By Lynn Burnett
Featured image: Heather Booth playing guitar for Fannie Lou Hamer and others during the Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi, 1964.
Born into a progressive New York Jewish community at the end of World War II, Heather Booth was raised to understand the importance of fighting injustice. In 1964 she headed south to participate in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, where she helped organize the freedom schools and voter registration drives.
At the age of 18 she thus stepped into a world of racial violence, where Black people took risks on a daily basis to organize for their freedom. The Black family hosting her was making themselves a target by doing so… an experience that led Heather to feel her privilege deep in her bones. Heather also saw that women were in many ways the backbone of the movement, but that their efforts often remained invisible. The civil rights movement thus accelerated her already growing feminist consciousness.
During the Freedom Summer, Booth met a young woman who had become suicidal due to an unwanted pregnancy. After returning to her campus in the North, Booth founded the Jane Collective, a clandestine student-run organization that connected women to doctors who were committed to the right to a safe abortion. She also joined the Students for a Democratic Society, where she led women in walk-outs when the men proved unable to hear their voices, and organized women’s groups on campus to tackle the misogyny that ran rampant in the University system.
Heather Booth also continued her racial justice efforts by leading the local Friends of SNCC chapter, traveling and raising funds in the North for SNCC’s efforts. When SNCC became an all-Black organization in the late 60s, Booth threw her energy more fully into women’s liberation and antiwar organizing.
Over the decades, Heather Booth grew into one of the nation’s leading organizers of progressive politics, creating numerous organizations and training programs. In 2000, SNCC leader Julian Bond hired her to lead the voter registration drive for the NAACP, which led to a strong Black turnout in the 2000 elections. Most recently, she played a key role in the Biden/Harris get out the vote effort.
Additional Resources
Documentary: Heather Booth: Changing the World.
Heather Booth:
- 2012 interview.
- Memories From Shaw, Especially of the Hawkins Family.
- The Election of 2016: Terrifying result, Traumatic time.
- 2019 interview with Heather Booth. (See video.)
- 2022 interview with Heather Booth: “We Still Can Control the Future”: The Jane Collective Founder on Coping With a Post-Roe v. Wade Reality.
Civil Rights Movement Veterans: Bio.
Jewish Women’s Archive: bio.
Just Seeds: Interview with Heather Booth of the Jane Abortion Service.
Veteran Feminists of America bio.
Wikipedia bio.