Chude Pamela Parker Allen, also known as Pamela Parker, Chude Pamela Allen, Chude Pam Allen, Pamela Allen, and Pam Allen (born 1943) is an American activist of the civil rights movement and women's liberation movement. She was a founder of New York Radical Women.
Pamela Parker was born in Pennsylvania in 1943. [1] She grew up Episcopalian and lived in Solebury, Pennsylvania. Her mother was a nursery school teacher and her father worked as a manager in a rubber goods factory. [2]
Allen attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, where she studied religion. She joined the Students for a Democratic Society. During the summer of 1963, she was a counselor at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia where she lived with Paul Washington, the church's African-American rector, and his family. [3] In her junior year, she was one of 13 white exchange students at the Spelman College in Spring 1964. There she attended a seminar on nonviolence conducted by Staughton Lynd and became involved with the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights. She volunteered as a Freedom School teacher in Holly Springs, Mississippi, for Freedom Summer. [4] [5] During her senior year, she was an activist on campus and spoke for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She married African-American activist Robert L. Allen in 1965. [6] Following her graduation from Carleton, she moved to New York City, where she worked at an agency that found homes for foster children. [1]
Allen was a key activist in the white women's liberation movement and she advocated for greater attention to be given to racism within the movement. [7] She co-founded New York Radical Women in 1967. [8] The group planned the Jeannette Rankin Brigade action. [1] Allen later left the group, criticizing their views of motherhood and rejection of traditional roles for women. [9] She worked for The Guardian in early 1968. [1] She moved to San Francisco, where she joined the feminist group Sudsofloppen. [10] Based on her experiences with the group, she wrote the influential pamphlet Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women's Liberation, in which she outlined a four-stage method of consciousness raising. The work was influenced by humanistic psychology.
She was editor for the newspaper of the Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality (Union WAGE). [11] She was also involved with the Bridal Fair action of 1969, the Miss America protest, and International Women's Day.
She changed her name from Pamela Allen to Chude Pamela Allen.
Allen collaborated with her first husband on the 1974 book Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States. She also writes poetry and has drafted two plays, The Uprising of the 20,000 and Could We Be Heard. [1]
Allen is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry . [12] [13]
Allen is a member of the Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. She lives in San Francisco.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.
Second-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades before ushering in a third wave of feminism beginning in the early 1990s. It took place throughout the Western world, and aimed to increase equality for women by building on previous feminist gains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Ella Josephine Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Mary Elizabeth King is a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the United Nations affiliated University for Peace, a political scientist, and author of several publications. She is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and received a doctorate in international politics from Aberystwyth University in 1999. She is also a Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute and a distinguished Scholar at the American University Center for Global Peace in Washington D.C.
The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s and continued into the 1980s primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which effected great change throughout the world. The WLM branch of radical feminism, based in contemporary philosophy, comprised women of racially and culturally diverse backgrounds who proposed that economic, psychological, and social freedom were necessary for women to progress from being second-class citizens in their societies.
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Louise Alone Thompson Patterson was a prominent American social activist and college professor. Patterson's early experiences of isolation and persecution on the West Coast had a profound impact on her later activism. She recognized the ways in which racism and discrimination affected individuals and communities and dedicated her life to challenging these systems of oppression. Her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, a period of intellectual and cultural awakening in African American communities, allowed her to connect with other artists and activists who were similarly committed to social justice. In addition to her notable contributions to civil rights activism, Thompson Patterson was also recognized as one of the pioneering Black women to be admitted to the University of California at Berkeley.
Black feminism, also known as Afro-feminism chiefly outside the United States, is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Black feminism also acknowledges the additional marginalization faced by black women due to their social identity.
Gloria Richardson Dandridge was an American civil rights activist best known as the leader of the Cambridge movement, a civil rights action in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. Recognized as a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement, she was one of the signatories to "The Treaty of Cambridge", signed in July 1963 with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and state and local officials. It was an effort at reconciliation and commitment to change after a riot the month before.
Alix Kates Shulman is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."
Freedom on My Mind is a 1994 feature documentary film that tells the story of the Mississippi voter registration movement of 1961 to 1964, which was characterized by violence against the people involved, including multiple instances of murder.
Cheryl L. Clarke is an American lesbian poet, essayist, educator and a Black feminist community activist who continues to dedicate her life to the recognition and advancement of Black and Queer people. Her scholarship focuses on African-American women's literature, black lesbian feminism, and the Black Arts Movement in the United States. For over 40 years, Cheryl Clarke worked at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and maintains a teaching affiliation with the Graduate Faculty of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, though retired. In addition, Clarke serves on the board of the Newark Pride Alliance. She currently lives in Hobart, New York, the Book Village of the Catskills, after having spent much of her life in New Jersey. With her life partner, Barbara Balliet, she is co-owner of Bleinheim Hill Books, a new, used, and rare bookstore in Hobart. Actively involved in her community, Clarke along with her sister Breena Clarke, a novelist, organizes the Hobart Festival of Women Writers each September
The Miss America protest was a demonstration held at the Miss America 1969 contest on September 7, 1968, attended by about 200 feminists and civil rights advocates. The feminist protest was organized by New York Radical Women and included putting symbolic feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can" on the Atlantic City boardwalk, including bras, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, mops, and other items. The protesters also unfurled a large banner emblazoned with "Women's Liberation" inside the contest hall, drawing worldwide media attention to the Women's Liberation Movement.
Kathie Sarachild is an American writer and radical feminist. In 1968, she took the last name "Sarachild" after her mother Sara. Kathie coined the phrase "Sisterhood is Powerful" in a flier she wrote for the keynote speech she gave for New York Radical Women's first public action at the convocation of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. This was a slogan that would become synonymous with the radical feminist movement in the years which followed. She was one of four women who held the Women's Liberation banner at the Miss America protest, and had her paper "A Program for Radical Feminist Consciousness-Raising" presented at the First National Women's Liberation Conference outside Chicago on November 27, 1968. She was a member of New York Radical Women. In February 1969, Kathie led a feminist group that was soon to be called Redstockings in their disruption of the New York State Abortion Reform Hearing, at which women first demanded to testify about their own abortions. In March of the same year, Redstockings held the first ever abortion speakout, which became a model for abortion rights activists across the United States.
Johnnie Tillmon Blackston was an American welfare rights activist. She is regarded as one of the most influential welfare rights activists in the country, whose work with the National Welfare Rights Organization influenced the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in particular.
Heather Booth is an American civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist who has been involved in activism for progressive causes. During her student years, she was active in both the civil rights movement and feminist causes. Since then she has had a career involving feminism, community organization, and progressive politics.
Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, formerly Gwendolyn Robinson, is senior lecturer emerita following her retirement from the University of Florida in 2019. Her research has explored Islamic feminism and the impact of Sharia law on Muslim women. She is a civil rights activist, serving as a member of both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Nation of Islam (NOI). Simmons has received a number of prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship, USAID Fellowships, and an American Center of Oriental Research Fellowship.
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Marilyn Salzman Webb, also known as Marilyn Webb, is an American author, activist, professor, feminist and journalist. She has been involved in the civil rights, feminist, anti-Vietman war and end-of-life care movements, and is considered one of the founders of the Second-wave women's liberation movement.
Clarie Collins Harvey was an African American businesswoman, religious leader and prominent activist during the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Her organization Womanpower Unlimited has been recognized by many for its role in sustaining the Freedom Riders during their imprisonment at Parchman Penitentiary. As a result of her long activist career, Harvey received many accolades, including the Outstanding Mississippian Award, given to her by Governor William Waller in 1974.
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