The Suzanne Pharr papers contain materials that document her professional life from 1958-2021. The collection includes writings, speeches, correspondence, interviews, workshops, published books, book drafts and production materials, articles related to her research, publicity about her work, and journals documenting her daily work. Materials document her work with the following organizations: Women's Project (Little Rock, Ark.), Southern Movement Assembly, The Blue Mountain Working Group, The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Southerners on New Ground, Highlander Research and Education Center, The National Council of Elders, the Institute for Democratic Renewal, and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV). There is an almost complete run of the Transformation newsletter (Little Rock, Ark.) and three issues of the Distaff newsletter (New Orleans, La.), both of which contain Pharr's essays. There are three flyers made by the Little Rock political activist Robert 'Say' McIntosh in the Women's Project materials. Collection also includes audio and visual documentation of Pharr's speeches, presentations, interviews, and photographs. There are electronic records documenting Pharr's writing process, chiefly from the 1990s.
Suzanne Pharr is a southern queer feminist, anti-racist activist, organizer, political strategist, author, and public intellectual. Pharr was born in 1939 and raised in Lawrenceville, Georgia. She graduated from the Georgia State College for women in 1961 and earned a master's degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1964. She began her career teaching English, but changed her focus to social justice organizing later in the 1960s. She was an editor of the New Orleans feminist periodical Distaff, a co-founder of the first domestic violence shelter in Arkansas, a founder of the Women's Project in Little Rock, Arkansas, a director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, and a founder of Southerners on New Ground. Pharr also worked in a leadership capacity for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Her work as a political organizer includes the Jesse Jackson campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Rural Organizing Project, and Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas. She has been a frequently invited speaker and workshop facilitator. Pharr's publications include many essays and articles, particularly for Transformation published by the Women's Project in Little Rock. She has written three books, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism (1988) and In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation (1996), and Transformation: Toward a People's Democracy (2021). Her accolades include the Harvey Milk Award, The Jeannette Rankin Award, the Ms. Foundation's Gloria Steinem Award, and the Stonewall Award for National Gay and Lesbian Leadership.
Biographical information adapted from the Encyclopedia of Arkansas: https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/suzanne-pharr-13822/ (accessed 17 February 2022)
