Linda Burnham is a co-founder and former executive director of the Women of Color Resource Center. The Women of Color Resource Center is a community-based organization that links activists with scholars and provides information and analysis on the social and political issues that most affect women of color. Burnham found the center to provide a strong institutional base for an agenda that recognizes the crucial interconnections between anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic organizing.
Burnham has worked for decades as an activist and writer focused on women’s rights and racial equality. She was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance, an organization that grew out of a women’s caucus in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and that, early on, challenged the women’s movement to incorporate issues of race and class into the feminist agenda. Burnham has participated in conferences and meetings with women in Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Cuba, returning with insights about the global factors that affect women’s status and the unique ways in which women organize to create change in their communities.
Burnham has written extensively on topics of Black politics and women’s rights. She was the first editor of Race File, a publication that compiles and analyzes articles highlighting key trends in communities of color. Currently Burnham is an editor of Crossroads, a magazine that promotes dialogue and debate on the left side of the political spectrum. The numerous articles she’s published include: “Has Poverty Been Feminized in Black America,” “Race and Gender: Analogous or Not,” “A Sledgehammer Message from L.A.,” and “Recruiting for the FBI: Reflections on The Bell Curve.”
In 1985 Burnham led a delegation to the United Nations 3rd World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya and organized women of color activists to participate in the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, in September 1995.
