by Jisu Sheen he New Haven independent
Women in the Civil Rights Era
Panel with Lisa D. Gray and Siobhan Carter-David, led by Markeshia Ricks
Kulturally LIT’s LIT Fest at ConnCAT
New Haven
Oct. 4
At nonprofit Kulturally LIT’s sixth annual LIT Fest Saturday afternoon, psychologist and educator Dr. Allyson Regis showed up to a “Women in the Civil Rights era” panel with an armful of on-topic books, including Ilyasah Shabazz’s “Growing Up X” and Anna Malaika Tubbs’ “The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.” She wasn’t on the panel herself, but she was ready to be an informed listener.
The books were fresh finds. Regis had just gotten them from outside the building.
This was the second year Kulturally LIT, a nonprofit formed to “elevate the excellence in the literary works of the African diaspora,” held a LIT Fest celebration at youth and adult education nonprofit ConnCAT in Science Park. The theme this year was “‘The Year of X’ honoring the centennial year of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X.” Inside were speeches, storytime, and workshops. Outside, tents with educational resources and activities were lined up, along with food trucks and an outdoor stage.
One of those tents held books from Edgewood neighborhood bookstore Possible Futures, where Regis selected her stack.
In a few years, she may need to add a couple more titles to that pile. Panelist Lisa D. Gray, a writer and curator who grew up in New Haven and now lives in Oakland — and who is a freelance reporter for the Independent — started the “Women in the Civil Rights era” session with a reading from her novel in progress, tentatively titled “Stolen Summer” or “One Summer.”
Set in 1963, the year civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated and Malcom X delivered his “Message to the Grass Roots,” and one year before Gray’s own birth, the story focuses on young women protesting during the Civil Rights movement in Georgia.
In the voice of her narrator, Gray laid out the unique stakes for women activists, including social precarity, pregnancy, and intense relations to love and community.
The session’s other panelist, Southern Connecticut State University history professor Dr. Siobhan Carter-David, has a book on the way as well. She is working on a manuscript called “Issuing the Black Wardrobe,” which she hopes to publish in 2027. It’s about African American fashion, assimilation, and the role of magazines—and the tastes of their readership—in shaping “a strong Black woman’s identity.”
Along with their projects in progress, the panelists mentioned stories of Mollie Moon, a socialite who raised millions for the Civil Rights movement, singer Eartha Kitt being blackballed from the entertainment industry for speaking on the Vietnam War, and Rosa Parks’ work interviewing victims of sexual assault long before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
For Gray, her positionality as a Black woman is at the core of her drive to tell her story. “I bring me everywhere I go,” she said. “I show up as me everywhere I go. And that means I bring my whole self into the room.”
She continued, “When I do that, I’m able to educate, I’m able to assist, I’m able to ensure that people—no matter who those people are—get a sense of what it means to be a Black woman through my experience.”
Carter-David invited the audience to think of the Civil Rights era the way many scholars now refer to it: as the “long freedom movement” or “the long Civil Rights movement.”
How long is long? The movement could have started with emancipation or at the first arrival of enslaved Africans to American shores, Carter-David explained, where they began “becoming their own abolitionists.”
By the 1960s, many women who supported the long Civil Rights movement were members of what Carter-David called the “informal economy,” meaning they were dealing with “funds that couldn’t be traced.” These included numbers runners (for gambling operations), sex workers, psychics, and spiritual workers.
As panel moderator and journalist (and former Independent staff reporter) Markeshia Ricks put it, “Inside the community, we have known unknowns.”
The panelists talked about how these women used profits from their work to support activists on the ground. The hidden quality of their funds was useful in countering suppression and surveillance.
In Gray’s novel, multiple women characters support activists by using formal businesses in expansive ways. One character runs a boarding house, where Black activists can live when they are refused housing elsewhere. Another runs a restaurant, using her skills and generosity to feed the movement.
“What can we learn from the unrecognized, unacknowledged work of women?” Ricks asked the panelists, noting that this is often “work that has to be done virtually in silence.”
Gray responded with an urge to protect the human spirit, saying that she has learned “rest is paramount.”
She went on to suggest ways people can support each other’s wellbeing. If you know someone is out there doing the work, she said, “invite them to dinner.” Gray prompted the audience to consider how re-energizing a simple moment of care can be.
Carter-David chimed in, saying, “keep building community.” Rather than give into fear and the temptation to isolate ourselves, she said, people can respond to scary times by sticking together.
Panel attendee Shaunda-Sekai Holloway called the session “quenching.” Regis said the panelists gave her a lot to think about. She teaches cross-cultural counseling at Southern Connecticut State University and is currently guiding her students through intersectionality and the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the scholar who coined the term. She recognized the need to center women in order to gain a full understanding of political movements.
Both in scholarship and in practice, the women on the panel made sure their experiences would not be lost. “Pen and paper, record your stories,” Ricks advised the crowd.
Gray, utilizing her novelist senses, spun Ricks’ suggestion into a scene, telling the audience, “Take a camera to Grandma’s house.” She encouraged people to talk to their elders and flip through family photo albums with them. She emphasized the value in writing down your thoughts for the future.
With a book each on the way, Gray and Carter-David are doing just that.
Dr. Allyson Regis…
…and her book stack.