Mab Segrest

The Regulator celebrates the reissue of white anti-racist activist and professor Mag Segrest’s Lambda Literary Award-winning 1994 autobiography, Memoirs of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South. The reprint, published by The New Press, includes an updated introduction and afterword to reflect the white nationalism of the Trump era. In Memoirs of a Race Traitor, Segrest covers a wide ground, ranging from her racialized Alabama childhood to the 1979 Greensboro Massacre and organizing to expel the Klan from North Carolina. Segrest, a lesbian, ties her activism to coming out and finding community with “the ‘political dykes’ in Durham,” and in one timeless queer aside, Segrest recounts her friends insisting that personal challenges in her late twenties could be explained by her astrological “Saturn Cycle.” Following the reading, Christina Davis-McCoy, a longtime North Carolina community organizer and former executive director for the North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, joins Segrest in conversation.