The Porch sat down with two beloved founders of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Mandy Carter and Pat Hussain. With collectively over 100 years of organizing experience, Mandy and Mama Pat chat about how they first got started as teenagers in the War Resistance and Civil Rights movements, the 1987 March on Washington for Gay, Lesbian and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, and how they began to connect the dots between LGBTQ rights and other forms of oppression.  The two long-time friends share how they founded SONG with four other friends: the late Joan Garner, Pam McMichael, Suzanne Pharr and Mab Segrest. This conversation also digs into their philosophy for organizing “Don’t Mourn! Organize!” and how they responded to need at every moment with their labor and love to build an inclusive movement for liberation in our lifetime. 

Mandy Carter 

Mandy Carter is a southern African-American lesbian with a 58-year movement history of social, racial and LGBT justice organizing since 1967.  Raised in two orphanages and a foster home for her first 18 years in the state of New York, Ms. Carter 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 multi-racial and multi-issue organizing. 

It was specifically her participation in the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired 1968 Poor People’s Campaign organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that solidified her sustained commitment to nonviolence. This was to have been Dr. King’s most dramatic appeal to the conscience of the nation, designed to call attention to the fact that thousands of American citizens -both white and black – continued to suffer poverty in the midst of plenty. Ms. Carter lived in the tent city named Resurrection City on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The Poor People’s Campaign was the last project Dr. King was working on before his assassination in Memphis, TN on April 4, 1968. 

Ms. Carter helped co-found two groundbreaking organizations. Southerners On New Ground (SONG) and the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC). SONG, founded in 1993, is about building progressive movement across the South by creating transformative models of organizing that connects race, class, culture, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. Specifically, SONG integrates work against homophobia into freedom struggles in the South. She served as its Executive Director from 2003-2005. 

The National Black Justice Coalition, (NBJC) founded in 2003, is a national civil rights organization dedicated to empowering Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. NBJC’s mission is to end racism and homophobia.  NBJC provides leadership at the intersection of national civil rights organizations and LGBTQ organizations. In 2015, Ms. Carter received the Union Medal, the highest honor from the Union Theological Seminary, a leading progressive seminary and voice for justice, as did former Vice-President Al Gore. 

In 2015, Ms. Carter helped organize diverse broad-based participation for the 50th Anniversary of the 1965 Selma-To-Montgomery Voting Rights March activities in Selma, Alabama. This 1965 march moved Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act that enfranchised hundreds of thousands of blacks across the South. Former President Obama and the First Family were in attendance.

Pat Hussain

Pat Hussain, born in 1950, grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, attending segregated schools. She has been both a Southern debutante and a Marine. She has been a community organizer since she started stuffing envelopes for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in high school. In 1963, Pat attended a civil rights sit-in at a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop. When a man purposely poured a hot cup of coffee down the back of a fellow protestor, Pat stood up and left to prevent herself from lashing out. She realized she wasn’t cut out for non-violence.

Pat has always been at the center of community organizing. She co-founded the Atlanta chapter of GLAAD, helped the Task Force prepare for the 1987 March on Washington, and was the Grand Marshall for the first Pride parade in Knoxville, Tennessee. Prior to the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, when the commissioners of nearby Cobb County approved an anti-gay resolution, Pat led a successful campaign to move the Olympic volleyball competition out of the county.

In 1984, Toys “R” Us hired her, even after she disclosed in her interview that she was queer. At work she met Cherry, a fellow employee. Pat helped Cherry escape from a physically abusive marriage, and the two became partners, jointly raising Cherry’s two kids from her previous marriage. She and Cherry are now grandparents, and have been together for over 30 years.

At the 1993 National LGBTQ Task Force conference, Pat joined five other women to found Southerners on New Ground (SONG). 

In this episode, Mandy Carter and Mama Pat Hussain reference several figures in the Civil Rights and Queer Liberation movements. They call in their fellow co-founders of SONG, the late Joan Garner, Pam McMichael, Suzanne Pharr, and Mab Segrest, a band of sisters who don’t fight.  Pat cites John Lewis, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organizer of the March on Washington, and the U.S. House of Representatives.  The two go on to mention singer, composer and curator and voice of the movement Bernice Johnson Reagan. In the same discussion on Civil Rights, the two honor the contributions of the Highlander Research and Education Center, where countless multiracial Civil Rights and labor activists have trained since 1932. Incidentally, Highlander has been headed by two different SONG founders Suzanne Pharr and Pam McMichael. 

In conversation about the beginnings of their queer activism, the two recall names like Harvey Milk (first openly Gay man elected to office), Cleve Jones (who conceived the AIDS Memorial Quilt) along with Black queer organizers and thought leaders, Bayard Rustin and Audre Lorde.  Rustin was the organization of the March on Washington, as well as the person who taught Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. nonviolence. Lorde was a renowned author, professor, intersectional feminist and activist. 

While recalling the creation of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), the two talk about key movements and political happenings at the time. Mandy starts with the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993  and moves to the first Creating Change Conference, coordinated by the Taskforce and Sue Hyde.  She also mentions the 1993 senate race between the notorious racist and homophobic North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Black architect, Harvey Gantt, in 1993. Mandy recalls the organizing of Dolores Huerta and Chesar Chavez, who co-founded the United Farm Workers of America, when overviewing  SONG’s engagement with the Mount Olive Pickle protests and boycott. Pat comments on the 1993  Olympics Out of Cobb County battle in Atlanta.

Both discuss the founding of GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation)  and early activism, along with the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) born of the 1982 Gay Olympics, which featured Tina Turner as the opening performer. 

Potential Study Questions:

• Talk about ‘Don’t Mourn, Organize’- what does that mean for now?

• “If you see a need, fill it” is an organizing adage that Mandy Carter always says– where do you see the opportunities to do this in your life and community now? 

• Mama Pat talks about how her embodied experience of queerness turned her to organizing. What embodied experiences have politicized you?