Building the South’s first home for women’s HIV and reproductive justice
Dázon Dixon Diallo has been fighting for women’s health in the South for more than three decades. In 1989 she founded SisterLove—the first organization in the southeastern United States dedicated to women’s HIV prevention and to sexual and reproductive justice. She still leads it today as president.
Her advocacy reaches well past SisterLove’s doors. Dázon is a member of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, co-chairs the Act Now: End AIDS coalition, and was one of the founding members of the SisterSong reproductive justice collective. She has also lent her expertise to the National Institutes of Health’s Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council and to the board of the National Women’s Health Network.
A Fort Valley, Georgia native, she studied at Spelman College—which later awarded her an honorary doctorate—and earned a master of public health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Ahead of the 2019 Super Bowl, Atlanta honored her as one of 30 residents whose faces appeared on murals across the city.
What she’s learned
Dázon’s hard-won lesson: people are not always who they claim to be, but nearly everyone eventually reveals themselves. Keep your eyes open, she says, and trust what people show you over what you hear or feel.
The best advice she ever got came around 2001 from Miss Johnnie Mae, a 75-year-old receptionist, who told her she would simply have to be happy in spite of all the nonsense life throws at her.