bigforeheadgaaal:Five Black queer and trans women carrying our liberation forward, each of them re

bigforeheadgaaal: Five Black queer and trans women carrying our liberation forward, each of them representative of vital work around race, sexuality, gender, class, and beyond. For the occasion, Mock selected our “Mothers,” Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who rose up at Stonewall and is still fighting, and Barbara Smith, legendary Black lesbian feminist from the ‘60s to today. Joining them are our Daughters — Tourmaline, the artist best known for immortalizing and honoring the icon Marsha P. Johnson; Alicia Garza, the queer woman who coined the term Black Lives Matter; and Charlene Carruthers, who’s literally writing the book on modern, intersectional queer feminism. Miss Major has dedicated 50 years of her life to organizing for trans women of color. She is a veteran of the Stonewall riots, a survivor of Attica Correctional Facility, and the founding executive director of Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), a nonprofit that centers and supports trans, gender-nonconforming, and intersex people in and out of prisons, jails, and detention centers. And when most wept at the election of Trump, Major persevered in her retirement, moving from the comfort of home in San Francisco to Arkansas, where she heard a call to help the trans community build a stronger movement. In Little Rock, she’s building the Griffin-Gracy Education Retreat and Historical Center, lovingly known as the House of GG. Born and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts, Tourmaline’s mother, Maureen Ridge, and late father, George Gossett, worked in the Labor and Black Power movements, respectively. With their influence, she developed a deep commitment to social justice and empowering marginalized people. As a college student, she became particularly drawn to the experiences of incarcerated, queer, and trans people. This led to her dedicating much of the last 15 years organizing with New York-based LGBTQ+ organizations like FIERCE and Sylvia Rivera Law Project, teaching at Rikers Island, and working with elders like Miss Major. “For a lot of trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people of color, we didn’t [initially] know about the prior generation of activists because their stories had been erased,” she says. “I think about not just people being pushed out of the movement, but how did HIV and AIDS — like criminalization, not just the epidemic — play into the erasure of us ever knowing of so many people who came before us? It was July 2013 when the world encountered a brilliant, powerful assemblage of words that would come to define a generation. Alicia Garza gifted Black millennials the rallying cry #BlackLivesMatter in the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. She unleashed the power of digital activism to create a movement and revealed to us that a hashtag, a post, an image, and a video shared online could change the course of history. Before joining forces with community organizers Patrisse Cullors-Khan and Opal Tometi, Alicia’s work had already spanned nearly two decades. Drawing inspiration from her childhood growing up in a household with a single mother, the lifelong Californian began her early work with an emphasis on reproductive justice. Since then, she has been able to see how the pieces of seemingly disparate issues like economic justice, students’ rights, and police brutality are all intertwined in the fight against state violence. Last July, I witnessed Charlene Carruthers, drenched in sweat and filled with anguish, command the attention of a large crowd in response to the fatal police shooting of 37-year-old Harith Augustus, a Black Chicagoan. I saw the faces of so many activists — including attendees from that year’s Black Youth Project 100 convening — watching her as she chronicled the latest updates from Augustus’ family and friends. With determined eyes, a bullhorn, and an electrifying voice, she invited those who knew the slain man to share about who he was and why they loved him. After hours of rallying and gathering resources for protesters (like ice, milk, and first aid), it felt as if we all breathed a collective sigh of relief. She calmed us while spurring a fire in our hearts. This was Charlene in action, demonstrating true, remarkable leadership in one of her last months as BYP100’s first National Director. After assuming the role in November 2013, she laid the foundation for the member-based organization to become a queer, feminist political home for young Black activists. She inspired robust dialogue on eschewing the patriarchy and rigorous praxis of accountability. And within its first five years under her leadership, BYP100’s membership (and leadership) swelled, resulting in eight chapters throughout the United States. Like many feminists, I met Barbara Smith on the page. I read the “Combahee River Collective Statement,” which she co-authored, in a women’s studies course. I did not take note of her name. I was not compelled to research her beyond the merits of the collective, a group of Black feminists and lesbians who gathered and organized in Boston in 1974. She did not call attention to herself; instead, she did the work, as part of a team. Her work speaks to that mission: to bring her sisters to the page and the work, by creating platforms, documents, and publications that would remain long after they had gone. In her 72 years, Barbara not only cofounded the Combahee River Collective, she helped build a visible Black feminist movement during a period when one did not exist. “Virtually everything I have done has been in service of that mission,” Barbara says, from teaching one of the first courses on Black women writers in the United States in 1973, to building the field of Black women’s studies by asserting that there was and could be such a thing, and cofounding Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, the first United States publisher for all women of color to reach a large national audience, which published the second edition of the beloved and groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back. “Arguably, the history of Black women’s organizing would be very different if none of these interventions had occurred” . -- source link

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