Legacies
Marsha P. Johnson was a self-identified drag queen and a prominent gay liberation activist born on August 24th, 1945 in New Jersey. She became a prominent figure in New York City’s gay scene during the 1960 – 1990’s. She was there during the Stonewall Riots – many say that she helped start the riot at the Stonewall Inn. She was active in many gay liberation organizations that fought for the protections and liberations of all people. More specifically, she co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) alongside Sylvia Rivera to help homeless young drag queens, gay youth, and trans women in New York City, Chicago, California, and England before eventually disbanding. She continued to fight for the liberation of the LGBTQIA+ community until her untimely passing on July 6, 1992. Her spirit and revolutionary efforts live on through the Marsha P. Johnson Institute founded in 2015 which is dedicated to the defense and protection of trans and non-conforming communities human rights.
Sylvia Rivera was a Venezuelan and Puerto Rican Stonewall veteran, transgender activist, and Young Lords member. She was born in New York City, New York on July 2, 1951. On June 27th, 1969, Rivera fought against the police that were attacking the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on Christipher Street in Greenwich Village, and is sometimes credited with throwing the first bottle that initiated the uprising. The Stonewall uprising went on for three days between gays and the police, and the militancy of the gay liberation movement was born. It also sparked the gay and transgender liberation movements that continues to take place today. She continued her organizing efforts whenco-ounding the Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activists Alliance, and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in New York City. Rivera stepped away from organizing for twenty years shortly after the 1986 Gay Rights Bill became a law in New York because it intentionally excluded the rights of the Transgender community. She eventually
returned during the mid-1990s as issues such a gay marrage and LGBTQIA+ folks serving in the military emerged. She continued to attend LGBTQIA+ centered events until her passing on February 19, 2002. Rivera will always be acknowledged as one of the pivotal figures in the LGBTQIA+ movement, specifically for ensuring that the “T” is included in all efforts and victories.
Gloria Anzaldua was a self-identified “chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist.” She was born on September 26th, 1942 in South Texas Rio Grande Valley.
To Anzaldúa, writing was not an action, but a form of channeling voices and stories, and she attributed its power to a female deity. She moved to California in 1977, where she devoted herself to writing, political activism, consciousness-raising, and groups such as the Feminist Writers Guild. She actively seeked ways to build a multicultural, inclusive feminist movement. Her more well-known texts such as Borderlands/La Frontera, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and Making Face Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color where she discusses culture, heritage, language, and resistance won numerous awards during her lifetime. She later became a professor at UC Santa Cruz and continued to radically write about Queer Women of Color and spirituality in her texts up until her passing on May 15, 2004. The University of Texas Libraries: Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection now houses Anzaldúa’s archive that includes manuscripts of her major published works, unpublished manuscripts, notebooks, correspondence, lectures, and audio and video interviews.
Audre Lorder was a self proclaimed “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” born on February 18, 1934 in Harlem, New York to West Indian immigrant parents. When discussing her poetic beginnings she states that “[she] literally communicated through poetry. And when [she] couldn’t find the poems to express the things [she] was feeling, that’s what started [her] writing poetry” during her adolescence. In 1972, Lorde became a poet-in-residence at Tougaloo University. Her experiences as a Black queer woman in academia informed her work which later influenced feminist theory, queer studies, and critial race studies. During this time Lorde was also publishing collections of poetry that include The First Cities, Cables to Rage, From a Land Where Other People Live, New York Head Shop and Museum, Coal, and The Black Unicorn. After reaching critical acclaim and critiques she professed that her “poetry comes from the intersection of [her] and [her] worlds.” In the 1980s Lorde reflected her life struggles in her work when writing The Cancer Journals after being diagnosed with cancer. She also wrote Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, and A Burst of Light during this decade as well. In addition, she co-founded two efforts: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with writer Barbara Smith and Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa – an organization that worked to raise concerns about women under apartheid. She transitioned into an English Professor role at John Jay College of criminal justice and Hunter College before her passing in 1992 due to breast cancer. Ultimately, her long lasting legacy stands at the intersection of her advocacy work for gender, race, sexual orientation, class, age, and ability injustices in America.
June Jordan was a poet, essayist, journalist, teacher, and activist born in Harlem, New York on July 9, 1936. As a Jamiacan bisexual women she proudly produced work early on in her career that dissected bisexuality, racial oppression, and highlighted the power of the global majority of marginalized communities. She challenged and disrupted the “traditional standard” of white English throughout her work. Jordan remained active in the civil rights, feminist, antiwar and gay and lesbian rights movements, even as she became known as a writer. In 1967, she established her teaching career at City College of New York and eventually taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, State University of New York, and UC Berkeley. Jordan specifically founded the influential poetry program Poetry for The People that continues to this day at UC Berkeley. In addition, she was a regular columnist for The Progressive magazine and frequently wrote lyrics, plays, and musicals. She continued to teach at UC Berkeley until her passing on June 14, 2002. Jordan remains regarded as one of the key figures in the mid-century American social, political and artistic milieu because she leaves behind a legacy of challenging majoritarian white perspectives and the empowerment of the poet activist.
Barbara Smith was born on December 16, 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio. Smith’s activism started in high school when she participated in boycotts, marches and civil rights protests in the 1960s. Barbara Smith earned her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1969. She co-founded the Combahee River Collective in Boston, Massachusetts in 1974, which was best known for its Combahee River Collective Statement (1977), which she co-authored. This document became one of the earliest explorations of the intersection of multiple oppressions, including racism and heterosexism, critiquing both sexual oppression in the black community and racism within the wider feminist movement. For the first time, according to the Statement, black women openly and unapologetically communicated their sexual orientations in the midst of their social justice work. In 1980 She co-founded the Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first U.S. publisher of books for women of color. Among other honors, Smith received the Stonewall Award for Service to the Lesbian and Gay Community (1994).
Born as Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she adopted the pen name of her great grandmother to acknowledge the matriarchal legacy. bell hooks is a Black/African-American author, professor, feminist and social activist that identifies as “queer-pas-gay”. She attended Stanford University in 1973 where she graduated with a degree in English literature. She later obtained a Master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976, and a Ph.D. from the University of California-Santa Cruz in 1983. Her 30-plus books have covered topics of gender, race, class and the significance of media in contemporary culture. In her first foundational book titled “Ain’t I a Women: Black Women and Feminism,” which she began writing when she was only 19 years old, hooks wrote about the intersections of race, class and gender in relation to the experiences of Black women and their lives. This book and her subsequent works, like “Feminist Theory: From the Margin to Center,” paved the way for intersectional feminism that is inclusive of the complex and layered identities that people from the margins hold.
Jennicet Gutiérrez is a transgender Latina organizer from México. She was born in the city of Tuxpan, Jalisco. She is an organizer with Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement. Jennicet believes in the importance of uplifting and centering the voices of trans women of color in all racial justice work. Jennicet will continue to organize in order to end the deportation, incarceration and criminalization of immigrants and all people of color. She currently resides in Los Angeles.
Janet Mock is a Black writer, television host, director, producer and transgender rights activist. She started her career as an editor for People magazine and her career in journalism shifted from editor to media advocate when she came out publicly as a trans woman in 2011. Mock was featured in two documentaries, one in 2011, Dressed, and another in 2013, OUT List. In 2014, she published her first book, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More. Shortly after signing her book deal, Mock left People magazine and became a host on TakePart Live and her own show, So POPular! In 2014, following the conviction of activist, Monica Jones, Mock joined a campaign against a Phoenix law which allows the police to arrest anyone suspected of “manifesting prostitution” which targets transgender woemn of color. In 2017, Mock published her second book, Surpassing Certainty, picking up where her last book left off, chronicling the journey of finding her way, her voice, and her purpose in her 20s through a series of first experiences. She later produced two shows, one in 2016, The Trans List and another in 2018, Pose. She wrote, directed, and produced Pose. She was the first trans woman of color hired as a writer for a TV series in history. In 2019, she signed a deal with Netflix for this show.
Marsha P. Johnson: https://www.biography.com/activist/marsha-p-johnson
Sylvia Rivera: https://www.biography.com/activist/sylvia-rivera
https://www.thoughtco.com/gloria-anzaldua-3529033
Audre Lorde: https://poets.org/poet/audre-lorde
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/audre-lorde
June Jordan: http://www.junejordan.net/bio.html https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/june-jordan
Barbara Smith https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/smith-barbara-1946/
bell hooks: https://www.them.us/story/bell-hooks
Miss Major is a transgender women of color and activist born in the South Side of Chicago on October 25, 1940. In her early years she was an active member of the drag ball scene in Chicago. After being asked to leave two colleges for her gender expression, she found a home in New York City, where she would become a prominent leader in the LGBTQIA+ community.
She was a leader in the infamous 1969 at Stonewall Uprising along with fellow trans leaders Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Unfortunately, she experienced police brutality as an officer struck her on the head before arresting her and a corrections office broke her jaw while incarcerated. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s where she served on multiple HIV/AIDS organizations including Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center. In 2003, Miss Major began working with Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project that examines the intersectionality of the prison industrial complex and how it disproportionately criminalizes trans folks. Today she continues to fight for the rights of trans people of color, particularly those who are low income and formerly incarcerated.
Victoria Cruz is a Boriquen transgender activist born in Guánica, Puerto Rico and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She was friends with transgender civil rights leaders Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Cruz lived through the criminalization of cross-dressing and is a survivor of addiction and sexual violence. Her life experience eventually brought her to the Anti-Violence Project where she worked as a domestic violence counselor and resource specialist for 18 years. Today she is retired but continues to advocate for the transgender community and remains an outspoken activist fighting to end violence against transgender women of color.
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Ernestine Eckstein (1941-1992) was born Ernestine Delois Eppenger, though all her work was done under the name Eckstein to protect herself from being outed in circles where it was not safe to be open. She helped lead the LGBTQIA+ rights movement during the 1960’s. Eckstein was a leader in the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). In 1965, she marched in the first Annual Reminder Day and in front of the White House as the only person of color demonstrating. Her influence helped the DOB move away from negotiations with medical professionals, to reject the idea that homosexuality was a mental illness, and towards tactics of public demonstrations. Eckstein’s understanding of, and work in the Civil Rights Movement lent valuable experience on public protest to the LGBTQIA+ rights movement. She saw the connection between the Black struggle for equality and the LGBTQIA+ struggle for equality and fostered the connection. In the 1970s, she became involved in the black feminist movement, in particular the organization Black Women Organized for Action (BWOA).
James Baldwin was an author, essayist, novelist, playwright, poet and a Civil Rights advocate born on August 2, 1924 in Harlem, New York. His identity as an openly gay Black man informed his beliefs that human sexuality was more fluid and less binary than often expressed in the U.S. Baldwin broke literary ground when exploring several societal and identity issues in his works, especially that of the Black experience in America at that time. For instance, his book The Fire Next Time grappled with what it meant to be Black in America and educated the white audience about how they’re viewed by them.In 1964, he wrote the Blues for Mister Charlie play that was loosely inspired by the inhumane and racially driven murder of Emmit Till in 1955. In addition, he and Richard Avedon wrote Nothing Personal to commemorate the life of civil rights leader Medgar Evans who was slain. As the years progressed, his works continued to reflect the life and tragic deaths of Black and LGBT folks. Baldwin passed on December 1, 1987, leaving behind an extensive, rapturous literary legacy that he never intended to manifest because he did not want to be a spokesperson or a leader. He saw his personal mission as bearing “witness to the truth” which he accomplished through his works.
Angela Davis is an abolitionist, author, and professor who was born on January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama. In the late 1960s, Davis became involved with the Black Panther Party and Che-Lumumba Club, an all black branch of the Communist Party. She became an acting professor of Philosophy at UCLA for the 1969-1970 academic year where she was challenged by the UC Board of Regents -urged by the then California Governor Rondal Regan- because of her association with the Communist Party. She went on to teach three courses at UCLA despite the controversy and attracted audiences in the thousands. In August 1970, Davis was arrested on counts of alleged participation in George Lester Jackson’s escape attempt during his trial where five people were killed in an ensuing shoot out. She initially went into hiding and was on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list before being arrested in the proceeding two months. Her case drew international attention after spending 18 months in jail and representing herself in court. Davis was eventually acquitted in June 1972. Through the following years she continued to lecture at UC Santa Cruz and travel while also writing her infamous books Women Race and Class, Are Prisons Obsolete?, The Meaning of Freedom: and Other Difficult Dialogues to name a few. Davis abolitionist work and legacy continues to this day as she connects the transcending use of prison systems, violence, and dehumanization in America to Palestine and across the world.
Bamby Salcedo is a Trans Latina activist born in Guadalajara, Mexico to a working class single mother household. Very early in life, she experienced several hardships that include sexual abuse, drug abuse, gangs that unfortunately influenced a deep cycle of drugs, crime, juvenile institutions, and eventually US based prisons and street violence once immigrating. Salcedo has repeatedly faced her mortality, and was able to commit herself to addiction treatment later in her life which inspired her organizing work. She has participated in Angels of Change, Unidas LGBT, National Youth Advocacy Coalition (NYAC), and a Board member of the National Latina/o Human Rights organization. Salcedo also spent eight dedicated years as the Health Education and HIV Prevention Services Coordinator at the nation’s largest and most experienced clinical program providing multidisciplinary healthcare and services to trans youth. Lastly, she founded the LA based TransLatin@ Coalition in 2009 alongside other TransLatin@ immigrant leaders to advocate for the needs of TransLatin@’s who immigrate and live in the U.S. Salcedo’s commitment to the intersectional struggle of liberation has been proven through her interdisciplinary organizing in human rights, civil rights, immigration rights, and LGBTQIA+ rights.
Born in Waddy, Kentucky in 1886, Lucy Hicks Anderson insisted on wearing dresses to school. While Anderson was a child her concerned mother took her to a doctor who suggested that she allow her child to live as a female. By age 15, she changed her name to Lucy and left home. Lucy Lawson married Clarence Hicks in 1920 and divorced him in 1929. Working as a domestic, she saved her money and eventually owned and operated a brothel in Oxnard, CA. In 1944, Lucy Hicks married Reuben Anderson. But in 1945, when an outbreak of venereal disease in Oxnard was said to have originated from Hicks’s establishment, the employees were ordered to undergo a medical physical examination where it was revealed that Lucy was assigned male at birth. Upon discovery, the Ventura County District Attorney voided the marriage and arrested Lucy for perjury, justifying the charge by saying she had signed the marriage license stating there were “no legal objections to the marriage.” Both Lucy Hicks Anderson and her husband were tried by the federal government. During her perjury trial Lucy Hicks Anderson insisted that a person could appear to be of one sex but actually belong to the other, saying, “I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman.” She told reporters, “I have lived, dressed, acted just what I am, a woman.” She was placed on ten years probation as an alternative to prison. However, her troubles were not over. When the government concluded that Lucy had been illegally receiving Anjaerson’s allotment checks as the wife of a member of the U.S. Army, the couple was tried and convicted of fraud. After her release from prison, Lucy Hicks Anderson was banned from moving back to Oxnard. She relocated to Los Angeles where she lived until her death in 1954.
Bayard Rusin was a civil rights organizer and activist who worked as an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. Born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Barnyard attended historical black schools such as Wilberforce University in Ohio and Cheyney University in Pennsylvania. His political views and philosophy were widely influenced by the Quaker religion rooted in pacifism, Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent resistance, and Black-American labor leader A. Philip Randolph, a sociliast political leader. Due to his personal and political beliefs that challenged a racist, imperialist, classist and homophobic U.S. society, he was arrested for refusing to register for draft, protesting against the segregated public transit system and for living as an openly gay man. In spite of the incarceration and injustice he faced for being himself, he moved on to become a mastermind of protests and organizing. He taught MLK about Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence resistance and advised him on tactics of civil disobedience. In fact, he was critical to the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956, and a key figure in the organization of the March on Washington where MLK delivered his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963. However, despite his imperative skills and abilities to organize and fight for justice, he also struggled with other Black organizers and activists due to his identification as a gay man, that labeled him a “liability” in the quest for civil rights for Black people. He continued to fight and advocate for the Gay community at the intersections of race, class and gender.
Laverne is a Trans-rights icon, and a critically acclaimed actress and producer. Her and her twin brother were born and raised in Alabama by a single mother. She attended Indiana University in Bloomington and Marymount Manhattan College where she graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Dance. She’s appeared as a guest star in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Bored to Death and The Mindy Project. In 2014, Laverne became the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Emmy after starring in Netflix series Orange is the New Black and to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Laverne went on to become the first African-American/Black transgender person to produce and star in her own show TRANSform Me, which wa nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. In addition, Laverne won an Emmy for the show The T Word, which she was the executive producer. Overall, Laverne is a trailblazer for the LGBTQIA+ community for not only her career in film and acting that pushes mainstream boundaries and norms, but also for her unapologetic activism and advocacy that centers the experiences of Black Trans women.
Born to a white father and a Black mother, Storme was widely known as an American singer, a drag king, and some accounts claim a possible instigator of the Stonewall Riots. When she turned 18, she came out as gay and moved to Chicago where she worked not only worked for a mob as a body guard, but she began singing in bands. Her career in singing took off in the 1950s when she began performing in drag as M.C.in the legendary Jewel Box Revue–the first traveling drag show in the country. In 1969, Storme was present at Stonewall Inn when the rebellion started and several oral history accounts claim she not only physically fought with police but shouted at bystanders witnessing the police brutality against them, “Why don’t you guys do something?” DeLarvarie continued to fight for the Queer community for many decades after Stonewall. In fact, she was known to patrol the streets with a licensed gun protecting her LGBT “children” from harassment.
Bayard Rustin: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/100-amazing-facts/who-designed-the-march-on-washington/
Storme Delarverie: https://www.queerportraits.com/bio/delarverie
Laverne Cox: https://lavernecox.com/about/
Angela Davis: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/angela-davis https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/angela-davis-returns-to-ucla-classroom-45-years-after-controversy
Bamby Salcedo: https://peoplepill.com/people/bamby-salcedo/ http://bambysalcedo.com/
Miss Major: https://www.them.us/story/transvisionaries-miss-major https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Major_Griffin-Gracy
Lucy Hicks Anderson: https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/lucy-hicks-anderson
James Baldwin: https://www.biography.com/writer/james-baldwin