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Our Stories Must be Told; Our Faces Must be Seen!
For more than ten years, beginning in 1978, a group of Black activists from urban centers throughout the U.S.A. carried out advocacy, educational and cultural awareness activities as the National Coalition of Black Gays (NCBG) which later became the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (NCBLG). The organization's achievements where many, and they were carried out during a time spanning from the year before the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, in 1979, through the first decade of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic. Among NCBLG's many accomplishments, the organization sponsored the first ever National Conference of LGBT People of Color--The First Third World Conference of Lesbians and Gays (1979) and the first National Conference on AIDS in the Black Community (1986). NCBLG also published several nationally distributed newsletters and news magazines, and maintained a national office in Washington, DC, which was later moved to Detroit, MI before NCGLG disbanded. Get a glimpse of this history through "NCBLG: The First Decade (1988)," a video produced by then Executive Director, Rev. Renee McCoy, written and narrated by Michelle Parkerson, with additional narration provided by Gideon Ferebee and Renee McCoy.
In the Summer of 2010, the founders of NCBLG met in retreat to organize an effort to document the history of NCBLG and the history of the preceding and succeeding periods from the perspectives of Black LGBT/Same Gender Loving (SGL) individuals. This website is intended to serve as virtual exhibit space, and to provide access to electronic copies of historical documents, as a repository for electronic copies of such documents, as well as a tool to support ongoing documentation and research in the interest of preserving and celebrating a history of contributions by Black LGBT individuals to social movements in the US and internationally. Visitors to this site are encouraged to support the project with your tax deductible donations, make use of the information available, follow us on Facebook, and contribute to the information about our history by commenting on our wall.
Sponsors and Contributors
Birthright is indebted to Sabrina Sojourner, of Washington DC, who graciously facilitated the 2010 Founders Retreat that set the wheels in motion for this project.
The Founders of NCBLG, now organized as the Advisors of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC) Sponsored Project-Birthright, have pledged an initial $3,500 as initial seed funds for the project, and invite you to match these resources with your ongoing financial support.