workingclasshistory:

On this day, 18 February 1934, Audre Lorde, US writer and daughter of Caribbean emigrants, was born. Lorde described herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. She was also a factory worker, social worker, X-ray technician, artisan, writer, civil rights activist, communist and much more. In the 1960s, she graduated from Columbia University and began to participate in the feminist, LGBT+ and civil rights movement of the time, where she contested the class discrimination and racism existing in the feminist movement, which was generally focused around the experiences of white women. Lorde identified the wide and varied experiences of women in matters of class, race, age, sex and even health, which is often referred to today as “intersectionality”, noting that “there is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives”. In 1980, together with Cherríe Moraga and Barbara Smith, she founded the first publisher for women of colour in the US. Later, she developed an important work of revolutionary activism in the Afro-German movement, when she taught at the Free University of Berlin.
She passed away in 1992 after a long struggle with breast and liver cancer.
More info, sources and map on our Stories web app: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8968/audre-lorde-born https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2213145498870588/?type=3