Tufara Waller Muhammad

Tufara Waller Muhammad is among the most consequential thought leaders and activists in contemporary social and economic justice. Despite influencing strategic leaders in social movements across the United States and Africa, her relative obscurity finds its roots in a syncretic ethos born of her Islamic faith and her familial heritage in African American Christian servant leadership traditions; as well as her belief that the organizer’s work is best evidenced when they are not in the foreground of the movement.   

A political strategist and cultural organizer, Tufara used her role as the Cultural Programs Director at Highlander Research & Education Center to train artists and community organizers fostering intentional learning exchanges and collaborations from the US South to the Global South. Strategically impacting individual, corporate and philanthropic efforts by infusing the need to fund indigenous grass-roots causes, her efforts, always done behind the scenes and in coalition. This strategy has directly built capacity among those working on various issue-based campaigns including voting rights across multiple Southern states; labor rights among poor and working-class people across race, gender, ethnicity, and faith tradition; environmental justice from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta; and human rights among undocumented workers, refugees, and asylum seekers. Her work is intergenerational, intercultural, and inter-movement focused.

Tufara has been instrumental in shifting the discourse about the strategic use of art and culture to shift policies and practices towards justice and equity, healing, and transformation having trained hundreds of Southern activists, organizers, and everyday people. Tufara has quietly helped to lay the groundwork of mass-mobilization across identities and geographies, including the Movement for Black Lives and the Southern Peoples Movement Assembly to name a few.

A renaissance woman, she has performed with Grammy® Nominated founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon; nationally known blues artist, Essie Neal; renowned folk musicians Guy and Candie Carawan; The Fruit of Labor Singing Ensemble;  and many others.