Out Spotlight

            Today's Out Spotlight describes herself as an “out, southern, black, lesbian, social justice activist.” She has been advocating for human rights for more than 45 years. Today's Out Spotlight is Mandy Carter.

 Mandy Carter was born in Albany, New York, November 2, 1948.  She was raised in orphanages and the foster care system.  Although she was first introduced to social justice activism in 1965 when the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee visited her high school in Schenectady, New York, it was the 1968 Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Poor People's Campaign that officially marked the beginning of her activism.

Carter also credits Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s campaign projects such as those associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the former Institute for the Study of Nonviolence founded by folksinger Joan Baez, and the War Resisters League (WRL), specifically WRL-West.

After high school, she attended Hudson Valley Community College before dropping out and moving to New York City. She met the League for Spiritual Discovery and traveled with them to San Francisco. In 1969, she joined the War Resisters League  with whom she got her first-ever paid position in the movement.
 
She went on to be the Executive Director and one of the six co-founders of the North Carolina-based Southerners On New Ground (SONG).  Founded at the 1993 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's (NGLTF) Creating Change Conference in Durham, North Carolina, SONG integrates work against homophobia into freedom struggles in the South.




Carter served as campaign manager for North Carolina's Senate Vote '90 and Mobilization '96 political action committees. She served again as campaign manager for Florida Vote/Equal Voice based in Miami - a 2000 non-partisan, statewide voter empowerment campaign, which was initiated by the African-American Ministers Leadership Council of the People, People for the American Way Foundation, and the Florida NAACP - which resulted in one of Florida's largest black voter turn out's ever.

 Additionally, she was a four-year (1996-2000) North Carolina Member-At-Large of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and a member of both the DNC Gay and Lesbian Caucus and the DNC Black Caucus. She was a delegate at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, as well as one of the four co-chairs for the daily meeting of the DNC Gay and Lesbian Caucus.



Together with Matt Foreman, then executive director of NGLTF, she was one the two gay and lesbian people to speak at the 2003 Lincoln Memorial Rally for the 40th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. SONG and NGLTF had been asked by the 40th Anniversary Steering Committee, which included Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King III, to mobilize LGBT participation at the rally. They spoke at the event in honor of Bayard Rustin, the black gay activist who coordinated the 1963 march

She was one of the five National Co-Chairs of Obama LGBT Pride, the LGBT grassroots infrastructure for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She focused on organizing grassroots networks, especially people of color throughout the South.
Carter won a Spirit of Justice Award from GLAD for advancing LGBT rights. The National Organization for Women called her “one of the nation’s leading African-American lesbian activists.” She was inducted into the International Federation of Black Prides' Black LGBT Hall of Fame during the January 2012 Martin Luther King Day holiday.

She is the National Coordinator for the Bayard Rustin Commemoration Project of the National Black Justice Coalition. Carter lives in Durham, North Carolina.

 “Sometimes you have to be bold and take a risk.”