As I mentioned, I spent the past weekend attenting the fourth annual Southern Girls Convention in Athens, Georgia. About 250-300 people showed up from all over the South. I had the opportunity to attend a few really good workshops, had a really good time with friends, heard Elaine Brown and Constance Curry give great talks, saw some excellent shows, and most of all, had the invigorating experience of getting touch with hundreds of people and organizations doing social justice organizing in the South.

SGC’02 organizer Natasha Murphy, super-rad and looking a bit like Che in this photo

Before I go on, let me just say: thank you so much to Natasha, Merritt, Julie, Theo, and everyone else who drove themselves so hard to make sure that everything was set to go in Athens. Thanks also to all the wonderful women and pro-women organizers who made it all happen by organizing workshops and participating in the convention. As y’all may know, I helped organize last year’s Southern Girls Convention in Auburn. It’s been really invigorating to see the convention going on—not to mention having a chance to actually participate rather than just driving myself sleepless and staffing the registration desk!

Why am I getting so effusive? Well, simply the fact that several hundred rad people could come together and put on a pretty unapologetically anarchist / radical feminist political convention in the heart of the Deep South (Alabama and then Georgia) is inspiring and a bit humbling—and the fact that we’ve done it for four years now, going on five, is invigorating. The event has risen to the level of even getting coverage in the New York Times (!). The Times story presents a pretty positive image of the convention, but like most major media presentation, it leaves out a lot of important things about what the convention’s all about politically, and how it runs. But you have to understand all that to understand why SGC is as important and inspiring as it is. The convention is a totally grassroots, bottom-up meeting which is completely organized by local kids and run by the participants rather than any kind of self-appointed professional organizers. Workshops are based around the idea that we don’t need to import experts to tell us how to organize (from the North or from privileged sectors in our own community)—we can share our own knowledge and learn from each other. And the convention’s politics are unapologetically radical feminist, generally socialist and/or anarchist, pro-LGBT, and supportive of many other struggles for social justice. It’s not about being Scarlet O’Hara with an attitude (and let’s not even get started on the racism of that ideal…). Rather, as the Times article gets to at one point, it’s about Southern women and pro-woman activists raising hell and working to make our own communities in the South places that we want to live. And I feel really confident that we are beginning to see that happen.

What does this mean, in concrete terms, on the ground?

It means that we are working on having hard discussions about what we can do to improve our communities and our organizing efforts — such as how we can build activist communities that are more open, loving, and supportive even when we are facing emotional stress and crisis; what sort of processes we need to help prevent and respond to sexual assault in our communities; and how boys can become good allies in the work for women’s liberation. Here we got a lot of good starts but also need a lot more work. For next year, we are talking about new formats for workshops that will give people a lot more space for in-depth and focused strategizing on concrete solution—while still offering time for introductory discussion about the issue and the principles from which we want to approach it.

It also means we are doing on-the-ground organizing to roll back the power of the small Right-wing elite that has rigged the game for so long in the South through measures that directly challenge, or simply sidestep, their power plays. A perfect example is the movement to set up abortion funds to ensure low-income women’s access to reproductive choice in spite of the government’s refusal to cover this vital medical procedure under Medicaid.

It also means chances to share our skills in how-tos, whether on good vegan nutrition, political lobbying, bicycle repair, or taking control of your own body and healthcare.

And it means networking and enjoying a community with people doing work all over the South. When Southern activists are primarily used to feelings of isolation and hopelessness, the value of just seeing how many other people are working for change can’t be overstated.

Organizers have discussed all kinds of plans for how we can improve and expand the work we are doing through SGC. The always-rad Ailecia Ruscin is working on a networking project to keep Southern organizers more closely in touch with one another from day to day (if you’re interested in this project, get in touch with me and I’ll let you know more). We’re talking about organizing smaller state-level meetings to accompany the big annual meeting, allow for more discussions and much more on-the-ground organizing meetings. And new organizers are planning on putting on the next SGC in Asheville, North Carolina. Everyone is really excited about making the fifth SGC even bigger and better than before, and continuing to make SGC a transformative presence in the South for many years to come.

Women’s liberation and the rest of the struggle for social justice are not just alive and kicking in the South; the movement is on the rise and can no longer be ignored.

For further reading:

• GT 7/27/2001 Southern Girls Convention builds pro-woman community in the Deep South
• NYT 7/22/2002 Where a Southern Girl is also a Feminist by Kate Zernike

Whew! After half a year of hard work, Southern Girls Convention 2001 finally happened this past weekend in Auburn, Alabama. As you may have noticed from my extended absence, it was absolutely exhausting, long, hard work, but it was totally worth it. Over FIVE HUNDRED totally rad feminist women and boys came from all over the country (and Canada too!) for over 60 information-filled workshops, tables with all kinds of information, four music shows (including an outstanding hardcore show at Olde Auburn Ale House), and an amazing chance for community, networking, and meeting lots of rad kids from the South. Although as organizers we were constantly running around exhausted and dealing with crises, everyone told us that they had an amazing time and the positive feedback was more than enough to keep us going on vicarious great experiences.

Auburn hasn’t seen so much diversity or political consciousness in a long time. Queer punk girls were lounging outside of Foy Union, everyone from PIRG to SURGE to Planned Parenthood were hosting tables, and a group of Radical Cheerleaders coordinated a spontaneous march and took over the downtown Taco Bell in support of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ campaign for tomato pickers.

I can’t write here how challenging, exhausting, uniting, empowering, and wonderful the experience of organizing SGC2001 and carrying it through have been. But it’s been all that and more. I don’t want to organize any more conventions for a long time, but I am super-psyched about going to next year’s SGC and experiencing it from a participant’s-eye-view. I hope, I pray that SGC will be an on-going, transformative presence in the South for a long time to come.

Richard Shedenhelm wrote a good, brief article using the Confederate Constitution to help refute revisionist claims that Southern secession was about state’s rights, Northern tariffs, or what have you. Although Shedenhelm doesn’t note it, one of the provisions he discusses — Article IV, Section 3 codifies the decision of the United States’ Supreme Court in Dredd Scott v. Sanford by specifying in the Constitution that the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States. Like Dredd Scott, this is in fact a profoundly anti-states’ rights provision, since it fundamentally barred the states of the CSA from self-determination on whether or not to enforce an abolition of slavery within their own borders. Therefore, it seems that the maintenance of white supremacist slavery was more important to the crafters of the Confederacy than states’ rights ever were (which we might also note is backed up by their use of military occupation to keep 1/2 of the state of Tennessee from seceding back into the Union, and Jefferson Davis’s repeated speaches denouncing the ideology of states’ rights as harmful to the Confederate cause).

Four gay activists visiting the Florida state capitol in Tallahassee were told by a veteran lawmaker that the country has lost a lot because of gay and lesbian activities and that their lifestyle is at odds with Christian principles. I told them I disagree with what they’re doing and I think they’re headed in the wrong direction, said Rep. Allen Trovillion, a Winter Park, Fla., Republican and World War II veteran. [Daily news 04/11/01 on Advocate.com]

What a flaming jackass!

The Dallas Observer has an interesting profile on Paul Kerr, a gringo leader in the immigrant amnesty movement. Last year he organized the largest street demonstration in Dallas’s history, with about 10,000 rallying to downtown Dallas for immediate amnesty for undocumented immigrants.