Mandy Carter

Mandy Carter is an American black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activist. Career Carter is a former executive director and one of the six co-founders of the North Carolina-based Southerners On New Ground (SONG). Founded at the 1993 National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's (NGLTF) Creating Change Conference in Durham, North Carolina, SONG integrates work against homophobia into freedom struggles in the South. Carter served as campaign manager for North Carolina's Senate Vote '90 and Mobilization '96 political action committees. She served again as campaign manager for Florida Vote/Equal Voice based in Miami - a 2000 non-partisan, statewide voter empowerment campaign, which was initiated by the African-American Ministers Leadership Council of the People, People for the American Way Foundation, and the Florida NAACP - which resulted in one of Florida's largest black voter turn out's ever. Additionally, Carter was a four-year (1996-2000) North Carolina Member-At-Large of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and a member of both the DNC Gay and Lesbian Caucus and the DNC Black Caucus. She was a delegate at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, as well as one of the four co-chairs for the daily meeting of the DNC Gay and Lesbian Caucus. Together with Matt Foreman, then executive director of NGLTF, Carter was one of the two gay and lesbian people to speak at the 2003 Lincoln Memorial Rally for the 40th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. SONG and NGLTF had been asked by the 40th Anniversary Steering Committee, which included Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King III, to mobilize LGBT participation at the rally. They spoke at the event in honor of Bayard Rustin, the gay black activist who coordinated the 1963 march.