Heather Booth

Heather Booth (born December 15, 1945) is an American civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist who has been involved in activism for progressive causes.

During her student years, she was active in both the civil rights movement and feminist causes.

Since then she has had a career involving feminism, community organization, and progressive politics.

Booth was born in a military hospital in Brookhaven, Mississippi, on December 15, 1945, during a period in which her father was serving as an Army doctor.

Soon after her birth, her family moved to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where she received her elementary education in P.S. 200 in the Bath Beach neighborhood.

Later, she attended high school in Long Island's North Shore after her family had moved to that upscale area.

She has two brothers, David and Jonathan.

Booth said that she grew up in a warm, loving, and supportive family, and that her parents taught her the importance of recognizing injustice and acting to correct it.

They were observant Jews, belonging to a liberal synagogue, who showed by example the importance of treating others with decency and respect.

From her Jewish upbringing, Booth learned to take on responsibility for building a society that reflected these goals.

In 1960, she joined CORE in a protest against the segregationist policies of the Woolworth's chain.

After her family had moved to Long Island, Booth's mother, using Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, made her aware of the growing discontent of prosperous suburban housewives with the conventionally narrow lives they led.

In high school, Booth joined a sorority and the cheerleading team but left both of them when she came to believe that their members were discriminating against students who did not lead their privileged lives.

She began leafleting against the death penalty.

Upon graduating from high school in 1963, she spent the summer traveling in Israel and that fall enrolled as a freshman at the University of Chicago.

She chose that school in part because it had no sororities and deemphasized sports.

In college, she quickly immersed herself in political activism.

In 1963, soon after enrolling in college, she became head of a group, called Friends of SNCC, that was organized on campus to support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

She also became student liaison to the Chicago Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), which was then protesting school segregation in the city.

As CCCO liaison, she helped coordinate Freedom Schools in the Chicago's South Side.

In 1964, Booth joined the Freedom Summer project in which volunteers from Northern and Western colleges and universities worked to register black voters and set up freedom schools and libraries in Mississippi.

She was arrested for the first time while she was carrying a sign saying "Freedom Now!"

during a peaceful demonstration in Shaw, Mississippi.

He helped organize the 1965 March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam, subsequently became president of the Citizen Action Program in Chicago (a group formed in 1969 by members of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation), and was later a director of the Midwest Academy.

In 1967, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in social sciences, then in 1970, a Master of Arts degree in educational psychology, both from the University of Chicago.

She and Paul Booth married in July 1967, shortly after she graduated from college.

They had met at a sit-in protesting the University of Chicago's cooperation with the policies of the U.S. Selective Service System whose local boards were then drafting men to serve in the Vietnam War.

Later that year, she was arrested during a protest at the U.S. Army induction center in Chicago.

The couple had two sons, Eugene Victor Booth (born in 1968) and Daniel Garrison Booth (born in 1969).

One of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Paul Booth was national secretary of the organization when they met.

Beginning in the 1980s, he held a series of positions within the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union.

In a 1985 interview, Booth said "I remember having the feeling that you don't do this to people."

While in high school, she joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to help protest Woolworth's lunch counter discrimination in the South.

In an interview conducted in 1989, she said that the experience reinforced her commitment to the civil rights movement.

Confronted by the violent resistance of white Mississippians, she feared for her own life, but also realized that she could leave whenever she wished and was awed by the extraordinary heroism of the black residents with whom she worked.

In 2017, by then executive assistant to the union's president, he retired, continuing his political engagement by supporting Heather Booth in her work.

He died January 17, 2018, from complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

Booth's opposition to racial discrimination began when she was still in elementary school.

She defended an African-American fellow student who was being attacked for allegedly stealing another student's lunch money.

It was soon discovered that the girl who made the accusation had put the money in her shoe and forgotten it.