Efia Nwangaza
Advocate for community self-determination.
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, PA, she 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.
She 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 also 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 accepted a scholarship to attend 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.
Efia Nwangaza is founder and Executive Director of the Afrikan-American Institute for Policy Studies and Planning, and a founding member and SC Coordinator for the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement for Self-Determination and Center for Self Determination. She founded and coordinates the WMXP-LP community-based radio and serves on the board of the Pacifica National Foundation, the nation’s oldest progressive radio network.
As the former co-chair of the Jericho Movement for US Political Prisoners, Nwangaza represented the US Human Rights Network’s Political Prisoner Working Group in observing the US’s first appearance for the UN Universal Periodic Review, in Geneva. She similarly represented the National Conference of Black Lawyers in Aristide-era Haiti, lectured at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women, NGO Forum, in Beijing, China, and helped draft the action plan for the UN World Conference Against Racism.
Among her other honors is serving as an Amnesty International USA Human Rights Defender; past member of the Board of Directors for the National Organization for Women (1990-1994), and service with the African-American Institute for Research and Empowerment (1994-1996), the South Carolina ACLU (1994-2000), and as a 2004 Green Party candidate for US Senate.
