Anita Stroud grew up the oldest of three children in a female-headed household in public housing in Baltimore. As a teen in the late 1960s, she helped start and lead an underground student group, The Black Voice, to protest institutionalized racism at her high school. She also became a community worker with the Black Panther Party. This activism cost her a high school diploma. She married John Wesley Stevens, a Party member, and they took the names Nkenge and Patrice Touré. They had two daughters before the marriage ended in 1979. Touré left the Party in the early 1970s and moved to Washington, D.C. After briefly running a group called Save the People, she joined the staff of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. As general administrator and director of community education at the Center for thirteen years, Touré became a pioneer in anti-rape organizing and a champion of addressing all forms of violence against women: psychological, cultural, racial, economic, state, physical, and sexual. At the same time, as a co-founder of the Women's Section of the National Black United Front, she was defending women's rights within nationalist politics. Through the D.C. Study Group, a Marxist-Leninist group, and the City Wide Housing Coalition, she was also involved in anti-apartheid and tenant organizing. In 1982, she and Loretta Ross co-founded the International Council of African Women (ICAW) to prepare African American women to participate in the 1985 United Nations Women's Conference in Nairobi. Since leaving the Rape Crisis Center in 1988, Touré has hosted and produced In Our Voices, a public affairs radio program on WPFW as a forum for women's perspectives. She also works with substance abusers and others affected by HIV and AIDS and is active in the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.
From the guide to the Nkenge Touré Papers MS 563., 1968-2005 (ongoing), (Sophia Smith Collection)
