THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Byllye Avery

“I refuse to give up on people. We have a lot of work to do in learning how to listen to each other and learn how to be there for each other, put our things to the side and really just listen so somehow, we can become united.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, April 2025

BA:  My full name is Byllye Yvonne Reddick Avery, which I never used the Reddick part for other reasons, but it’s Byllye Yvonne Avery. And I was born in Waynesville, Georgia, October 20, 1937.

JW:  Great. So, briefly, tell us a little what your life was like as a child.

BA:  Oh, my life. I grew up. I was born in Georgia, but when I was 19 months old, my mother moved to DeLand, Florida, and that’s where I grew up. And she married a man named, his nickname was Mike Reddick. His name was Quitman Reddick. She married him, and he was like a father to me. I knew that he was not my birth father. I always knew he wasn’t my birth father. But he was a man who, in hindsight, I’ve come to understand some of his anger, some of his disillusionment.

He served in the war, and I guess what, it was World War I, and it was when the black men thought that if they went off and fought the war, that they would prove what good Americans they are. But when they came home, they were met with all kinds of, you know, discrimination and everything, even though they had given their lives. And so, a lot of them were angry. And he was a corporal, so I felt he was very angry. And so, I’ve learned through my research what they did, digging ditches and cleaning latrines and doing all this kind of work.

And so, he was angry, and he hated white people with a passion and only respected them enough to get what he needed to be done. So, he had an anger inside of him that sometimes exploded and came out on the family. But then there was the other side of him that was really wonderful and good to us and provided for us. I never went hungry. I never needed for anything. I had everything I wanted and a lot – everything I needed and some of what I wanted. But it was growing up in the south during segregation times, and I had to walk by two white schools to get to my school, and our books would have some of the pages torn out because they would have been the books discarded from the white schools.

But we had a very supportive community. And in the face of all the Jim Crow and all of the people telling us we were less than, we had this whole group of people who were telling us we were wonderful, that we were good, that we could do things and that we needed to make something of ourselves and so we carried that. And the main thing was we had to represent the Negro race. We had to always know that when people saw us, they formed opinions about who we were and in our Pollyanna minds, we thought that we could change their minds. And I would imagine we might have changed a few minds, but the large majority of the people, I feel like, held on to their beliefs.

Nevertheless, I have come to appreciate growing up in my segregated school, having been married to a woman who integrated every school she went to and to learn about the abuse that she suffered at school, and most people don’t know about that. And how in the evening, she and her brothers all integrated the schools and how at the dinner table, they would never ask, how was your day?

And they had horrible times. And it just left a very lasting scar. And I did not have that in my school. You know, we had other stuff, but we certainly didn’t have anybody abusing us because we were black or making us feel less than. I grew up in the AME Church, Bethel AME Church, and learned a lot of what it was like to be in charge and to do things because they gave you jobs to do in the church, and you had to perform certain jobs like teach Sunday school.

And it didn’t matter that you didn’t know how to teach. You know, you learned how to teach. And so, you know, I taught Sunday school and then on programs, you have to recite poems, and you have to learn how to talk in public and you have to sing in the choir. So, there are a lot of skills that you learn being in the church. And even though there was a lot I didn’t understand about the preaching and Easter and the killing of Christ and all that seemed horrible, and horrific to me and very frightening, you know, they never could answer any of my real questions that I had.

So, they just told me they didn’t know what I meant. And I was wondering that if the world ends, what happens to all of the time? And they would look at me like I was crazy. What do you mean, the time? There’s no time. It’s gone, you know. Anyway, so anyway, but that was that. And I went off to college, to Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama. And the first time I saw Talladega College; it was in the Ebony magazine. I read about it and, you know, I was in the seventh grade, and I decided that’s where I wanted to go to school.

So, none of this traveling people around and showing them colleges and talking about a fit and all that kind of thing. You will be glad. I was so glad to leave home. I would have fit in anywhere they sent me. But I went to Talladega, which was a very political school. I had no idea. I just thought it was college. But a lot of the Civil Rights movement people have been educated there. Martin Luther King was my – he spoke to my class my sophomore year. He was our Bible studies speaker, and then he was my graduation speaker. That was while he was becoming Martin Luther King. He was just a little minister from Montgomery, from Dexter Avenue Church, but he made quite an impression on me.

I remember the essence of his speech my sophomore year. He talked about love and the importance of love. And that there were three kinds of love. Erotic, platonic and redemptive love. And redemptive love, he said, was the most important and the hardest to do, but it was absolutely imperative. And that he said to us, and this was in ’50… I went to college in ’55, so this was ’57.

He told us, you have to forgive white people for all of the nasty, horrible things they’ve done to you in order for you to be forgiven. And so, we kind of will say, well, you got to be crazy. We can’t even walk into a restaurant and eat. But we still supposed to forgive these people for saying we can’t do this. But that was one of his cardinal principles. And then for graduation in ’59, he told us we had to be active. we had to do something – that we didn’t have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines and watching things happen. So, he was a big influence.

Those two interactions were big influences in my life as well as Talladega College, which is where Arthurine Lucy, who, when she attempted to integrate the University of Alabama, her lawyer Thurgood Marshall, brought her to Talladega. And she stayed on our campus for two weeks. Yeah, so we were all involved in the midst of everything. But I had no idea any of this was political. It was to me, this was college. You know, this was my school. So that was the growing up years.

I got married in 1960 and had my first baby in 1961, my second one in 1966. And my husband died in 1970. He had a massive heart attack at 33 and died. And I credit him for me really getting my act together to stop being scared and become, do something in the world. Before he died, he used to love to read all the time. He was quite academic. He went to college from the 11th grade. So, he was a very bright man, very future thinking. We talked about things then that people are surprised, that they don’t even talk about now. But one of the things he said to me was, I’m reading this book, Byllye, I think you’d really like it. And I didn’t read it until after he died. And it was called the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan.

JW:  I’ve heard of that.

BA:  Yeah, you’ve heard of that. So, I read that book and it was – he was right. He was somebody who was speaking to what I was thinking, what I believed in, what I thought about. And I really wish that I had been able to have a person-to-person conversation with him about it. But that didn’t happen.

JW:  But he suggested it to you?

BA:  Oh yeah. He read it before he died. I think the very last book he read before he died, if I recall, it’s been a long time because he died in 1970. And so, I got all involved in the women’s movement, which basically meant being involved with white women who were in the women’s movement. I was teaching at Shands. I got involved in women’s health; I was a head teacher at Shands Teaching Hospital. And our department chief asked me to do a presentation along with another woman about what were women talking about, reproductive rights?

This was in ’71. And so, we did the presentation and somehow just because we talked about what was going on, we kind of got identified as women who could help women get abortions. But we didn’t know anything about women getting abortions. But when people come to you and say you’re the experts, you rise to the occasion, you become the expert. And so we found out how to send women to clergy consultation at the Judson Church in New York and then they would help them get to the women’s center.

And that worked with white women who were, well, who were resourced. And so once the black woman came and I said, okay, this is what you do. And I gave her the information, and she says, well, first of all, I don’t know anybody in New York, I don’t have any money to get to New York. And you know, several, like a month or so later she died from a self-induced abortion. And so that really turned the lights on for me and my friends. And we really decided to get involved in abortion.

And in ’74, me along with two other women, we opened up the Gainesville Women’s Health center, first trimester abortion and well woman center. And I noticed that black women were coming in for abortions – more than 50% of our population. And over half of the abortions were black women. But nobody was coming back for the well woman care. And that was the part that bothered me. Yeah.

And while we were there, white Women started becoming upset about birthing experiences, and many of them were starting to have their babies at home. And so they would bring their babies to us for our docs to look at them, to examine them because the other doctors wouldn’t. And so we understood that there was a need for changes around birth. So in ’78, we opened birthplace and alternative birthing environment using the services of Bilberry.

JW:  Now, where was that?

BA:  That was all in Gainesville, Florida.

JW:  It was still in Gainesville.

BA:  All in Gainesville, Florida. So that was my work there. And so I was a birth attendant to I don’t know, to about almost 100 births or something like that, but it was just very eye opening and very…I understood life. I understood death, I understood the breadth. I understood so much about life just through the lens of birth and how powerful women are and how medicalized birth is. And our thing was one baby head first.

And most women were in charge of their births and decided how they wanted to have the babies, what position, where on the floor in the bed. Husbands caught the babies. Nobody fainted. Husbands cut the cords. Husbands gave the babies the first bath. Little children were in the room. So our children, our babies were born. So we just kind of demystified the whole thing. Had a lot of wonderful times doing it. It was an incredible experience.

Okay. That was part one, Gainesville. And so I left there kind of not knowing why I left. I knew why. I knew why on paper. I left the birthing center. They needed to hire another midwife. They didn’t need a talking type like me. And I got this job working at this community college in vocational education. The community college is called Santa Fe Community College.

And that was really the first time that I had contact with black women who I felt I could ask them about what was going on with them, with their health, because at that time, they were targeted. It was a CETTA program. Remember the days of, see, the Comprehensive Educational Technical Training Program, and the women were missing school, they were being paid $375 an hour to come to school, and they weren’t coming to school. And I didn’t understand it because if anybody had been paying me to come to school, I mean, I went to school without paying, and I couldn’t imagine not coming to school when you were being paid.

But then I learned how complicated their lives were and that it wasn’t just them they were taking care of. They had children. If their children got sick and they didn’t have anyone to care for them, they had to stay home and take care of them, and they themselves would get sick. And that’s when I started asking them, well, tell me, what do you have? And I found there were young women who were hypertensive, they were diabetic. They had all these health issues that I had, frankly, no idea that we would have. And I didn’t at that time.

We all existed under conspiracy of silence. So no one was talking about their health. And you didn’t hear about anything until somebody was almost to die. But you never – you knew what they died from, but you didn’t know what they were living with. And so there I started to ask women about their health. And that’s when the idea of black women’s health issues focus was kind of planted in my mind.

JW:  What year was that?

BA:  That was in 1979, 1980. And I was on the board of the National Women’s Health Network. And so I remember being in Ann Arbor at the Public School of Public Health, and I whispered to Norma Swenson, I’m thinking about doing a program to present to the board about black women’s health issues. Do you think it’s a good idea? So she and Nina Finkelstein, who was sitting right next to her, said, yeah, we think that’s a great idea. I never made that presentation, but I did end up working with Belita Cowan, and we organized and put on the first national conference on black women’s health issues in 1983.

It was still a program of the network, and we thought we’d have 200 to 300 women coming. We had close to 2,000. Yeah. And everything changed then. How we look at our health, how we look at ourselves, the work that we do, it all changed over that weekend. They called it the weekend that changed the thinking around black women’s health. That it wasn’t all us, that we were living with systems that didn’t serve us, our health care system didn’t serve us. We were living under racism, sexism, classism, you know, all of those things. All those dynamics that were causing us have poor health.

It was a monumental moment. And I have to give a lot of credit to the network. The women at the network gave me nothing but support. They never tried to tell me what to do. They never did anything but loved me and gave me what I needed and made sure I got it. They taught me how to raise money. They taught me. I didn’t know black women all over the country. I only knew black women in Gainesville. And I said, whenever one of them said to me, our board was from all over the country, do you [know black women all over the country]. What can I do for you?

I said, do you know any black women where you live that you can introduce me to? And they introduced me to them and they formed the first planning committee and we put on the coffers. And so that’s why we had such a wide net of these women from all over the country who were doing this work. So we started forming self help groups. I’d been to consciousness raising groups with my white sisters, but that model didn’t really go deep enough. So we changed it around.

Instead of the ones I went to, somebody said, okay, this week we’re going to talk about our relationship with our father. Next week we talk about our mother. That didn’t quite go deep enough. It just kept people on the surface. And so we came up with a simple thing of telling the stories of our lives. And what was it like for you growing up? What was hard? What was good? And then what do you love about yourself? And we found out the hardest question was the last one. Most people got very nervous and very, very nervous about saying what they loved about themselves. And so we knew that that was an area we needed to focus on.

Plus, all of this was hard. We learned about all of the sexual abuse that goes in our families and all of our families, actually, the domestic violence, the constantly being berated, how dangerous it is for a girl to grow up in a family. All of the bad stuff, you know, that can happen. But the reality of it for us is that we learned about each other, but we also learned about ourselves. And that was what made the difference in our work. And then we took that information and that’s what we shaped around. Shaped our work. Around where the pain was. Yeah, around the pain.

And then the other thing that we did that people think was so incredible, what to me made sense, is that we made sure all of our sisters were there, of all income levels, not just the ones who could get there. But I went to housing projects, I went to rural areas and sat with [them]. You know, I’ve sat in so many tennis association meetings where you have to sit through the whole meeting and then at the end they look at you and kind of say, well, what do you want?

You know, I travel. I put many miles on my car down the dusty roads of Georgia, going to meet women at churches where I knew I couldn’t say the word abortion, right? But I could say birth. And I used to carry this film, All My Babies, which is a film that was put out by the Georgia public health people in the 40s. And it showed a home birth, and it showed a good birth, a woman who had everything she needed, which was not a whole lot.

And then one woman who was living with stress in the family didn’t have enough food and all of that. It showed the difference between those two births. And see, most of the women who had babies, and that’s how I got them to talk about reproductive [healthcare]. It was through babies. One of the saddest things was I told them that I was planning a conference, just one group of women in Montezuma, Georgia. I told them that I was planning a conference and I was raising money so that they could come and that we would pay for their transportation and we would pay for them housing for them to get themselves there. That’s all they had to do.

So I sent a letter out to them about coming to the conference. And so I think it was a day or so after the conference, it dawned on me that I didn’t see them because, you know, we were doing so many things. It was only two or three of us and a bunch of volunteers, and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, you know, and so you just got to take care of whatever is the next day. And then we got all this crowd of people coming, and. But then I realized the women from Montezuma didn’t come. So I got on the phone and called them, and they said, yeah, we got your letter. I said, did you get my letter? Yeah, we got your letter. I said, well, why didn’t you come? They say, we didn’t open it because we thought you were going to tell us you didn’t raise the money.

JW:  I really did not think that’s what you were going to say.

BA:  I know, I know. But see, that’s people whose dreams have been so deferred.

JW:  Right.

BA:  And they can’t even imagine a different kind of answer.

JW:  Right.

BA:  And so, rather than suffer the disappointment…

JW:  They kept saying, oh, this is not for me.

BA:  Right. This is not happening. But nevertheless, many women did open their envelopes, though. So the place was there. And some of the professors at Spelman, they said, interesting way [to do it]. We’ve never had such a diverse population of black women on Spelman’s campus. But people came. We had seven or eight busses that came.

JW:  You arranged all that?

BA:  Not really. The women who are on the planning Committee, they arranged them. They were in New York. They decided to get a bus. And get a bus to come there. They didn’t wait. I wasn’t doing it. Women [were doing it].

JW:  I meant your committee, but yeah, yeah, that’s a lot of work.

BA:  They did all of that. They went back and they organized. See, people were ready, you know, people were ready for this. It was the right moment. It was the right moment in time for it to happen. It was in what I call divine order. And when you’re in divine order, things happen the way they’re supposed to. Excuse me. So, yeah, [people] came from Mississippi, from New York, New Jersey, from, I can’t remember, Philadelphia, D.C. people would pay $25, get on the bus in New York City, ride all the way to Atlanta and back and back because the Greyhound bus only cost like $2500 or $1500 or something like that, you know. So anyway, that’s how we all got started. And then we had to figure out what we were going to do after these people left the conference.

JW:  How do we keep this going? Nobody’s ever done it before.

BA:  Right, right, right. And so that’s when we went back and started building the Black Women’s Health Project and started doing self help groups around the country. And it was a really explosive time. In hindsight, I think we probably grew a little too fast too soon. But nevertheless, the most important thing is the work that we did during those years became ingrained in black women’s psyches and the whole thing around self love and self care that they will tell you now. Oh yeah, just self love. And you know, back then they told us that we were being selfish, that, you know, taking time away from our children and our husbands was being selfish.

So we had to unlearn all of that stuff in order to get to where we are now. And so it really changed the collective consciousness of black women. That was what happened. We changed the collective consciousness. And you can see that, you know, in the election, 98% of black women voted against being oppressed. You see what I’m saying? So, yeah, yeah, yeah. It became quite political. And so it was embraced by the black women leaders at that time, Dr. Hite, Jewel Jackson McCabe, all of them. Ms. Hite would say to me, Byllye, you work with the black women and I work with the Negro women.

JW:  Oh, interesting.

BA:  And so that’s what we did. And we accomplished a lot. And they also stood up for reproductive rights. And I remember having all of them declared which was really something big for them to do. Because while abortions were being gotten, nobody was talking about it.

JW:  Right?

BA:  Nobody was talking about it. Nobody was doing any political action. So when I look at how many – the proliferation of black women’s groups working on birth, working on reproductive justice, now, I feel like we did start a movement, a movement that’s very vibrant, you know.

JW:  Right, right. Talk about reproductive justice.

BA:  Reproductive justice. I think Sister Song Loretta knows, coined the terms, but the actual work for it started much earlier. See, all of those women were all involved in the Black Women’s Health Project, and they were all there, and we were sitting in the circles with women who were crying about their babies who they lost. They were crying about infant mortality, and they were crying about – while they weren’t talking so much about abortion, we had women who grew up in families where all of their, you know, their daddies were doctors, their mamas were doctors, affluent families, and they got all of their checkups and everything and not understanding why they were in the low birth weight clinic with all the poor women, you know.

So we understood that birth and infant mortality need to be a part of reproductive health. I tried with NARAL, with NOW talking to my white sisters about this, and they would not hear me at all. I said, we need to expand the definition of reproductive health to include infant mortality, maternal mortality. And they felt the only way we could win was to stay single issue and on abortion.

Judy, I don’t want to tell you how many, countless times I had this argument with people and they did not listen. They would not listen. So what Loretta and them did is they coined the term reproductive justice. And in coining that term, they understood that women needed the right to have a baby, the right to not have a baby, and the right to raise a baby in a healthy environment. And just those three things cover all bases. And my argument always was whenever I spoke, I talked about my work at the abortion clinic with passion. I talked about my work with birth with the same passion.

And actually I have been speaking at meetings where there have been right to lifers in the audience. And they’ve come up to me and said that was the most sensible thing that they ever heard. It disarms them because I support a woman who wants to have an abortion. I support a woman who wants to have a baby just as strongly as I do, one or the other. And I tried to let them know that these two things, they are on the same coin. And if we had more of that kind of approach. I think we wouldn’t. Well, I don’t know. I can’t say that. But we would have been in a different place.

JW:  I think that’s right.

BA:  We would have been in a different place. But people. See, the thing is what. What I understood doing Black Women’s Health, because black women used to say, well, what the white women are talking about isn’t relevant to me. It took me a while to get this. But the white women were doing…they were right. They were talking about things that were relevant to them in their lives. I cannot expect them to talk about what’s relevant to me in my life. I have to do that. And therein lies a different thing. That strategy never got that understanding and didn’t come early enough on.

Now, what we did at Black Women’s Health Project, we say we have to know what is important, what are the priorities to all of us. So I need to know that Fetal Alcohol Syndrome is important to Native Americans, so I can talk about that. I need to know what’s important to Latinos, so I can talk about that. That’s the way we be there for each other. And so white women need to know what we care about so they can say, now my black women care about so and so and so. So that we could show how each, how all of us are shaped by our worlds and by our environments. We don’t live in the same world.

JW:  Right.

BA:  We don’t live in the same world. We might be in the same town, but we live very different lives.

JW:  And it helps us all if we are united and working together for all those things.

BA:  Right, Right. We need to know. We need to know. But at that time, there was real separation. We couldn’t even use the word feminism at the ’83 conference because they said it was a white woman’s word. So we used empowerment, and it was the same thing we all felt. Barbara Smith, one of the top black women feminists, she delivered the whole process of empowerment speech. And it’s the same thing. This group of feminism, it’s never been the same thing. But we’re shaped by so much, by culture, by race, by all of these factors, and not to take all that into place.

So when Kimberly Crenshaw came along, she kind of looked at all this work and all of what we had done, and she gave it a name, intersectionality, which we didn’t have that word then. We were just doing the work. But they came along and named it. So that’s what I’m saying, that pulling the work out of people, understanding the flesh, and then putting a theory behind it is a different thing.

JW:  Well, it’s still thriving today, right?

BA:  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, the self help groups are not that we put together. We ran into trouble in two ways in our organization. Well, the foundations in the early days would give you general support, and general support meant you could do whatever you needed to do with your money. And so we were able to do a lot of things black women needed. We needed to pay their way. Some of the women could come to our meetings, but then they had to make sure that light bill was paid, that somebody was going to take care of the children, you know… and all of that.

But then the foundations changed and they wanted us to do deliverables and they wanted them to live in a year. And, you know, I mean, you know, that stuff didn’t fit our model at all. That was the first thing. The second thing that happened, and they also didn’t understand why we needed to have money to have support groups when AA and all these other people didn’t have to have money to do that. Groups with two different kinds of populations. We’re talking about the money to get there.

Yeah, money makes things happen, you know. And then the second thing that happened was there was a big split between me and Lily Allen. And Lily was the one who did our signature workshop, Black and Female: What is the reality? And that was the way we brought women together to talk about our lives. And she and I, it just got to be too much. I think in hindsight, I understand it.

At the time, I didn’t understand it because I started getting a lot of recognition, none of which I asked for, you know, MacArthur Award, all kinds of awards from this organization, from that organization. Nobody was recognizing, Lily. And I felt that in hindsight, it was a lot to bear. The sad thing is there was no one there to help us sort this out together. They just left us alone. And a lot of women said they felt like their parents were getting a divorce. When Lily and I broke up, that’s how tight we were and how tight the family was and all of that kind of thing.

So no one took us aside and said, let me sit you sisters down. Let’s talk this through. You know, I don’t know if Lily knew that I was uncomfortable getting all this stuff and her not getting anything. She never knew that. She probably thought I was glowing in it, you know. And I got all this money and I never asked for any of that. I never went looking for that. Paid myself $35,000 a year until I got to make off the award. You know, I hadn’t had no money in my life. I was glad I could sit down and pay all my bills at one time, you know what I’m saying? But that’s the reality, right? We never talk through, you know, so it’s just – it’s just one of those life things, you know?

JW:  But tell me about the organization now, though.

BA:  The organization now. One of the things we went through that was also hard was a name change. We changed the name from Black Women’s Health National Black Women’s Health Project to Black Women’s Health Imperative, which took me a long time to get to, and I was very upset about it. But when I learned we were not the same organization, it made sense. We went through some very lean years when we just barely survived. And then 11 years ago, we hired a woman named Linda Gold LeBlanc who had worked for the American Heart Association. American Cancer Association. Yeah, she worked for American Cancer Association.

And I tell you, Judy, we must have interviewed 15 people, none of which met any kind of qualifications. And she was the last person we interviewed. And she was the first time I’d ever seen Zoom. Oh, we interviewed her by this thing called Zoom. And we loved her. Through the Zoom, she asked the questions, she knew how to ask questions about our finances. She found where all the dead bodies were buried. She was the only one that, in addition to having the whole other part, talked about the money.

And she said, your organization is a non profit organization, but it’s also a business, and you have to attend to the business side. You do the work, but you got to make sure the business side is taken care of. At that time, I think we were just a little over a million and a half organization, or maybe no 2.2 million or something like that. Most of that came from CDC.

And she said we have to diversify our funding base. And that’s what started. So she started us on a new path. She was the first health person we had. All the rest of us were just consumer do-gooders. And she was an epidemiologist. And so she was about the science, about research, about changing the way we look at ourselves. So she came out with, oh, what was that thing she called this first document she came out with? I can’t remember the name of it.

But anyway, it positioned us to look so differently and for us to stop saying we were sick and tired of being sick and tired and that’s to claim being well and healthy and whole. And when she got ready to put this document out that I’m blanking on the name of it, she wanted black women models to have the photos. Well, all the stock photos didn’t do. They went out on the streets of Washington D.C. paid women down, the sign of release and took their pictures. And the pictures that we have were just so different, you know. Yeah. So we had not only a picture showing who we were, but the document we changed over to looking at it.

We are well, we are healthy, we are resilient. We have so much and so much, you know. And so she really changed us that way. The organization is doing very well now. We have over 30 employees all over the country. And because due to Zoom and all, everybody works from home. It’s virtual. She changed us over to that way before the pandemic because she opened up the beautiful office in DC. It was wonderful. These big, gorgeous murals and just very stylish. It was done real well and we weren’t there three or four years. She closed that thing down because she said on any given day there was only two or three people in the office. Oh yeah. And so the people. And so the board had voted that staff could work from home because folks were having to spend four hours of their day commuting to work.

JW:  I see.

BA:  And that was a real problem. So we did that. Before the pandemic. She’d already [done that].

JW:  Oh, really?

BA:  And so she got a place over in WeWorks over on the eastern market. And that was a while. And then we had the Atlanta board, they just decided to move the headquarters back to Atlanta. They got on there, they, I teased them, they stacked the board so they could move it back to Atlanta. And so we moved back to Atlanta. And so she’s been with us pretty much 12 years and now she’s leaving. Oh yeah. She built us up though, Judy. We have somewhere ranging between 12 million dollar budget and we have about 10, you know, quite millions in the bank. So we’re doing real well. We got enough money.

JW:  You’re doing okay.

BA:  We’re doing good. Well, very well. And. But she’s going to Community Catalyst.

JW:  Oh, okay.

BA:  That broke my heart. But yeah, she put us on the map in a different way. We focus a lot on research, a lot of policy. We have a rare disease coalition that’s huge. So much so it has its own ED. I didn’t realize. You don’t realize how many people have rare diseases that the first. The first web thing they had, like 30,000 people signed on. I thought, Jesus Christ. But it cuts across all – you know, it’s men, women, whites, blacks, everybody. We have a really vibrant My Sister’s Keeper program that deals with menstrual equity and focus on college campuses.

We have relationships with the NBA, the women’s whatever that is, the WNBA, they redid the film I did in 1987, on Becoming a Woman, mothers and daughters talking together. And this year, Lisa Cunningham, our communications person, they redid it, called My Period. And it’s already won, like, two awards and traveled all around the country doing that with Shirley Ralph is in it, and her daughter and another woman was real big on, like, Instagram, TikTok, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. All of that was funded by Procter and Gamble.

We have two versions of it. One that we can show to the mothers with the younger kids that doesn’t talk about all of the bad stuff that can happen. And there’s one that shows all the bad stuff that can happen, you know, like incest and all that. Mothers handle that part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So that’s good. We have a very good development team. I think we have, like, five people doing development. And so we really, Linda really left us in a really good place. And as she says, I’m not really leaving you, you know, but she put us where we can move on. And she said she can do some things with Community Catalyst that she couldn’t do with us.

But I’m having a hard time because I used to do some work with community cows, and they keep writing me, asking me, are you going to be in the partnership? And I’m going to answer them, I gotta do something to rebel. So I’ll get to them later on. Eventually, somebody will pick up the phone and talk to me, and I say, you stole Linda from me. What you expect me to do, you know?

JW:  But it happens.

BA:  It’s an interesting world. But as we start to look at EDs, one of the things I said to them, our search committee, you know, I know the rule is you go steal and find the best person you can, no matter what the hell they’re doing. But I’m saying we’re in a movement. If we got somebody who’s doing a good job where they are, let’s don’t bother that person right now, see if we can find somebody else. Only make that the last resort, not the first resort, you know what I’m saying? Yeah.

Because we have been suggesting some people who are really doing good work in areas that we need them, where we need them to be, you know, because, you know, the big white organizations, white people, you can get anybody. You know, we’re kind of limited, you know, we want to elevate and amplify black women’s leadership. And so it makes us have a special slot, you know, And I mean, we have a fully integrated board. We have white men, black women, blah, blah. We have all that kind of thing. But we want the face of the black women’s absolute territory to be a black woman.

JW:  Absolutely.

BA:  And so. So, you know, so that’s one of the principles that I’m fighting for, that we don’t steal somebody who’s doing a good job in a difficult place, you know, reproductive justice, reproductive health. Hard to work in these days, you know.

JW:  Well, there’s a lot of good women out there. You just gotta find them. Yeah, but they’re there. There’s no question about that.

BA:  Oh, they’re there. But now we’re in the midst of a search. But it’s a search doing what I call is a difficult time. We gotta have the right kind of person who’s going to shepherd us through these unknown waters. Yeah. And then time. Yeah. And then how are we going to exist being or something where the word, the truth of the words that are not acceptable. Black and women in our name, you know, we got to navigate these waters and figure out when to hold them and when to fold them. And, you know, it’s strategic. We have to be strategic. We can survive. So that’s what our challenge is now.

JW:  I believe this terrible time will pass, but it will take a lot of work. Let me ask you, like a kind of closing statement. Like, it’s clear that your early involvement with your consciousness raising, getting, say, wait. Women aren’t getting what the men are, has affected your whole life. That is really clear. Is there any sort of thoughts you have from how that beginning led you to where you are?

BA:  I have a deep faith in people. Even now, I feel that people still will come to their senses. I think that inherently we all are good, and we all deserve to be, you know, on the planet, you know, for a lot of reasons. So, I don’t know how that all will happen. But I refuse to give up on people. I refuse, even though there’s some of them I’m having a hard time not giving up on. But nevertheless, I feel that we, we have a lot of work to do in learning how to listen to each other and learn how to be there for each other, put our things to the side and really just listen so somehow, we can become united.

And you know, I go back to Martin Luther King’s speech about the power of love. And while it might sound kind of romantic and idealistic, at the end of the day, it is the thing that wins over that. All of us want to be loved. We all want to be respected; we all want to be seen. No matter who we are, no matter what we have, no matter what we don’t have, we just want to be seen and recognized.

And so, I hope that my biggest hope is that we keep the faith: that we don’t give up. And the thing I’m encouraging people to do is instead of feeling despair and feeling hopelessness, get involved in something local. Because when you get involved in something local, it’s something you can do, like please go and work helping people who are taking care of folks with foods insecurities. Go chop up some vegetable, go serve some plates.

Donate to organizations like ours and other organizations that are working, support the women who are working and being doulas and midwives and stuff like that, you know, get involved with people working around clean water, clean air, you know, these are the ways in which we can do something, you know. And I also know that all of this can lead to policy changes and also gets you out there and gets you meeting up with people and gets you seeing people and gets you not feeling hopeless alone, sitting down, looking at the television, looking at the news. Turn the news off, it’s all bad. You can just take my word for it. You don’t have to worry about it.

Anything real big is going to happen. Somebody will tell you but leave that stuff alone. In social media is a help for some, but it’s deadly for others because it just gives people permission to say whatever they want to say. And some of those things you want to say, did you really say that out loud? Did you really say that out loud? But I think getting out, being around people, working in places where you have power, run for school committees. We need the schools committee people badly because there is tax on books and there’s so much power there. And so that’s what I’m advocating. Get involved with local work.