About Efa
Efia Nwangaza is a lifelong civil/human rights activist and freedom fighter who first worked for the liberation of African/Black people as a child in her Garveyite parents’ apostolic faith church, in her birthplace of Norfolk, Virginia.
At age 13, she served as secretary of the Norfolk Branch of the NAACP Youth and College Chapter. Later in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she fought police violence, worked in the successful NAACP-led campaign to desegregate Girard College, “a school for poor white, male orphans,” which then sat in the heart of Black North Philadelphia.
Efia and her family helped raise money and collect clothes and food to send South for those evicted and persecuted for attempting to register to vote. She joined forces with returning SNCC volunteers to found the Northern Student Movement (NSM) Freedom Library Day School; featured in the Xerox-sponsored Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed series.
Anxious to go into the heat of battle, Efia Nwangaza accepted a scholarship and attended Spelman College. She worked at the national SNCC office and took on campus organizing for the successful Julian Bond Special Election Campaign Committee/SNCC-Atlanta Project.
The Atlanta Project, SNCC’s first attempt at urban organizing, began raising concerns of a maturing movement and demands of the day—self-determination and SNCC’s position on the US War on Vietnam (which it did before King and SCLC), Palestine, and the role of whites in the community and organization. Atlanta Project position papers became the theoretical underpinnings for SNCC programming and advancement of the modern “black power” call popularized by Kwame Ture (FKA Stokely Carmichael).
Armed with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and Visual Arts from Spelman College, Temple University’s first Master of Arts degree in Women’s History (African-African American), and Golden Gate University School of Law Juris Doctorate, she went to Greenville, South Carolina, where she is known as a freedom fighter, legal precedent setter, and the recipient of many awards.
Efia Nwangaza is the founder and Executive Director of the Afrikan-American Institute for Policy Studies and Planning and founding member and SC Coordinator for the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement for Self-Determination and Center for Self Determination. She is the founder/coordinator of the WMXP-LP community-based radio and a board member of the Pacifica National Foundation, the nation’s oldest progressive radio network.
Efia is the former co-chair of the Jericho Movement for U.S. Political Prisoners, represented the U.S. Human Rights Network’s Political Prisoner Working Group in observing the U.S.’s first appearance for the UN Universal Periodic Review, in Geneva. She represented the National Conference of Black Lawyers in Aristide-era Haiti, lectured at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, NGO Forum, Beijing, China, and helped draft the action plan for the UN World Conference Against Racism.
She is an Amnesty International USA Human Rights Defender, a past member of the national Board of Directors for the National Organization for Women (1990-1994), which launched the Every Woman NOW Campaign for President to force NOW to address internal white supremacy and elitism, African-American Institute for Research and Empowerment (1994-1996), South Carolina ACLU (1994-2000), and she was a 2004 Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate in memoriam and education of voting rights/citizenship work and ethics of Fannie Lou Hamer, Mojeska Simpkins, and Septima Clark.
