Keep the South Dirty and Our Needles Clean

By Laura McTighe, Catherine Haywood, Deon Haywood, Danita Muse

Southern Cultures

THIRTY YEARS AGO, Women With A Vision (WWAV) was just an idea, thought up by a collective of Black women on a front porch in New Orleans, Louisiana. The year was 1989, and the so-called War on Drugs had already been raging for nearly two decades. Black women were increasingly being demonized as “welfare queens” in order to justify the total gutting of the social safety net, just as sensationalized stories about “crack babies” were used to criminalize Black mothers and users in a rapidly ballooning prison industrial complex. The impacts of these policies were lethal. Rates of HIV infection were peaking and the numbers of new HIV infections among Black people exceeded those of white people; those differences still hold today. By the early 1990s, HIV was the second leading cause of death for Black cisgender women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four. WWAV’s founders shared an intimate knowledge of how the twin epidemics of HIV and mass criminalization were decimating their communities. They also saw how funding and supportive services were systematically being denied to their people. And so, from their health and human service positions citywide, the WWAV foremothers did what Black women always do: they set their hands to building what their community needed.

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