20 Facts About Pat Parker

At eighteen, Parker was in an abusive relationship and had a miscarriage after being pushed down a flight of stairs.

Pat Parker participated in many forms of activism especially regarding gay and lesbian communities, domestic violence, reproductive rights, civil rights and anti-racism.

Pat Parker released five poetry collections: Child of Myself, Pit Stop, Movement in Black, Womanslaughter, and Jonestown and Other Madness.

Pat Parker was born on January 20,1944, in Houston, Texas, to Marie Louise and Ernest Nathaniel Cooks.

The family lived first in the Third Ward and then moved to the Sunnyside neighborhood when Pat Parker was four years old.

Pat Parker left home at seventeen and moved to Los Angeles to attend college.

Pat Parker attended Los Angeles City College and was enrolled in San Francisco State College from 1966 to 1967 but did not graduate.

Pat Parker later said that her ex-husband was physically violent and that she was "scared to death".

Pat Parker worked from 1978 to 1988 as the medical coordinator and executive director of the Oakland Feminist Women's Health Center.

Pat Parker founded the Black Women's Revolutionary Council in 1980, and she contributed to the formation of the Women's Press Collective, as well as being involved in wide-ranging activism in gay and lesbian organizing.

Pat Parker was asked by her father to take "the freedom train of education," Parker moved to Oakland California, in the early 1970s to pursue writing and potential opportunities for activist work.

Pat Parker gave her first public poetry reading in 1963 in Oakland.

Clarke believes that Pat Parker articulates "a black lesbian-feminist perspective of love between women and the circumstances that prevent our intimacy and liberation".

Audre Lorde and Pat Parker shared common themes within poetry they wrote as well.

Pat Parker wrote the autobiographical poem, Womanslaughter, based on this event.

Pat Parker served a one-year sentence in a work-release program.

Pat Parker brought this crime to the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in 1976 in Brussels, vowing.

Pat Parker died on June 19,1989, of breast cancer at the age 45 in Oakland, California.

Pat Parker was survived by her long-time partner, Marty Dunham, and her daughters Cassidy Brown and Anastasia Jean.

In June 2019, Pat Parker was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in New York City's Stonewall Inn.