Hi, I’m Jim Willshier, the Chief Public Affairs Officer at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. Welcome to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast.

To celebrate and highlight stories of people who advanced the anti-sexual violence movement, particularly Black women, we are sharing a series of shorter episodes so you can learn all about the people and events that contributed to our movement.

During today’s episode we’re going to learn about Loretta Ross, a powerful advocate that is an award-winning, nationally recognized expert on racial justice, women’s rights, reproductive justice, and human rights.  Her story also contains descriptions of racial and sexual violence so we ask that you please take care of yourself while listening.

Loretta is the sixth of eight children in her family from a small town in Texas and clearly a rising star student as she earned a scholarship to Harvard.  She is also a rape survivor and a survivor of sterilization abuse.  She is a model for how to survive and thrive despite the traumas she faced along with many other low-income Black women. Her work emphasizes the intersectionality of social justice and how intersectionality can fuel transformation.  

In 1964, when Loretta was at the age of 11, she became a survivor of sexual assault when  she was beaten and raped by a stranger.  A short time later in 1968 she was raped again at the age of 15 by her distant cousin and became pregnant.  At this time, abortion was not a safe option. Rather than place the child for adoption, she decided to keep her son, Howard, and forfeited her scholarship to Radcliffe College of Harvard.

In 1976, when Ross was 23, she experienced sterilization abuse with the Dalkon Shield.  This was a type of intrauterine device, commonly referred to as an IUD, that was marketed despite being found to be defective.  The Dalkon Shield caused major negative health threats to hundreds of thousands of women, and inflicted harm particularly on African American women and low income communities.  Loretta suffered a hysterectomy due to an infection she received as a result of  he Dalkon Shield and was among the first Black women  to win suit against the manufacturer, A.H. Robins.  This experience became an inflection point in her life to begin her passion to advocate for reproductive justice and racial politics.

During this time period, Loretta became the third executive director for the D.C. Rape Crisis Center -- one of the first centers in the nation -- but even more notable for being the first rape crisis center primarily run by and dedicated to providing resources for women of color.  She also worked with a group of Black and minority activists to coin the term “women of color” at the National Women’s Conference as a unifying term to address political and social issues in 1977.

By 1980, a close friend and political ally of Loretta's -- Yolanda Ward -- was mysteriously shot and killed in the midst of a street robbery.  Loretta saw this as a political assassination, which further encouraged her to use her voice as an advocate.  This same year, she guided others from the D.C. Rape Crisis Center to help organize the First National Conference on Third World Women and Violence in D.C.  This was the first conference that brought together women from different racial backgrounds, unifying the participants towards achieving the goal of cultivating a new, holistic network for men and women of color, to advocate for anti-violence activism.
 
Five years later, the National Organization for Women, also known as NOW, hired Ross as the director of the Women of Color Programs to both improve participation of women of color, and, as a response to the criticism by women of color that expressed mainstream feminist organizations were ignoring issues of race and class.

In her new role, Loretta organized women of color delegations for the pro-choice marches NOW sponsored in 1986 and 1989. She also organized the first national conference on Women of Color and Reproductive Rights in 1987.

Ross met another milestone in 1997 she worked with Luz Rodriguez and 14 others to co-found SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, which aims to build an effective network between individuals advocating improvements within institutional policies that impact the reproductive lives of marginalized communities.  She served as the National Coordinator for SisterSong from 2005 to 2012.  In her time at SisterSong, Loretta was among the first Black women to again coin another term:  “reproductive justice,” which frames this important issue using a social justice framework.

As she continues her advocacy for reproductive justice, Loretta has now co-written three books on this issue  -- Undivided Rights:  Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice, which also won an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavas Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights; Reproductive Justice:  An Introduction; and Radical Reproductive Justice:  Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique.

Loretta will author yet another book, Calling in the Calling Out Culture which will be available later this year.  

Loretta is also a visiting associate professor at Smith College in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, where she teaches courses on white supremacy, race and culture in America, human rights, and calling in the calling out culture. She also is teaching online courses - you can sign up on her website at lorettajross.com. 

Loretta continues reproductive justice advocacy as a nationally-recognized trainer on using the transformative power of Reproductive Justice to build a human rights movement that includes everyone.  Loretta Ross is truly an inspiring person and leads us all by example to, quote, “tell your truth and get amazing results and responses.”
 
Thanks for listening to this episode of History You Should Know, part of the PA Centered Podcast. To learn more about Loretta Ross, check out the resources shared in the episode description and also listen to Episode 2 of our podcast series for a one-on-one interview with her. 

To learn more about the history of the anti-sexual violence movement, check out PCAR’s free History and Philosophy eLearning course at campus.nsvrc.org.