Mandy Carter

Mandy Carter, is a self-described "out, southern, black, lesbian, social justice activist." 2008 marks her 40th year of working in multi-issue and multi-racial grassroots organizing. 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 Non-violence founded by folksinger Joan Baez; and the pacifist based War Resisters League (WRL), specifically WRL-West with whom she got her first-ever paid position in the movement in 1969.

Carter is a founding board member of the National Black Justice Coalition and one of the six co-founders of the Durham-based Southerners On New Ground (SONG), where she served as the Executive Director. Carter received the $10,000 Anderson Prize Foundation's Susan J. Hyde Longevity Award at the 2008 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's (NGLTF) Creating Change Conference. Carter was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as one of the "1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005" which recognized, made visible and celebrated the impressive and valuable, yet often invisible peace work of thousands of women around the world.