had I known about Bayard or Audre Lorde, it would have had a major impact on me self-identifying as a lesbian of color, and not just a lesbian.”

Carter has many passions.  Certainly we all know of her dedication and commitment to social justice, particularly for LGBT people.  Few of us, however, know about her passion for women’s college basketball.  She is a long-time season ticket holder for Duke University’s women’s basketball team in Durham, N.C. who arranges part of her life and work around making sure she can watch the playoffs.

Within the LGBT Movement, Carter would be our point guard—our playmaker and ball handler.  She has been a general on the court, controlling the ball and passing it to the right players at the right time. 

Perhaps the most important duty of the point guard is to create scoring opportunities for teammates—and that has been Mandy Carter’s lasting legacy in her four decades of service in social justice activism and the LGBT Equality Movement. 

In a 2008 speech, NGLTF’s Sue Hyde said that Carter represents “forty years of political trouble making.”

“The movement is eternally grateful for Mandy Carter’s ‘political trouble making,’” said Sharon J. Lettman, Executive Director and CEO of NBJC.  “If you’ve ever received an email from her, she often signs off with the phrase, ‘For peace, justice, and equality!’  Today, we honor Mandy Carter as NBJC’s Jewel of the Week for her life’s work, her calling, and her enduring legacy of peace, justice, and equality.”

Article by Stacey Gates, NBJC Communications Manager.