Graves Bingham Higher Education 1

Bingham Graves grew up in Talladega, Alabama, in the 1950s. She attended Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, where she graduated in 1967 and where she met her first husband. At Samford she became more aware of and supportive of the civil rights movement. Graves moved to New York City in the late 1960s where she learned about the Women’s movement through consciousness-raising groups. In the early 1970s, she settled in Knoxville, Tennessee and began work as a community organizer and soon became staff at the Highlander Research and Education Center. Following her tenure at Highlander, she became an education representative-organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. In this interview she describes wending her way in and out of the major social movements of the second half of the twentieth century and what she learned along the way.