- Description
- I am an attorney, scholar and life-long activist, born into a family of activists. Starting at age 16, I spend 10 days in jail after occupying a nuclear power plant in New York.. I've been arrested eight times in the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-Apartied movement, the anti-war movement, and once by accident when the police arrested the legal observers before they arrested the protesters. I got my law degree from U.C. Berkeley and worked for many years in housing rights and advocacy for low income people. I went back to school for a PhD in history in order to better understand the intersections of race and gender. I've has published on African American women’s freedom movements, from slave revolts to reconstruction. I've been an organizer and trainer with Peaceful Uprising since 2009. I am an African American woman and direct descendant of slaves. My father was the child of slaves—both his parents were born in 1860, my grandmother Harriet Thorpe born the property of Squire Sweeney in Howard County, Missouri and my grandfather Haywood Hall was born the property of Colonel Haywood Hall on his plantation in Tennessee. I never met either of them—they died long before I was born in 1963. My dad was the youngest of the Hall family’s children, born in 1898. He never finished eighth grade and worked odd jobs, from shining shoes to waiting tables. Unable to tolerate or comply with racism, he worked outside the system. He took the Name Harry Haywood to honor both his father and mother. He was labor organizer, a communist and a self-taught worker-intellectual, publishing two books and numerous articles during his life. In 1956 my parents were forced to travel to three different states before they could find a judge to marry them—my mom a second generation White New Orleanian Jew of Russian and German descent, my dad African American and 33 years her senior. My mom had begun her work as an anti-racist activist when she was a teenager in the 1940s and never looked back. She was a teacher and later a professor of history and has written 3 books on the history of slavery. My parents were black-listed during the McCarthy era and forced to flee the country, which is how I ended up being born in Mexico City and having dual citizenship. My family taught me to always watch for the folks on the margins, to educate myself on what is going on and how we got here, and that we have to fight back in order to survive.
![WHAT IS CLIMATE JUSTICE? Climate justice includes a focus on the root causes of climate change and making the systemic changes that are therefore required,a commitment to address the disproportionate […]](http://www.peacefuluprising.org/wp-content/themes/arras/images/thumbnail.png "Defining Climate Justice")