7 Black LGBTQ+ Civil Rights Activists You Should Know
By Fola Onifade
The fight for LGBTQ+ rights has always been inextricably tied to the fight for Black civil rights. While more LGBTQ+ leaders of the civil rights movement have begun to receive acknowledgment in recent years, this was not always the case. Some had to hide the truth about their sexual orientation or gender identity, while others, like Bayard Rustin, were even punished by law for living their truths. Still, queer leaders of the civil rights movement played a critical role in the shaping of the movement and ideas that would eventually lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Let us not forget that Black trans people were at the forefront of Pride’s earliest days, and that Pride itself started as the Stonewall Riots, in the language of the unheard, as Dr. King would say. And while we’ve made progress since the ‘60s, there’s still much to be done, much to be angry about, and much to fight back against. In that spirit, we’re lifting up a few queer trailblazers from the civil rights movement and beyond who continue to inform and guide the movement and political work of today.
1. Barbara Jordan
Civil rights leader, attorney, and university professor Barbara Jordan became the first African American woman elected to the Texas Senate in 1966, where she also served as the first Black woman in American history to preside over a legislative body as president pro tem of the Texas Senate. In 1972, she became the first Black woman elected to Congress from a Southern state. Jordan never explicitly acknowledged her sexual orientation in public, but was open about her life partner Nancy Earl. Her election inspired hope in Black women across the country, including Democracy in Color founder Steve Phillip’s mom (Don’t worry, we’ll be diving into that story in the coming weeks.)
2. Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin was an LGBTQ+ and civil rights activist and a key player in the labor rights movement. Rustin organized the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Labor. He was one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest advisors and has been credited with introducing Dr. King to the idea of nonviolent resistance. In 1953, Rustin was convicted of a misdemeanor vagrancy violation for having consensual adult sex in a parked car in Pasadena, California. The court sentenced Rustin to 60 days in jail and ordered him to register as a sex offender. In 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 2020, and California Governor Gavin Newsom pardoned him. The pardon read: “His conviction is part of a long and reprehensible history of criminal prohibitions on the very existence of LGBTQ people and their intimate associations and relationships.”
3. Ernestine Eckstein
Ernestine Eckstein was the first Black woman to be on the cover of the lesbian magazine The Ladder, a magazine published by Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the country. She also worked with the NAACP while in her home state of Indiana, and she joined the Congress of Racial Equity when she moved to New York. Eckstein was keen on inclusion across identities, and stressed the importance of coalition building in her work. In 1964, she became the vice president of the DOB’s New York chapter. Like other queer Black civil rights activists of the time, she viewed the fight for civil rights and for LGBTQ+ rights as joint fights.
4. James Baldwin
James Baldwin is one of the greatest American writers and thinkers of all time. During his life, he was one of only very few openly gay men involved in the civil rights movement. As a sharp and prescient social critic, Baldwin spoke to the realities of racism and homophobia in America. Baldwin, who was present at the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, had a close relationship with both Dr. King and Malcom X, and was working on a screenplay about Malcolm X’s life when he received the news of King’s assassination.
5. June Jordan
Poet, playwright, essayist, and academic June Jordan was a devoted human rights and political activist and a key member of the Black Arts Movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. She came out as bisexual in the ‘70s, at a time when such an identity was maligned by both straight people and gay folks who considered bisexuals as the “weak link” in the struggle for sexual equality. In 1991, she founded the influential arts and activism program Poetry for the People at the University of California, Berkeley.
6. Marsha P. Johnson
Note reads: If I keep dressing like this, I’ll save the world from nuclear apocalypse. But will anyone love me for it? I’ll save the world anyway. I know what looks good.
Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson was a transgender rights activist, drag queen, and one of the key figures of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, which served as the foundation for what we know as Pride today. Despite her own personal and mental health struggles, Johnson was a staunch advocate for trans rights, homeless queer youth, and those affected by the AIDS epidemic. In 1970, Marsha, along with trans activist Sylvia Rivera, founded Street Transvestite Activist Revolutionaries (STAR) to help house young trans people in a safe environment where they could organize and fight for their rights.
7. Pauli Murray
Pauli Murray was a lawyer, writer, poet, organizer, and Episcopal priest. Murraybecame the first African American to receive a J.D. from Yale Law in 1965. Their theories contributed to the legal groundwork for much of the civil rights movement, and their arguments and interpretation of the Constitution helped win the fights for public school desegregation, women’s rights in the workplace, and the extension of LGBTQ+ rights through the Civil Rights Act of 1964.Murray, who wrote about their gender identity and experiences of gender dysphoria, co-founded the National Organization for Women, served as the vice president of Benedict College in South Carolina, and became the first person to teach African American Studies and Women’s Studies at Brandeis University.