Mab Segrest at Regulator Bookshop
September 24, 2019
- 7:00 PM
Regulator Books
720 Ninth St,
Durham NC

The Regulator welcomes Mab Segrest for a reading and book signing in celebration of a reissue of her book, Memoir of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South. Mab will be joined in conversation by special guest Christina Davis McCoy. Free and open to the public.

Back in print after more than a decade, Memoir of a Race Traitor is a singular chronicle of life at the forefront of antiracist activism, with a new introduction and afterword by the author.

In 1994, Mab Segrest first explained how she “had become a woman haunted by the dead.” Against a backdrop of nine generations of her family’s history, Segrest explored her experiences in the 1980s as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent far-right movement in North Carolina. Memoir of a Race Traitor became a classic text of white antiracist practice. bell hooks called it a “courageous and daring [example of] the reality that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences.” Adrienne Rich wrote that it was “a unique document and thoroughly fascinating.” Juxtaposing childhood memories with contemporary events, Segrest described her journey into the heart of her culture, finally veering from its trajectory of violence toward hope and renewal.

“Mab Segrest’s book is extraordinary. It is a ‘political memoir’ but its language is poetic and its tone passionate. I started it with caution and finished it with awe and pleasure.” —Howard Zinn

Mab Segrest is professor emeritus of gender and women’s studies at Connecticut College and the author of Administrations of Lunacy and Memoir of a Race Traitor (both from The New Press). A longtime activist in social justice movements and a past fellow at the National Humanities Center, she lives in Durham.