Rainbow flags for Mumia
Lesbian, gay, bi, trans communities building April 24
By
Shelley Ettinger
New York
Lesbian, gay, bi and trans fighters for justice are going to
make history when they march for Mumia Abu-Jamal on April
24.
So said author and activist Leslie Feinberg at a March 18
forum at New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center.
And the evidence backs her up.
Over 150 groups and individuals have signed on to a national
organizing effort to mobilize the lesbian/gay/bi/trans
communities for the "Millions for Mumia" marches in
Philadelphia and San Francisco.
The call to build a Rainbow Flags for Mumia contingent seems
to have reached every city, every campus, every community
center and activist group.
Rainbow Flags for Mumia is on the map in Los Angeles and
Boston and lots of places in between. In Tucson, Ariz., and
Ashland, Ore., lesbian, gay, bi and trans people are leading
the overall Millions for Mumia effort.
"We also know that there are forces organizing for Rainbow
Flags in New England, especially Vermont and Rhode Island. And
in the South, too--Florida and North Carolina and Atlanta,
Ga.," says national organizer Imani Henry.
"And the range of people and groups who have endorsed
represent the range of our communities," Henry told Workers
World.
Endorsers include the International Lesbian and Gay Human
Rights Commission, Pride At Work, the Latino/a Lesbian and Gay
Organization, Housing Works, African Ancestral Lesbians United
for Social Change, and the Audre Lorde Project. Urvashi Vaid
and Kerry Lobel of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force have
endorsed Millions for Mumia. So have authors Barbara Smith,
Jewelle Gomez, Joan Nestle and Sarah Schulman.
Rainbow Flags for Mumia organizers will be on the "Gender
Talk" radio program in Boston twice in upcoming weeks. Nancy
Nangeroni hosts the show.
Nangeroni is one of many trans activists waving rainbow
flags for Abu-Jamal. Other endorsers include author Kate
Bornstein, the New York Metro Gender Network, FTM International
President James Green and Street Transvestite Action
Revolutionaries.
STAR's co-founder Sylvia Rivera, a veteran of the 1969
Stonewall Rebellion, was in the audience March 18. Teresa
Gutierrez opened the event by recognizing Rivera and hailing
her spirit of struggle.
`Get on the bus!'
Gutierrez said: "If we can win a new trial for Mumia, and
then win his freedom, it will strengthen every struggle. It
will put the racists, the gay bashers, the trans bashers, the
police and the rich on notice that we're not going to take it
anymore."
Every speaker emphasized that uniting against racism and
defying all attempts to pit one community against another are
the keys to moving forward--not only in the struggle to free
Abu-Jamal, but in the overall struggle for justice.
Bob Lederer, a longtime gay and AIDS activist, discussed the
founding of Queers In Support of Political Prisoners and how
QUISP held a forum to build lesbian and gay support for
Abu-Jamal eight years ago.
African American lesbian Maura Bairley of Project Reach
talked about the connections among the cases of Abu-Jamal,
Mathew Shepard, James Byrd, the police stings and anti-gay
beheading in Richmond, Va., and New York police attacks on both
the Million Youth March last summer and the Oct. 19 political
funeral for Shepard.
Bairley and others also linked the police killing of Amadou
Diallo in the Bronx, N.Y., with both Abu-Jamal and the struggle
against anti-gay and anti-trans violence. She noted that gays
and lesbians had taken part in civil disobedience at police
headquarters to protest the Diallo killing.
Jesse Heiwa of Queers for Racial and Economic Justice urged
everyone to get involved in the Rainbow Flags organizing. "I
have a lot of hope," he said. "There's lots of people we can
reach. People do get the linkages if you speak with them."
Anti-racist activist and poet Minnie Bruce Pratt said
everyone has "got to get on the bus." She invoked the
Montgomery, Ala., bus-desegregation boycott begun by Rosa Parks
in the 1950s, the buses that took civil-rights activists to the
South in the 1960s, and the buses that so many lesbian, gay, bi
and trans people "get on to leave small towns and come to the
big city and come out of the closet."
Leslie Feinberg closed the meeting with a sweeping overview
of the recent upsurge in reactionary violence, how it serves
the ruling class's interests, and how the capitalist state is
actually a key player in promoting it.
Organizing independently, she said, rather than depending on
the government, is the way to push back the right wing.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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