In this episode of The Porch, we sat down with kai lumumba barrow and Serena Sebring, two forever SONG members and community organizers, to discuss ways to create safer environments for our people as authoritarianism ramps up in the United States. With years of activism championing prison abolition and Black freedom movements, these two brilliant organizers discussed what security looks like when it is rooted in Black feminist praxis, queer liberation and collaborative practice. Kai and Serena remind us of the ways our communities have always worked to keep each other safer like making sure our kids are home before the streetlights turn on, to secret codes to warn of danger, or simply crewing up for Souls to Polls. This episode invites us all to make safety plans, build relationships with our neighbors and be aware of the ways technology has become a surveillance tool for our enemies.

Bios

kai lumumba barrow

For over 40 years kai lumumba barrow has worked with numerous organizations on campaigns and projects to stop jail expansion; confront police violence; free political prisoners, and experiment with abolitionist models for shrinking carceral logics. A self-taught artist, barrow is interested in the praxis of radical imagination, experimenting with abolition as an aesthetic vernacular. Her sprawling paintings, multimedia collages, environmental installations, and found object sculptures incorporate images, materials, sites and ideas that perform queer, Black feminist theory.

Serena Sebring

Serena Sebring, Executive Director, is a queer Black feminist, mother, organizer, and educator. She brings leadership and vision to the coalition, builds the capacity of a growing statewide progressive ecosystem, and coordinates resources and staff capacity in their service. Since 2005, she has woven and nurtured relationships across the state with organizers, artists, policy-makers, workers, parents, and caregivers on front porches, in church basements and city council rooms, at the statehouse, and in the streets.

www.blueprintnc.org

Resources

Slam Hunter College

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Assata Shakur

Critical Resistance

Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.

https://www.byp100.org/

Souls to the Polls

Equality NC,

COINTELPRO

Phone tree

Maroonage

Cuss and Discuss

Study Questions

1. From Safety to “Being Safer”

How does adopting a “being safer” mindset change the way you design campaigns, actions, and organizational structures?

2. Strategic Risk Assessment

What are the highest-priority risks in your current organizing context—and what concrete protocols do you have (or need) to address them?

3. Demilitarizing Movement Security

What would it look like to “queer” or demilitarize our security culture while still taking threats seriously?

4. Surveillance & Communication

What communication practices should we shift to reduce vulnerability?

5. Relationship as Infrastructure

How are you investing in relationship-building (neighbors, families, cross-movement allies), and how could those relationships function as real safety infrastructure in a crisis?

In this episode of the Porch, Co-Directors Jade Brooks and Carlin Rushing tell the story of how they found Southerners on New Ground (SONG) and their early impressions. Both open the conversation answering a familiar question in SONG circles: “Who are your people and who are you accountable to?” Sharing their outlook on the current moment in the United States and the importance of Southern organizing, Carlin and Jade talk about SONG’s work to convene our folks, engage with our neighbors for disaster planning, and embody the best of this 32-year-old legacy organization. Get the low down on the Won’t You Be My Gaybor campaign, The CookOut, and this year’s Queer South Revival. __________________________________________________________

Bios

Jade Brooks Co-Director Jade Brooks joined SONG in 2009, when she first moved to the South. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Jade is a white gay person and comes from a lineage of Jews, Quakers, single moms, hippie types, and deep dykes. Over the past 15 years, she has helped to build out SONG’s campaign organizing muscle. She also led the creation of SONG Power (our sister electoral organizing shop). She is passionate about community organizing that builds people’s power. Jade also has experience drawn from organizing in the Palestinian Liberation Movement as an anti-Zionist, diasporic Jew & within movements to build progressive electoral infrastructure. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her son & her pup.

Carlin Rushing Co-Director Carlin Rushing joined SONG as a member in 2013 and first joined the staff as Regional Membership Lead in 2018. At her core, Carlin values family and faith and believes that liberation in our lifetime is possible. Unapologetically Black and Southern, Carlin is a lover of the Black women’s literary tradition, all things percussion and rural North Carolina sunsets.

Study/Reflection Questions 1. What new practical skill do you want to learn? 2. Are you in your dignity? 3. How is your full-throated love practice going? 4. How is your listening going, and to whom…to folk you don’t know or others?

Recources

The Sound of the Genuine (Baccalaureate ceremony) (Spelman College), 1980 May 4 · The Howard Thurman Digital Archive https://thurman.pitts.emory.edu/items/show/838

Southerners on New Ground, Strategic Almanac https://southernersonnewground.org/our-work/strategic-almanac/

The Street by Ann Petry https://archive.org/details/street00annp

The Color Purple by Alice Walker https://archive.org/stream/the-color-purple-alice-walker/the-color-purple-alice-walker_djvu.txt

Beloved by Toni Morrison https://archive.org/details/beloved0000morr/page/8/mode/2up

The Full Imago Dialogue Process https://higherthoughtinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Full-Dialogue-Process-3-2-2038-1.pdf

Continuing our Creating Change series, the Porch sat down with narrative activists Sam Master and Diamond Stylz to discuss queer and trans liberation in our lifetime. The two talk about their southern roots and the legacy of organizing passed down by women in their families, being a femme as a politic, as well as surviving American racial and gender apartheid. Sam and Diamond also call on marginalized people’s history of resilience as an antidote to this moment of learned helplessness and explore “igniting the kindred” as a recipe for our collective survival.

Join your guest hosts, Kendra R. Johnson and Rolynné Anderson, on the Porch with Southerners on New Ground.

This is the inaugural edition of the Porch, a new podcast hosted by Southerners on New Ground. At Creating Change 2025, we sat down with trans elder and lifelong activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Shelby Chestnut, Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center. The two discuss the unfolding hellscape in the United States since 48 took office and offer insights into the legal landscape, the fight ahead and how we win. The discussion highlights what we all know: while this moment of rising authoritarianism is different, we’ve been here before as a community and we got us.

Find out more about Miss Major, Shelby, and their organizations below:

Miss Major is a Black, transgender activist who has fought for over fifty years for her trans/gender nonconforming community. She is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a survivor of Dannemora Prison and Bellevue Hospital’s “queen tank.” Her global legacy of activism is rooted in her own experiences, and she continues her work to uplift transgender women of color, particularly those who have survived incarceration and police brutality. Miss Major’s fierce commitment and intersectional approach to justice brought her to care directly for people with HIV/AIDS in New York in the early 1980s, and later to drive San Francisco’s first mobile needle exchange. As director of the TGI Justice Project, she’d return to prisons as a mentor to her ‘gurls’ inside. She now runs House of GG-TILIFI, a retreat center for trans and gender nonconforming leaders from the Southern U.S., in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her recent creative projects include executive producing the series Trans in Trumpland (now streaming everywhere), and Miss Major Speaks, a book on her life’s activism co-authored with Toshio Meronek (host of the podcast Sad Francisco), is out now from Verso Books. To learn about the House of GGs and donate click here.

Check out Major!, the movie, a documentary about her life here.

Major references a scene in the 1962 movie Gypsy, starring Natalie Wood.

Shelby Chestnut (they/he) is the executive director of Transgender Law Center, the largest national trans-led organization advocating for a world in which all people are free to define themselves and their futures. Chestnut has over 20 years of community organizing, policy advocacy, and leadership experience in the LGBTQ and anti-violence movements. They previously served for five years as TLC’s Director of Policy and Programs.

Chestnut has spearheaded leadership development and social change within and for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities throughout their career. While Director of Community Organizing and Public Advocacy at the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP) Chestnut was a part of steering committees and coalitions working on the passage and implementation of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and landmark New York City police reform legislation, the Right to Know Act (RTKA).They are a graduate of Antioch College and currently the chair of the Board of Trustees.

Chestnut is the first Native trans executive director of TLC and one of the first Native trans leaders to head a national LGBT organization.

To learn more about the Transgender Law Center, click here.

The Trans Agenda for Liberation is here: transgenderlawcenter.org/trans-agenda…-liberation/