ALERT Collective Blog

Last summer was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and during Pride month many news outlets did a historical review of the events of June 28, 1969. While the fight for equality didn’t begin at Stonewall, the Stonewall Uprising did rouse people into action like never before, and has served as an important touchstone for activists to this day. What many stories failed to mention was that some of the key figures who fought back that night were trans women of color - and that for many years they were excluded from the movement they helped create. In New York City, Vice squad police officers routinely raided bars like the Stonewall Inn under the guise of liquor license violations in order to harass and arrest members of the LGBTQ+ community. The patrons that night were undoubtedly used to having the police come in and disrupt things, but this time bottles and bricks began to fly and police barricaded themselves inside the bar. Trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia...

Between the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and everything at the forefront of today’s news, it’s been a hell of a different Pride Month. While I don’t want to detract from any of these movements, I believe it is still important to place focus on the struggle for LGBTQ+ equality in our country. LGBTQ Pride began as a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, which began in the early morning of June 28, 1969 as a spontaneous violent protest to a police raid by patrons* of the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. While not the first notable act of resistance or rioting by the community, the Stonewall Riots evoked a pervasive sense of both urgency and empowerment that led to activist organization on a national level and a newly-emboldened style of protest where gay and lesbian people chose to live more openly as an act of defiance. On the one-year anniversary of the riots, people assembled outside the Stonewall Inn for Christopher Street Liberation Day while Gay Pride marche...

Amid the Black Lives Matter movement and the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others, there is a cry to address diversity in our educational system – not only for more representative and supportive staff and faculty, but in the content being taught in schools. How can we implement fundamental change, when the education we receive remains whitewashed? Until recently, I never understood how little I was taught in school, particularly in the mostly-white public school system where I grew up. At a very young age, we learn that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492, but not that he enslaved the indigenous peoples he encountered and treated them with extreme violence and brutality. We learn that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's “New Deal” created much-needed relief through stimulus programs after the Great Depression, but not that the resulting Federal Housing Administration was specifically – and explicitly – designed to segregate neighborhoods, and t...

Along with thousands of my fellow Delawareans, I left my COVID-19 self-isolation on June 9th to vote on the Christina School District referendum. It was a pleasant surprise to see an all-new machine in the voting booth, with a long receipt paper gliding up and down as my choices were printed onto a receipt. This paper ballot backup is a great step forward in securing our election process here in Delaware and was made possible by groups like Common Cause Delaware and the League of Women Voters who pushed for verified voting here in Delaware. While It is wonderful to see our electoral process improving, there’s still much work to do before all voters in our state have equal access to the polls. Voting issues have been in the news a lot lately - the safety concerns and long lines in Wisconsin, the closure of polling places Georgia and Kentucky which disproportionately affected people of color and low-income voters, not to mention the fears of election tampering in the November 2020 e...

A Portmanteau of June and Nineteenth, Juneteenth is the oldest celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. It commemorates the day that Federal Troops took control of Galveston, TX and informed the enslaved there that they were free. Though this event took place two and a half years after they were formally freed by the signing of the  Emancipation Proclamation, slaves were not informed by their masters in order to gain illegal as well as immoral labor from them.   Once the freed slaves heard the news many left to seek opportunities in the north or look for family in neighboring states but all slaves rejoiced.  Celebrations and commemorations began the next year in 1866. “Jubilee Day,” as Juneteenth was known then, focused on community celebrations in church and political rallies for enfranchisement.  As many freedmen were barred from public and segregated places such as parks, Black Americans had to purchase their own land in order to celebrate. Houston’...