Frank Porter Graham Award Recipient: Mandy Carter
One of the country’s leading African-American lesbian social justice activists. Carter has a history of organizing for social justice, racial equality, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) equality that spans more than four decades. She credits her longstanding commitment to activism to the influences of the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee, the former Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, and the pacifist War Resisters League, but her participation in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.-inspired Poor People’s Campaign organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1968, truly solidified her life-time commitment to nonviolence.
In 1993, Carter was one of the six co-founders of the Southerners On New Ground (SONG) and she served as its Executive Director. Founded and based in Durham, SONG’s purpose is to build progressive movements across the South by developing transformative models of organizing that connect race, class, culture, gender, and sexual identity. Specifically, SONG integrates work against homophobia into freedom struggles in the South.
In 2003, she also helped found the National Black Justice Coalition, a national civil rights organization of concerned African-American LGBT individuals and allies dedicated to fostering equality by ending racism and homophobia.
Carter was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a part of the “1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005” in order to recognize, make visible and celebrate the often invisible peace work of thousands of women around the world. She has services on a long list of Board of prominent social justice and political organizations, is a featured speaker at national civil rights events, and has received a number of honors from groups such as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Boston Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, and the LGBT Center of Raleigh.
