Suzanne Pharr is a southern queer feminist and anti-racist organizer. She founded the Women’s Project in Arkansas in 1981, was a co-founder of Southerners on New Ground in 1993, and was director of the Highlander Center from 1999 to 2004. Pharr is an organizer and political strategist who has spent her adult life working to build a broad-based, multi-racial, multi-issued movement for social and economic justice in the United States.
Major themes in her movement work include intersectional issues and strategies, anti-violence, racial and gender equality, cross-generational collaboration, democratic participation, economic justice, and human rights based on equality and justice.
At the center of Pharr’s every effort is the question, “How can we make it possible for everyone to live as a whole person, to have self-determination, to be treated with dignity and respect, and to have access to material necessities as well as joy?” Based on six decades of work across movements, she now thinks of herself as a political handywoman, working across issues with activists of diverse races, genders, sexual identities, classes, ages, abilities, and cultures to develop strategies for justice and equality.
