ACTIVIST • WRITER • TEACHER
The arc of Mab Segrest’s work spans forty years and profound cultural shifts, the resolution of which still hangs in perilous balance.
In 1984, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote about Mab Segrest’s first book My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, proclaiming, “Mab Segrest is of a younger generation than I, another kind of family. But her essays speak to the whispers in my bones, and they both remind and instruct me. To understand this country, we need to know the American South from the perspective of those who, like Margaret Walker, like Mab Segrest, have lived real lives there all along.” In 2020, Segrest is back with a reissue of her classic anti-racist text Memoir of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South and an epic new volume, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry from Georgia’s Milledgeville Asylum. This in-depth asylum study is already being hailed as a landmark of scholarship, a “profoundly great book,” and a “gripping” and “compelling” and “monumental” narrative.
Mab Segrest was born in 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in Tuskegee where her family on both sides had lived for over a century. Steeped in its white version of southern history, she grew up into the crucible of the civil rights movement. In more ways than one, this movement arrived at her door and kept on knocking. Her childhood experience in Alabama’s apartheid culture shaped her future work as an activist, writer and scholar. As a young woman, she left Alabama for graduate school in North Carolina, carrying in her baggage legacies that included the destruction of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, attendance at a segregated private school, and the murder by a distant Segrest relative of civil rights worker Sammy Younge in her hometown. Segrest earned a PhD in English literature from Duke University in 1979. More importantly, in North Carolina and across the country, dynamic, multiracial feminist and lesbian movements gave her the context to unpack her bags and sort them through as writer, activist, teacher, and public intellectual.
My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture (Firebrand, 1985) collected her earliest essays from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In them, she located lesbian and queer work in the southern literary canon and in southern movements for social justice. Memoir of a Race Traitor (South End, 1994) reflected on the legacies of her white Alabama childhood that inspired her to work with others in the 1980s countering Klan and neo-Nazi movements in North Carolina that were then the most virulent in the nation. This book rapidly became a landmark work of white anti-racist activism. The New Press published a 25th anniversary edition in September 2019.
In the 1990s, Segrest worked for the World Council of Churches (WCC), an ecumenical organization based in Geneva, helping to map transformative justice movements across the globe. The essays of Born to Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice (2002) rose out of the WCC experience and extended the reach of her work globally in a late-twentieth century world experiencing rapid economic and political change.
Segrest returned to her first-love of teaching in 2002 and chaired the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at Connecticut College from 2002 until 2014, serving as the Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies.
In the 21st century, Segrest returned intellectually and creatively to the South for a deep dive into the archives of Georgia’s state mental hospital in Milledgeville, the largest in the world in the 1940s and 1950s and considered an emblem of American asylum psychiatry writ large. She was drawn there to understand the relationship between “the intimate and the historical,” as she had articulated in Race Traitor, and to answer the kind of question that had taken hold of her as an adolescent — how a culture that promoted slavery could decide who was and was not sane. After a fifteen-year grappling, the result is Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum (The New Press in April 2020).
Segrest has been a Mellon Distinguished Professor at Tulane, a Fellow at Emory’s James Weldon Johnson Institute, the Newell Visiting Scholar at Georgia College and State University, and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2018 after spending five years in Brooklyn, she returned to Durham where she now lives, writes, and organizes.