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By RHONDA SMITH
Friday, March 25, 2005
WASHINGTON — People who knew Wanda Alston —
gay, straight, rich, poor, black, white — are vowing to keep the human rights
activist’s socially conscious, politically progressive legacy alive.
It is a legacy rooted in giving a voice to the voiceless, they said, whether
they are poverty stricken, addicted to drugs, people of color, or gay, lesbian,
bisexual and transgendered residents of Washington, D.C.
“We all loved Wanda because she got it done for the cause of civil rights,”
District of Columbia Congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said Monday at
Alston’s funeral.
Alston was stabbed to death in her home on March 16. A neighbor was later arrested
and charged with her murder; police said they have ruled out anti-gay bias as
a motive.
Alston, who was born in Newport News, Va., on April 7, 1959, believed civil
rights were indivisible, Norton said. When it came to equal rights, it was all
or nothing — for everybody — not for any one particular group.
Those familiar with Alston’s work and life said she understood deeply the challenges
posed by being an African American, a woman, a former cocaine addict and a lesbian.
After becoming clean and sober, she remained active in the recovery movement
nationwide and reached out to help others who needed her, friends said.
In 2001, Alston recorded her oral history for the Rainbow History Project,
an ongoing effort to document gay and lesbian history in Washington. “I can’t
stop fighting racism, because no matter how old I get I’m still going to be
black,” she said. “I can’t stop fighting [sexism] because no matter how old
I get I’m still going to be a woman. I can’t stop fighting some of the other
‘isms’ I see because I can’t change those things. I’m going to change the culture,
and begin to work with people who want to change the culture.”
Officially, Alston’s political career began in 1992, when a friend, D.C. resident
Marquita Sykes, introduced her to the National Organization for Women. Valerie
Papaya Mann said she remembers when a youthful Alston would attend Sapphire
Sapphos meetings and sit quietly and listen. The now-defunct organization supported
black lesbians.
Mann, an international consultant on HIV/AIDS issues, described Alston as strong,
feisty and opinionated and said she possessed self-taught political savvy. “I
saw her up there with the big boys, attending meetings, setting policy,” Mann
said. “She took the steps that a lot of us weren’t willing to take. Or we were
willing, but just tired.”
At NOW, from 1992 to 1996, Alston worked as then-President Patricia Ireland’s
executive assistant and as a special projects director. Her first major project
at NOW involved helping organize its 1992 March for Women’s Lives. Alston also
helped NOW organize other national marches on Washington and while there served
as the staff liaison to Rev. Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition.
“It wasn’t until I got to NOW and I started reading the case studies and I
started listening to what the work was about that I said, yeah, I was a victim
… I was victimized all my life behind this bullshit called racism, sexism and
homophobia,” Alston told the Rainbow History Project. “I put names on my pain.
I had not done that. If there was anything that changed my life more than my
sexuality, it was understanding that there was a place to take my pain. I wasn’t
alone, and that was a beautiful thing about being at NOW.”
At Alston’s funeral Monday, March 21, Ireland said that while at NOW Alston
learned how to “harness her energy. Along the way, I watched Wanda blossom …
into one of the most determined, courageous and best people I know.”
Alice Cohan, the current political director of the Feminist Majority, who also
worked with Alston at NOW, echoed this sentiment when she spoke Saturday at
another public gathering to mourn the loss of her friend.
“Wanda was an organizer par excellent,” Cohan said. “She could convince and
cajole. There wasn’t an action she didn’t love … whatever the issue might be.
She was a scrappy old kid. And sexism was one of the major issues she felt had
to be changed.”
Alston told the Rainbow History Project that the highlight of her career came
in September 1995, when she co-led a NOW delegation to Beijing for the United
Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, where Alston talked about lesbianism.
She left NOW in 1996 to explore other career options, including a stint at the
Human Rights Campaign, and held several positions in the District of Columbia
government before becoming special assistant to the mayor for lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender affairs in November 2001.
Carlene Cheatam, a longtime gay civil rights advocate who worked with Alston
at the D.C. Coalition, a black gay political group, as well as in local government,
praised her for expanding the GLBT affairs position. Cheatam also once held
the job.
“I had my challenges with my sister. But even when I disagreed, you had to
appreciate the person,” Cheatam said. “Each of us has to do a little bit more
so that nothing she started will fall.”
Wanda Alston, director of Mayor
Anthony Williams’ Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender
Affairs, was discovered slain in her home by her partner. Police ruled the
death a homicide. (Photo by Rudy K. Lawidjaja) |
Keith Boykin, an author and the former executive director of the National Black
Gay & Lesbian Leadership Forum, echoed Cheatam. “With her fast-talking, quick-thinking,
aggressive style of advocacy, Wanda was the type of person you would want in
your corner in a pinch,” he wrote, hours after learning of her death. “She was
a dynamo, and her presence was inescapable in any room she entered. Whether
you agreed with her or disagreed, you knew where she stood.”
Gay civil rights and HIV/AIDS advocate Ernest Hopkins, met Alston in 1991 and
described her as a quintessential grassroots activist. “She was an insider and
outsider who relished both roles,” he said Saturday. “She was not afraid to
argue. We were able to have serious disagreements and come together on issues
of mutual concern.”
Alston successfully pushed to create a mayoral Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
& Transgender Affairs. Mayor Anthony Williams signed an executive order in September
2004 creating the office and tapped Alston, then his special assistant for LGBT
Affairs, to head it. The mayor granted the office cabinet-level status, which
meant Alston would serve in his cabinet and attend cabinet meetings with all
city department and agency heads.
“Some things are worth fighting for, and we’ve certainly had our differences
over the years,” Rick Rosendall, vice president for political affairs for the
Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, D.C., said of Alston on March
19. “But the end result is unless people step up the way she did, we’re not
going to move anywhere.”
In November 2003, Alston faced opposition from members of the Gertrude Stein
Democratic Club, another gay political group. Its leaders called on the mayor
to reprimand her for declining to support a proposal to designate two reserved
seats for the club on the city’s Democratic State Committee, which had voted
down the proposal in October.
Alston, a member of the committee, abstained from the vote, drawing criticism
from Stein Club members. In a letter to Williams, Stein Club President Brad
Lewis said the committee’s decision not to approve the seats showed the committee
failed to recognize the club as “the city’s GLBT Democratic organization.”
“Given these facts,” Lewis wrote, “we would like to request that you actively
and publicly support the Stein Club’s representation on the DSC and that you
reprimand Wanda Alston for failing to assess the needs of the GLBT community
and advocate on its behalf.”
Alston called the club’s request that she be reprimanded “ridiculous.” She
said she made it clear to Stein members that she abstained in the State Committee
vote because she favored coupling the Stein seats with seats for other racial
minorities such as Latino and Asian Americans. Alston said she did not support
any one group having a designated seat without other minorities also having
such seats.
A spokesperson for the mayor called the club “out of line” in asking for a
mayoral reprimand for Alston.
On March 19, Lewis said Alston’s passion would be missed.
“It’s a given we’re going to clash,” he said. “But we all had the same goal.”
Gay civil rights advocate Noemi Perez, a former staff member at the now-defunct
Latina/o Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Organization, said Alston was
“tremendously instrumental in making sure that Latinos were represented in D.C.’s
LGBT politics.”
“She came to identify LGBT Latinos as potential appointees, and always made
sure that the community was present at political events,” she said. Perez said
when they attended fund-raisers, “She would grab me by the arm and say, ‘Come
here! I want you to meet someone.’”
Last year, during the presidential campaign, Perez said Alston was the only
Kerry-Edwards staffer willing to go with her to public housing units in Tampa
to register people to vote. “We came out with 72 registered voters and 12 change
of address forms,” Perez said. “At the end of the day, the Kerry-Edwards campaign
had 84 more votes than we would otherwise not have.”
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