Lois Fernandez

Lois will record her personal life experiences on tape and have them transcribed, both for the record and the ODUNDE archive. She will eventually share her memoirs in an ODUNDE program book and website, a children's book, and public readings. She will talk about how ODUNDE came to be, how it has impacted her life, and what it means as an African community festival. She will share the struggles to maintain it, and the battle for rights, education, and against gentrification. Lois believes that these are the lessons about self-determination, cultural survival, and cultural health that are important to pass on to the next generation: to inspire and encourage others to follow their dreams as it has for her.

Lois is the founder of ODUNDE, a community festival that started 34 years ago as an alternative cultural response to the gang wars prevalent throughout the city in the mid-1970s. ODUNDE has been the major focus of her art for social change work. As a practice of reclaiming culture and space, the festival came out of Lois’s growing cultural awareness and sense of responding to community need. Inspired by Yoruba processions and culture, from the start she sought to create a festival where African Americans could see the beauty in celebrating themselves by showcasing the best of African culture, music, dance, and crafts. Lois began working in civil service jobs in the mid 1950’s, fighting discrimination and using her experiences of cultural awareness to foster change. The political and cultural vision of ODUNDE demonstrates a liberated vision about individuals and their community, as well as how conditions can be changed to support that vision.  Involving a primarily volunteer staff of more than 200 people and bringing upwards of a half-million people together on the second Sunday every June, ODUNDE is a true community gathering, an economic development tool, a cultural enrichment tool, an integral part of many extended family annual festivals, and a model for other African community celebrations around the country. To document the festival, Lois collaborated with filmmakers Tina Morton and Warren Bass on documentaries about the festival in 2006 and 1990, respectively. Most recently, she has had to be increasingly vigilant in fighting City Hall and gentrifying neighbors opposing her community’s right to assemble.