Marcia Langton was born on 31 October 1951[1] to Kathleen (née Waddy) and grew up in south-central Queensland and Brisbane as a descendant of the Yiman and Bidjara heritage, both groups being Aboriginal Australian peoples.

[2] After hearing that Brisbane police were clamping down on Indigenous activists (at the beginning of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's premiership[2]), she left the country aged 18, with her son.

[4][5] On her travels she met US servicemen who had served in the Vietnam War, and became acquainted with Afro American culture and the Black Power movement.

[1] After this, she wrote Too Much Sorry Business, in which she connected the high number of Aboriginal men who died in police or prison custody Northern Territory to Indigenous mortality rates, and to alcohol and other substance abuse.

[2][7] Langton was then appointed assistant head of the Division of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs in Queensland (under the government of Wayne Goss[2]), but was forced to resign 15 months later.

[2] Her 2005 PhD thesis in geography at Macquarie University applies phenomenological theory to the study of Aboriginal peoples of the eastern Cape York Peninsula.

[11][12] During the early 1970s, Langton was one of three leaders of the Communist League,[13] a group founded by Queensland doctor John McCarthy, Peter Robb and others in 1972, which merged into the Socialist Workers Party[14] around 1976.

BWA published a monthly community newspaper for Aboriginal people, Koori Bina (meaning "Black ears"[16]),[17] which ran until June 1979.

[18][1] Langton later wrote that the founders of the paper had been inspired by Abo Call, which had been published in 1938 in Sydney[19][20] by Jack Patten (co-founder of the Aborigines Progressive Association) and Percy Reginald Stephensen.

[21] She was also involved in a number of other Black community publications, and wrote in the introduction to her 1979 Listing of Aboriginal periodicals: "the experience of producing those newspapers within a hostile white environment... because it has the power and resources, has historically defined us".

[23] Langton went to Canberra for a year in 1977, after being elected general secretary to the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, where she enrolled for an anthropology degree at ANU.

In the course of answering an audience question at a community information meeting, she said of the No campaign that "Every time the No case raises one of their arguments, if you start pulling it apart you get down to base racism — I'm sorry to say it but that's where it lands — or just sheer stupidity".

[34] For this she was criticised in some sectors of the media and various politicians from the No campaign, including a headline by The Australian (later corrected) which read "No Voters Branded Racist, Stupid".

This was followed by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton publishing on Instagram: "No voters branded 'racist, stupid' by prominent Voice campaigner Marcia Langton".

[41][8] Langton was made a member of the Order of Australia in the 1993 Queen's Birthday Honours for "service as an anthropologist and advocate of Aboriginal issues".