Sabrina Samone, TMP
The TBGL community
showed its support in large numbers this past weekend for the 50th
anniversary of the Martin Luther King march on Washington. Martin Luther King
had a dream that all men would one day find freedom and equality. Though many
in our African-American community have long denied that our TBGL struggle was
the same, the tide is turning fast. Over the past few years the bond between
all groups seeing civil rights as a shared dream, is beginning to truly live up
to the idea of everyman being equal, that Dr. King had envisioned.
The African-American
and Latino community are not alone in learning to put aside differences and
understand that minority groups, together are the majority. The TBGL community
also has had and must continue to put away false hopeful ideas of attaining
white heterosexual cis-gender privilege and put bigotry and transphobia aside
for the greater good. This past weekend many did just that.
According
to the Washington Blade, the daughter of the late-former New York
Congresswoman, Bella Abzug, who introduced the first federal gay rights bill in
‘75, was 11 years old when she and her mother attended the March on Washington
in 1963. The daughter said of her mother that “She’d be up there speaking in
the front,” Liz Abzug said as she stood with member of Congregation Beit
Simchat, a TBGL synagogue in New York City, on the National Mall. “She’d be
screaming and speaking and charging up and thrilled, but say we have unfinished
business.”
The unfinished business
is no secret. Finally in 2013 we saw DOMA struck down, several transgender laws
passed, but it is still 50 years after the initial walk for freedom and equality
for everyone and we continue fighting
state by state for rights for American citizens to just live and have the right
to be happy.
Many members of the new
civil rights movement spoke at the 2013 March; American Federation of Teachers
President Randi Weingarten; National Black Justice Coalition executive Director
Sharon Lettman-Hicks; International President Mary Kay Henry and Adrian
Shanker; member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; Equality Maryland,
the Latino GLBT history Project and other LGBT groups also took part.
“I’m here with my
brothers and sister, not only the union movement, but with LGBT people, with
African-Americans from the Civil Rights movement,” said Suzanne Keller of
Richmond, VA.
Maybe the march of 2013
will mark the beginning of truly realizing Dr. King’s dream; that equality and
rights are ‘not divisible’.
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