REJN was founded at a time when Southern communities were experiencing waves of plant closings and escalating racist violence.  The three founders pooled their experiences in national and international networks to create a model for the South  that would provide space and processes for  workers and communities to better understand and respond to these conditions in light of global economic restructuring. 

 FOUNDERS

   LEROY JOHNSON is a visionary leader who always has been grounded in community.  Born into a land owning, farming family in the majority black Mississippi Delta, Leroy distinguished himself a dynamic and daring organizer , and later director, for the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center in Holmes County.  Through the Urban Rural Mission of the World Council of Churches, Leroy gained international experience that profoundly impacted his vision of democracy, justice and self-determination. It also committed him to work to change the culture of organizing in the South. It is in this outlook Leroy was motivated to create the Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network. In REJN, he envisioned a network that would "create a will among people in the US to reach beyond multi-issue organization to an international understanding of what it is to be free to create new justices".

   BILL TROY is an "old soul" who has brought and continues to bring wide ranging perspective and depth to the social justice movement. The son of a Methodist minister and raised in the Chattanooga/Knoxville area, he is an ordained United Methodist minister, who has devoted his ministry to community justice struggles, particularly around economic inequities. In the same year that REJN was started, Bill was also forming TIRN, a statewide coalition of church, union, and community groups. At REJN he contributed skillful facilitation, always bringing focus to the practical effect of work, while looking down the road five years. As a REJN leader and politically smart organizer Bill is one who is excited by the possibility of making a difference, not just winning a victory.

   LEAH WISE has helped convey a working-class, women-centered analysis to Southern organizing, drawing upon her multiple experiences as an organizer, mother, cultural worker, disabled steelfitter, and oral historian.  Raised in Berkeley, California,  she was exposed to justice struggles at an early age through her parents'  organizing activities.   Known as a taskmaster for getting major projects done with little resources, Leah has dedicated more than three decades of hard work to the social justice movement in the South.  Leah first began to conceive of a Southern regional network in the 1980's, while she was directing Southerners for Economic Justice and participating in national and international ecumenical networks.  Recognized as the mother of REJN, Leah helped to organize the network as a space where organizers and rank and file workers, could share stories, develop an overarching analysis of the region, and above all develop principled, meaningful relationships with each other.