Feature

Audre Lorde: The Warrior Poet of Justice and Equity

By Carlota Morgado de Almeida | November 19, 2024

Courtesy photo

Audre Lorde

This is the first of six Icon Series as we lead up to the Thanksgiving holiday.

Icons Essays

By Carlota Morgado de Almeida

In our Icon Series, we reflect upon individuals who have laid the foundation for our journey toward justice and equity. The New Hampshire Center for Justice & Equity celebrates the extraordinary life of Audre Lorde.

About Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde was a self-described ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ whose work and activism challenged racism, sexism, homophobia, and class oppression. She used her writing to explore the intersections of her identities and to call for justice and equity. Lorde’s poetry became a powerful tool for resistance, and her essays critiqued the failure of mainstream feminism to address race and class. Lorde believed in the power of naming one’s experiences and emphasized solidarity among marginalized communities. Her legacy continues to inspire intersectional approaches to social justice.

Experiences Shaping the Warrior Poet

Born on February 18, 1934, in New York City to immigrants from Grenada, and the youngest of three sisters, Lorde grew up navigating the challenges of race, gender, and class in America. From an early age, she learned how her multiple identities made her an ‘outsider.’ However, Lorde rejected the idea that we must choose between our identities and believed people from different walks of life became stronger together.

Lorde’s early experiences with feelings of marginalization became a central theme in her work. She started writing poetry around the age of 12 while attending a Catholic school in Manhattan and achieved her first professional publication in Seventeen magazine after her school’s literary journal rejected it for being inappropriate. In 1954, Lorde studied at the National University of Mexico in Cuernavaca for a year, where she solidified her identity as a lesbian and a poet. She earned her BA from Hunter College in 1959 and worked as a librarian in New York public schools during the 1960s. Lorde had two children with her husband, Edwin Rollins, a white, gay man before they divorced in 1970.

In 1972, Lorde began teaching as a poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where her experiences as a Black, queer woman in white academia profoundly shaped her thinking. There, she also met her lifelong partner, Frances Clayton.

Poetry as Resistance and Healing

As a feminist and civil rights activist, Lorde’s writing and poetry were a powerful form of political engagement, resistance, and healing, as she saw the act of naming one’s experiences as an essential step toward dismantling systems of oppression. One of Lorde’s most powerful poems, Power, was born out of rage when a police officer was acquitted after killing a ten-year-old Black child.

Additionally, Lorde’s work embodied intersectionality, even though the term would not be coined until 1989 by law professor and activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Her belief that oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation, class, age, and ability are deeply interconnected helped shape the modern understanding of identity politics.

Her essay The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, remains a valuable critique of mainstream feminism, commonly known as white feminism. Lorde pushed the movement to be more inclusive, highlighting the need to embrace the differences among women rather than downplay them. She urged white feminists to acknowledge race, class, and sexuality as crucial dimensions of women’s experiences. Her 1978 collection The Black Unicorn is also particularly celebrated for its exploration of the complexities of Black womanhood and the celebration of African heritage and mythology.

As a public intellectual, Lorde spoke truth to power and viewed silence as an enabler of oppression. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977, she felt that the support narratives for patients didn’t extend to women of color facing similar struggles and wrote to fill the gap. Her Cancer Journals from 1980 are a testament to her lived experience, pain, and resilience, winning the American Library Association’s Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award.

A Legacy of Empowerment

Throughout her career, Audre Lorde received numerous accolades, including the 1990 Bill Whitehead Memorial Award and the 1991 Walt Whitman Citation of Merit, which named her the Poet Laureate of New York State from 1991 to 1992. Her 1988 collection of prose, A Burst of Light, won the National Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Lorde was also awarded honorary doctorates from Hunter College, Oberlin College, and Haverford College. In 2001, the Publishing Triangle established the Audre Lorde Award to honor outstanding works of lesbian poetry. In 2020, she was posthumously inducted into the American Poets Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Lorde’s life was one of constant resistance against societal norms and oppressive structures. But it was also a life of empowerment. She emphasized the need for community and solidarity among marginalized groups. Together with Cherríe Moraga and Barbara Smith, Lorde co-founded ‘Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press’ in 1981 to provide a platform for Black feminists and their work.

At its core, Lorde’s legacy is about the radical belief in the power of the individual to effect change. Her work created space for Black women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other historically oppressed people to see themselves as powerful agents of change. We give thanks to her for documenting this philosophy, as it continues to guide our work at the New Hampshire Center for Justice & Equity, where we recognize that true equity can only be achieved when every voice is heard, and every identity is honored.

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