An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 6/13/2021
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"Picketing I regard as almost a conservative activity now. The homosexual has to call attention to the fact that he's been unjustly acted upon. This is what the Negro did."
Born in 1941 South Bend, Indiana, Ernestine Eckstein (neé Eppenger) graduated in 1963 from Indiana University, with a BA in journalism and a minor in government and Russian. She moved to New York in 1963, where she took a job as a social worker and also became a member of CORE (Congress for Racial Equality), attracted to its mission statement of equality for all people regardless of race, creed, sex, age, disability, age, ethnicity, or (significantly) sexual orientation. It was during these years that she realized she was in fact a lesbian --a realization that had never occurred to her. She also became a member of a gay liberation organization called the Daughters of Bilitis.
Some background: before Stonewall, the mantle of gay liberation (known then as the homophile movement) was taken up by civil and political rights organizations such as Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis. The leadership of these organizations was almost exclusively white and traditionally reluctant to take such outright action as active picketing --with one notable exception! By 1965 Ernestine had appeared in a prominently-circulated photograph protesting homosexual discrimination before the White House, and later became the first black woman on the cover of The Ladder (the magazine published by the Daughters of Bilitis).
Eckstein soon became a leader in gay and lesbian civil rights, attending the "Annual Reminder" picket protests (and was frequently one of the only women --and the only black woman-- present at these earliest LGBTQ rights protests). Ahead of her time, Eckstein was also an early advocate for the transvestite community to be included in the homophile movement. Later during the 1970s she moved to California and co-founded Black Women Organized for Action, which notably challenged the then-accepted medical notion of homosexuality being classified as a mental illness. She died at the relatively young age of 50, but her legacy is enjoying a fresh look in recent years: someone who understood that the fight for civil rights and for LGBTQ rights are intrinsically linked.
"I think Negroes need white people, and I think homosexuals need heterosexuals. If you foster cooperation right from the start, then everyone is involved and it's not a movement 'over there.'"
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