Larry Lamar Yates

Author page bio

I’m Larry Lamar Yates, author of Bloodroot Cantons and The Scalawag Scholar’s Notes on Virginia, both published by my business Social Justice Connections LLC. At 62, I have been a lifelong poet, an amateur botanist, an activist lucky enough to get paid to organize sometimes on grassroots-rooted struggles, and always an envisioner of new worlds.I live in Winchester, Virginia, and have lived and traveled around Virginia for the last 48 years.

Writing and publishing these two books has enabled me to play with two sides of who I am and with two sets of skills.

Writing Bloodroot Cantons, I would have to pause and see which bird, or beast, or breeze, or practice of Germans or Shawnee or West African might come to meet and move the developing story. In my Notes on Virginia, I go and look for those facts that make my points. I am stuck with the reality of Robert E. Lee or Maggie Walker or Pocahontas. It’s a very different book. The novel seeks to intuit, within a historic framework, where human beings might go. The Notes tell where human beings have gone, and tries to clear away the smoke and soot of centuries of misleading stories.

But both books come from my same heart and mind, and from my same deep desire for a braver, kinder world where each human creature is given full respect. They also come from my real experience of how sometimes we can move toward that world.

This includes organizing around housing, environmental, and criminal justice issues, struggling with and learning something about relationships and love, stumbling towards a spiritual path, and always being connected to the Movement, even when it frustrates me. It also includes my solitary writerly side, the side that makes poems and photos out of the incredibly powerful details of everyday life. All these have come together in my writing, and I hope they benefit you and bring you pleasure.

My writing has been previously published in these articles in the listed books, all worth your attention:

“A Case Study: Professional Advocates Can Be Accountable to People of Color,” published in Accountability and Anti-Racist Organizing: Stories From Our Work, edited by Bonnie Berman Cushing et. al., Crandall, Dostie and Douglass, 2010.

“Housing Organizing for the Long Haul: Building on Experience,” published in A Right to Housing: Foundation for a New Social Agenda, Temple University Press, 2006.

“A Response to David Horowitz’s ‘Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea -- and Racist Too,” published in The Debtors: Whites Respond to a Call for Black Reparations, Caucasians United for Reparation and Emancipation, 2005.

The Internet: What It Can and Can’t Do for Activists, a self-published booklet, presented as a paper at the 1996 global meeting of the Internet Society.