Heather Booth

Heather Booth (born December 15, 1945) is an American civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist who has been involved in activism for progressive causes. During her student years, she was active in both the civil rights movement and feminist causes. Since then she has had a career involving feminism, community organization, and progressive politics.

Early life and family Booth was born in a military hospital in Brookhaven, Mississippi, on December 15, 1945, during a period in which her father was serving as an Army doctor. In high school, she joined a sorority and the cheerleading team but left both of them when she came to believe that their members were discriminating against students who did not lead their privileged lives.

In 1978, Booth proposed and helped to found an alliance of citizen-activist and labor organizations called the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition, often referred to as CLEC. The group chose her as its executive director at its first meeting and began work toward overcoming the mutual distaste that was seen to exist between the major elements of the New Left and the leadership of the AFL–CIO. In the words of labor historian Andrew Battista, CLEC addressed "a crucial issue of American public life: the relationship between the decline of organized labor and the decay of liberal and progressive politics." CLEC's lasting contribution is seen to be the establishment of new citizen-labor activist groups at the state level.