Minnie Bruce Pratt, an Alabama native, women’s liberation and LGBTQ activist, poet and educator, died Sunday surrounded by friends and family in Syracuse, New York, at the age of 76.
Her death comes after her sons announced in June that she had been diagnosed with a serious health condition.
Pratt was a prolific advocate and writer throughout her life. She pushed the boundaries of feminist teaching and thinking. She wrote poems and essays about race, class, gender and sexuality, which received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Library Association, the Poetry Society of America, Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle.
In 2022, she wrote for AL.com that she and other lesbian, transgender and gender-nonconforming people “have always been in Alabama.”
Pratt was born in Selma and graduated from Bibb County High School. She attended the University of Alabama just one year after George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door,” according to her website. She has degrees from Tuscaloosa and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Later in life, she split her time between Syracuse and Centerville.
“I still consider Alabama my home,” Pratt said in a recent interview with Reckon News. “I’m really unhappy that people don’t know I’m from Alabama. I want them to know I’m from Alabama. I’m proud of it. I’m proud of the resistant traditions of Alabama, resistance to oppression that are embedded in the soil there.”
The Invisible Histories Project, an organization that researches Southern history, called her “a phenomenal poet, a fierce femme lesbian, a fighter for the working class and marginalized, and an unapologetically Southern woman.”
“She was a Bama girl,” Maigen Sullivan, cofounder of the Invisible Histories Project and friend of Pratt, said. “She never let it go, regardless of how long she spent in New York or anywhere else. She was always deeply, deeply Southern, very passionate about her hometown and the…
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