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Seeing Roe v. Wade fall must have been devastating. Ross looks up from her breakfast and laughs.
“As a Black woman, I never put a lot of faith in the Supreme Court being the site of my liberation,” she says.
This year should be a celebration.
In October, Ross’s work earned her honors from one of America’s most prestigious institutions. The MacArthur Foundation awarded her an $800,000 fellowship, one of several ‘genius grants’ awarded annually to the country’s top scholars, artists and activists. In November, she returned to the District to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the DC Rape Crisis Center — a groundbreaking organization for survivors of sexual violence that Ross directed as a young activist living in D.C.
It would be easy to let the pall of the Supreme Court decision loom over Ross’s storied career. Fifty years ago, she might have come undone. But she’s learned to take the long view.
“When I was young, I thought the revolution was tomorrow!” she says with a chuckle. “It’s a painful lesson to learn that you’re not in charge of the universe’s timeline.”
Ross, 69, has a lot to share after five decades of activism. Her recognition by the MacArthur foundation comes as she settles into a second act as a tenured professor at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., teaching a class called “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump.”
Her work isn’t done, and she thinks the story of her career has lessons for the students and activists reeling from the Supreme Court’s decision. Ross didn’t win every battle she fought. She learned more, she says, from how she continued despite the setbacks she faced.
Her most important message is the one that keeps her going.
“The lesson I’m most focused on right now,” Ross says, “is the importance of maintaining hope.”
Painful circumstances led Ross to politics.
She was raped at 11, by a stranger, while returning home from a Girl Scout trip, and several times at 14, by a distant relative, she said. She didn’t talk about it, until a pregnancy resulting from the rape forced the conversation. Her mother was furious, Ross recalled in a 2004 interview for an oral history project.
It was 1968, a few years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the country. Ross moved into a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers and had a son, Howard, who she couldn’t bring herself to abandon. She lost a full scholarship to Radcliffe College, then the prestigious women’s counterpart to Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., as a result, and was shunned at high school.
She got to work rebuilding her life — moving to the District and enrolling at Howard University in 1970, at a time of social upheaval and radical change.
Ross was raped once more in her freshman year and lost her scholarship when her grades slipped. She dropped out after her junior year when juggling work to pay for classes and caring for her son became too much to bear.
This, coupled with a further loss of control over her reproductive health, was a turning point for Ross. She said a defective Dalkon Shield IUD device given to her by Howard ultimately rendered her sterile after her doctor misdiagnosed an infection.
She sued. They settled. When a class-action lawsuit followed and Ross’s case attracted wider attention, she thought about how many other women had been harmed too.
“It was in that moment that I’m conscious of becoming a reproductive rights activist,” Ross said in the oral history. “I was pissed off — all this that has happened to me shouldn’t happen to nobody else.”
Ross found community and purpose in political work, which pervaded the college halls and streets of the District. It was the times, Ross explains — the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination lingered, protests against the Vietnam War were in full swing, and awareness of the anti-Apartheid movement was growing — but her own experiences also formed convictions that compelled her to act.
Friends and referrals led her into a web of activist organizations — a tenant’s rights group, a study group for Marxist literature, and outposts for nationwide Black nationalist and anti-Apartheid movements — where she worked full time. In passionate meetings with a housing coalition in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church on Newton Street, Ross helped push for some of the first rent control bills in the District. In 1979, she became an early executive director of the DC Rape Crisis Center, one of the first D.C. organizations created to support survivors of sexual violence.
Spreading herself across a variety of causes never struck Ross as a distraction — “My own thinking was not siloed that way,” she says. At meetings, she spoke with a verve that helped her carve out a powerful legacy, merging conversations of gender and race that she said were frustratingly ignored by the predominantly White leaders of many activist groups in her time.
“I don’t think anybody so eloquently connected what I already knew to be true around the intersections of the way that violence impacts women’s lives, but also people of color,” says Monika Johnson-Hostler, the current president of the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence.
In 1977, Ross and a group of activists from D.C. attended the National Women’s Conference in Houston, where their calls for a ‘Black Women’s Agenda’ attracted interest from other minority groups and expanded into a statement of solidarity between women of color. In 1980, Ross organized the first National Conference on Third World Women and Violence in D.C., and, seven years later, the first national conference on Women of Color and Reproductive Rights.
She later coordinated a statement on Black women’s support for abortion in the wake of the 1989 Supreme Court decision Webster v. Reproductive Health Services that restricted states’ ability to fund abortions, and co-founded SisterSong, a national network supporting reproductive health for people of color.
“What Loretta did is call people into thinking about race as a central rubric in which reproduction is shaped for everybody,” says Carrie Baker, a professor in Women and Gender studies and a colleague of Ross’s at Smith College. “She’s just able to reach different people and communicate with them in a way that they can hear and transform the way they think.”
With a MacArthur Fellowship, Ross joins a prestigious fraternity of scholars, artists and advocates — a long overdue recognition, her colleagues say. Her cornerstone contribution to reproductive rights activism is a framework she dubbed ‘Reproductive Justice,’ which centers the experience of women of color and emphasizes reproductive freedom and a healthy environment to raise a child as human rights. It continues to be used by organizers.
“She is one of our unsung heroes,” says Indira Henard, the executive director of the DC Rape Crisis Center. “A lot of us stand on her shoulders.”
Ross herself prefers to downplay talk of her legacy. She’s proud seeing her ideas continue to be held up — “That’s a palpable impact,” she says with a smile. “I just get a warm, fuzzy feeling every time.” — but she’s quick to stress that her work took its toll, and that she was never perfect.
“I always thought that mentoring is sharing your scars, not your successes,” Ross says.
At times, Ross’s trauma weighed heavily on her. She was forced out as director of the Rape Crisis Center in 1982 after borrowing from the center’s funds to buy cocaine — a spiral that began when her friend and fellow organizer Yulanda Ward was murdered in 1980. Ross described battling suicidal thoughts and reaching for drugs to numb the pain.
“I foolishly thought that as long as I was doing great political work, I didn’t have to pay attention to the mess inside my own head,” Ross says.
Working at the Rape Crisis Center helped her discard the blame she’d placed on herself for the rape that led to the birth of her son. She was humbled, she says, when her colleagues recommended her for further positions after she was forced to resign from the center. She sought therapy and continued organizing.
“I think coming to the Rape Crisis Center taught me grace,” Ross says. Her mistakes at the Rape Crisis Center “taught me about redemption.”
She said she also drew strength from her family — “five brothers and a daddy who showed me what good men could look like” — and her son, Howard, with whom she kept a close relationship until his death from a heart attack in 2016.
Ross battles smaller addictions today, like cigarettes. But there are many things that bring her joy: a tight network of friends, some kept since her days at Howard, others made recently over fiercely competitive rounds of the card game pinochle.
Happiness, too, comes from her work, which she refuses to put down as she approaches 70. This is what she always wanted out of retirement, she says: to talk and teach. Ross laments that institutional knowledge among organizers is hard to build and easy to lose.
“I’m doing it because it’s fun,” Ross adds.
In 2021, Ross earned tenure at Smith College, where she’s taught as an associate professor since 2019. Her work is in a movement dubbed “calling in” — educating people on problematic or offensive behavior instead of publicly shaming them — as an alternative to what’s popularly known as cancel culture. She’s folded it into the curriculum of her current class on White supremacy, which is regularly oversubscribed, colleagues say, with students eager to hear her stories.
“It’s hard to learn about social injustice,” Baker, of Smith College, says. “It’s easy to be defeated by that. So I think she’s very much a role model for our students in perseverance, in hopefulness.”
On the first day of class in September, Ross’s students filed in, still reeling from the Supreme Court’s decision. They looked to her for answers.
“Most of us think we were too young to be at the most significant moments of history,” Ross says, thinking back to her own childhood, when she first came to grasp the significance of signs segregating Black people at diners and lunch counters.
She knew exactly what to tell her students.
“I said, ‘Kids, this is your lunch counter moment,’ ” Ross says. “ ‘What are you going to do now?’ ”
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