SFWAR’s 50th Anniversary Kitchen Table
Virtual Event| Kitchen Table Conversation
San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR) presents our second Kitchen Table conversation featuring: Barbara Smith, Loretta J. Ross, and Jamie Lee Evans.
If you have the capacity to, please make a donation after viewing the Kitchen Table.
Barbara Smith is a Black feminist pioneer, lesbian, activist, author, lecturer and publisher. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she and her twin sister, Beverly, began participating in civil rights protests in the 1960s. In 1974 Smith co-founded the Combahee River Collective in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 1977, she co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement, with Beverly, and Demita Frazier.
Smith taught her first class on Black women’s literature in 1973 at Emerson College and has taught at numerous colleges and universities. She co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher of books for women of color, in 1980.
In 2005, Smith was elected to the Common Council in Albany, New York. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize that same year. Smith’s essays, reviews and other work has been published in The New York Times, The Black Scholar, Ms., The Guardian, The Village Voice, and The Nation, among others. She is editor of the groundbreaking Black feminist anthology titled Home Girl and author of The Truth That Never Hurt: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom.
Loretta J. Ross is a Professor at Smith College in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender where she teaches courses on white supremacy, human rights, and Calling In the Call Out culture. Loretta also is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellow, Class of 2022, for her work as an advocate of Reproductive Justice and Human Rights.
Loretta was the National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective (2005-2012) and co-created the theory of Reproductive Justice. Loretta was National Co-Director of April 25, 2004, March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C., the largest protest march in U.S. history at that time. She founded the National Center for Human Rights Education (NCHRE) in Atlanta, Georgia, launched the Women of Color Program for the National Organization for Women (NOW), and was the national program director of the National Black Women’s Health Project. One of the first African American women to direct a rape crisis center, Loretta was the third Executive Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center.
Jamie Lee Evans began her work at San Francisco Women Against Rape in 1992. She is an award-winning youth leadership development advocate, and founder of the groundbreaking Foster Youth Museum, among other programs for current and former foster youth in California.
At SFWAR, Jamie created/co-developed STAND (Students Talking about Non-Violent Dating), a public-school peer led program for youth to combat sexual assault and relationship abuse. She also initiated Poets Against Rape, a fundraising poetry event that allowed SFWAR to purchase their first staff dental insurance, and is a co-founder of SFWAR’s South, East, West, Asian, & Pacific Islander Women’s Taskforce. Jamie also wrote curricula for a powerful program for young women called I’m Too Sexy for My School. This program was developed following the realization that the San Francisco public school system’s sex education program did not include the word clitoris or orgasm, but instead centered around the penis and ejaculation. This program empowered young women to better understand their bodies and encouraged consensual sexual experiences that did not include coercion or assault.
Jamie leads a cross hemisphere consulting business with non-profits and currently lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand with her partner. She is a newbie fruit and vegetable gardener.
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press Co-Founder Barbara Smith explains, “We chose our name because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other.”
It is SFWAR’s hope to capture that spark and the spirit of those earnest, real, heartfelt, kitchen table conversations – those talks that stay on the mind and essentially transform us – as SFWAR marks 50 years of critical work to support survivors and end rape.
This conversation is moderated by SFWAR Executive Director, Janelle L. White, PhD.