Opinions
Wake up! Listen to black student protesters
Recent events at Mizzou recall a life-changing 1992 episode at Penn State
University of Missouri (Photo by AdamProcter; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
The issue of race relations on college campuses reemerged last week following highly publicized incidents at Yale and the University of Missouri that triggered protests at schools across the country. Much of the reaction and commentary included patronizing remarks that minimized and trivialized the plight of African-American and other minority students navigating life on majority-white campuses.
At Missouri, students protested a string of racist incidents that were largely ignored by administrators, leading to the resignation of University of Missouri System President Tim Wolfe and Columbia campus Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin. They stepped down only after the football team threatened a boycott, jeopardizing lucrative sports revenue for the school. The athletes’ brave act of defiance should be a template for students elsewhere looking for creative and effective ways to fight back against apathetic administrators.
Meanwhile, at Yale, a black undergraduate student claimed that she was barred from a fraternity’s “white girls only” party. Sigma Alpha Epsilon denied the report. In another incident, a faculty member was accused of racial insensitivity after defending students’ right to wear potentially offensive Halloween costumes. The seemingly isolated incidents at Yale and Mizzou have proven anything but, with solidarity protests being staged across the country.
Leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predictably sided with the status quo. “I think the two people that resigned are weak, ineffective people,” he told Fox News. Ben Carson assailed the “politically correct police” for the resignations.
Numerous publications and commentators have weighed in, belittling the students and ignoring the larger issues. This isn’t about Halloween costumes or the coddling of spoiled elites who miss their helicopter parents. It’s about the disparate treatment of minority students everywhere who face real obstacles to obtaining their education and degrees that are mostly unknown to their white counterparts.
The recent incidents call to mind my own eye-opening experience with race issues as a student at Penn State University in 1992, where I served as editorial page editor for the Daily Collegian student newspaper.
Back then, Penn State saw protests led by black students decrying low minority enrollment and inadequate efforts by the university to retain minority students. There were sit-ins and street demonstrations. One of my regular columnists, a black student, penned a column titled, “African Americans should not trust devilish white people.” It contained some harsh language and warnings to fellow black students to bear arms to defend themselves. “White people are irredeemable racists, who have never loved or cared about black people,” he wrote.
The column wasn’t the most profound or original take on race, but it certainly reflected the genuine fear and isolation that many black students felt on campus. One black friend told me that when traveling to campus from home, he gassed up his car in New York City and didn’t stop again until he pulled into his dorm four and a half hours later, ever fearful of having to make an unexpected stop in rural Pennsylvania along the way to State College.
The university was overwhelmingly white, with just 3.1 percent black enrollment. Many students were from small towns with zero black population. I had a roommate who had never met a black person before arriving on campus. When he saw a photo of me with my black prom date from high school, he said, “You took a black girl to prom?! What did your parents say?”
Such was the atmosphere for minority students. And so when I edited the column, I knew it would get a lot of attention on campus but I was young and naïve and had no idea the maelstrom that it would trigger. On the day it was published, I received an early morning phone call at my apartment from the newspaper office. “Kevin, you need to get down here. There are protesters picketing the office.”
When I arrived, there were two white students pacing in front of my office carrying signs bearing crosshairs that read, “White Man, Shoot Here.” It was startling but hardly a mass protest. I dismissed it as minor and went about my day. Later, I got a call from an Associated Press reporter in Harrisburg who’d heard about the protest. I explained that it was a brief demonstration by just two people. He wrote a story that moved across the AP state wire that night while I was still in the office. Our news editor flagged it for me. It read that our offices were besieged by a “wave of protests” following publication of the column. I was disappointed by the irresponsible sensationalism of the AP writer but it was only the state wire. Not a huge deal. Later that night, the story moved across the national AP wire and appeared in every major newspaper in the country the next morning. All hell broke loose.
The office phones rang incessantly. Penn State administrators denounced us in the media as a “hate publication.” Student organizations yanked their advertising. Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jesse and Geraldo called seeking interviews with the author and me. The story was covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and every media critic and major news outlet. Death threats began arriving to our offices. The author’s life was threatened in a flier distributed across campus with a rifle’s crosshairs superimposed across his photo. I received a death threat at my apartment from the Ku Klux Klan, which operated in a nearby town. The police visited my office offering protection. Alumni canceled donations to the university and administrators searched for ways to retaliate against the newspaper, which is an independent corporation unaffiliated with Penn State. Professors denounced our actions openly in classes. Collegian staffers were harassed on the streets.
Despite all the fear mongering in the media about us instigating a “race war at Penn State,” the only violence we saw came in the form of death threats against newspaper staff. It’s surreal to turn on the radio or TV and hear your name being trashed by commentators. I was labeled a “drug addict,” “racist,” “crazy” and worse. I lost a job offer because of the uproar.
All this because I’d defended a black staff member who’d written a column from a place of fear and isolation. Yes, he wrote some inflammatory things. But on a college campus, students deserve a wide berth when exploring complicated and emotional issues for the first time on their own. As former Yale University President Benno Schmidt once said, “A university ought to be the last place where people are inhibited by fear of punishment from expressing ignorance or even hate, so long as others are left free to answer.”
It was a life-changing experience and I wish every practicing journalist could walk for a day in the shoes of someone being castigated by the national media. It taught me the importance of fairness. Words matter and they can hurt when applied recklessly.
Fast-forward nearly a quarter century, and to my dismay students are still grappling with the same issues of racism and low minority enrollment and retention. Indeed, the list of grievances from University of Missouri students is strikingly similar to a list compiled by students in the 1960s. As the Huffington Post reported last week, “The 1969 list expressed concern about the ‘nonchalant attitude on the part of the university,’ saying it made it ‘a haven for comprehensive institutionalized racist and political repression.’ Those feelings were echoed by many protesters this week.”
Instead of dismissing these students’ concerns, we should listen and help. The condescending response from Trump, the Wall Street Journal editorial board and others ignores the genuine fears of students who face threats of violence and racist epithets — one of which was scrawled in human excrement at Missouri.
Often it’s the covert manifestations of racism that sting most, like the indifferent response of administrators and media critics. Or the persistent problems with retaining minority students and faculty at major universities that are instead focused on building multi-billion dollar endowments while neglecting needs of current students.
There are no easy solutions to these entrenched problems, but we’ve seen the result of propagating the status quo, from Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond. At the very least, we can listen to these students respectfully and engage with them. Football players don’t boycott games and students don’t initiate hunger strikes for kicks or attention. The problems are real. As Spike Lee implored us in his 1988 film “School Daze,” “Wake up!”
Kevin Naff is editor of the Washington Blade. Reach him at [email protected].
Opinions
‘Hidden in Plain Sight:’ The story of Odessa Madre
A queer U Street criminal, entrepreneur, and wealthy Black woman
The liquor was flowing, the dice were rolling and the women were plentiful. Down on 14th Street in the U Street corridor in 1946, at Club Madre, your thirst could be quenched and your vices satisfied. At the center of it all was a large, dark-skinned woman whose taste for mink, money, and power made her larcenous — and legendary.
Look at photos of Odessa Madre, clothed head-to-toe in fur, hair freshly curled, and her eyes dared you to question her prowess. Her mischievous smile suggested she knew something you didn’t. Here was one of the most successful women in Washington, D.C. — and yet most Washingtonians have never heard of her. Why?
Madre was a big-time numbers runner during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ’50s, when the illegal lottery was booming. For Black Washingtonians, the underground lottery offered a chance to get ahead economically when segregation made legitimate financial advancement nearly impossible. Those who ran the game always seemed to be making money — and Madre was one of the most successful, with the hustle, resources and smarts to become one of the richest women in the city. Yet she nearly became a footnote in D.C. history, remembered mostly by a small plaque on U Street where her mugshot is captioned: “This was D.C.’s Al Capone.”
Why does someone like her nearly disappear from history? And when someone is erased — what is lost?
Madre graduated from Dunbar High School, the segregated school for African Americans renowned for producing students who went on to earn advanced degrees and returned to teach. The expectation was that if you looked and spoke the “right” way, a respectable job — teaching, civil service — awaited. Those jobs were also often reserved for women who fit a certain mold. As Professor Sharon Harley writes in “Sister Circle: Black Women and Work,” Madre’s turn to criminal life was fueled in part by “deep feelings of rejection by the Washington color-conscious Black middle class.” She didn’t fit the mold. So she built her own path.
She aligned herself with people she was never supposed to befriend — Italian and Irish men who ran the city’s underworld — and turned selling moonshine into a calling card. Childhood friends who became police officers looked out for her, and she looked out for them.
Madre never married and had no interest in men. She kept a steady crew of attractive women close, and accounts suggest she had relationships with women — relationships that would hardly have been acknowledged publicly at the time. Her rejection of the era’s social expectations meant she was never bound by a marriage that could have curbed her ambition, or a divorce that could have wrecked her financially. Her independence gave her a level of control over her life that few women of her era experienced.
Eventually, police stings, betrayals and a government eager to legalize the lottery for itself squeezed the life out of the underground game. Madre’s luck ran out. She died penniless — her funeral paid for by street friends and a detective or two who had quietly admired her hustle for years.
Why does any of this matter? Because it’s a clear-eyed look at what it takes to chase the American Dream when the front door is locked. History can be ugly — but sanitizing it doesn’t make it less true.
Odessa Madre was a criminal, entrepreneur, hustler, queer woman, Dunbar graduate, numbers runner, wealthy Black woman, friend to police, lawbreaker and product of segregation — all at once.
Her story is a reminder that the truth about Jim Crow, and who survived it and how, is more complicated — and more honest — than any diluted version of history could be.
My documentary, “Odessa’s Reign,” is an attempt to give her the fuller portrait she never received in her lifetime. Madre’s path challenges us to think about identity, place and memory: who gets remembered, and why their stories matter.
Robin Hamilton is a filmmaker and journalist and director of ‘Odessa’s Reign.’ There will be a screening and community conversation, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: The Story of Odessa Madre,’ on Friday, Oct. 30 at Busboys and Poets at 14th and V streets, 6-8:30 p.m. Learn more at www.aroundrobin.com.
Opinions
Solidarity beyond the parade: the actual cost of Pride
Chandreyi Guharay spoke with activists at World Pride in Amsterdam
Editor’s note: Chandreyi Guharay is the global advocacy officer for Walking the Talk. She spoke with queer activists from around the world at World Pride 2026 in Amsterdam about the impact of shrinking aid.
Queer activists and Dutch NGOs gathered at Amsterdam City Hall as part of “Building Bridges,” a World Pride 2026 visitor program for LGBTIQ+ community leaders run by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and COC Nederland.
Pride is every day, everywhere
Although we were in Amsterdam, the work back home never stops for activists. Enkhmaa Enkhbold, executive director of the LGBT Center in Mongolia, excused themself a couple of times to check their phone.
“We’re organizing Pride in Mongolia, and it’s happening in two weeks,” they explained.
Among many other things, their organization drives policy advocacy and movement building for LGBTIQ+ rights, and helps queer people facing persecution find a safe way out.
John Mathenge Mukaburu is also doing the daily work of resistance. His organization HOYMAS in Kenya runs clinics across three counties, serving almost 20,000 patients from key populations, including gay and bisexual men and sex workers. In Nigeria, Cosmas Osinachi Ihenacho-Herbert, program director at Obodo, shared how they are changing the narrative by elevating the leading role queer people play in shaping art and culture across the country and the African continent.
And in Vietnam, Nguyễn Diệu Anh co-founded Yêu-nữ (Women Living Wicked), a sapphic collective that hosts regular gatherings where women have a place to find joy and each other. Whether it’s healthcare, protection, culture or belonging, these efforts keep communities alive. Still, they have never been properly funded.
Less funding, more backlash
As an advocate for gender equality and a queer activist myself, I know how much LGBTIQ+ movements do with so little. Even before the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the funding cuts across other major donor countries, just $.04 cents of every $100 in Official Development Assistance (ODA) went to queer communities. Now even that is rapidly disappearing. And what little there is doesn’t land evenly. As trans activist Marcela Morales from Asociación Lambda in Guatemala emphasized: “Most of the funding goes to gay men’s and trans women’s organizations. Very little reaches organizations of trans men and LBQ women.”
But this isn’t just about money. The same politics driving these cuts are shrinking civic space everywhere. Anti-rights actors are growing richer and bolder, finding new ways to target LGBTIQ+ people, as my colleague Jordan Dittmar has written. Queer and feminist activists defend the right to protest, to speak and love freely, to put care for people and the planet at the center and to decide over our own bodies and lives. And yet our rights are always the easiest target, and our funding the first to be cut. We are the canary in the coal mine, and everyone else’s freedoms are never far behind. That should worry all of us.
A lifeline built on solidarity
Bessy Ferrera was a trans activist from Honduras who fought for the rights of trans people, sex workers and people living with HIV, and whose life was violently cut short in 2019. A year later, Hivos established the Bessy Ferrera Emergency Fund in her name. It offers fast, practical help to LGBTIQ+ activists facing threats because of their work, from medical and legal costs to security and relocation. Since 2022, it has helped nearly 100 people and organizations around the world.
When I mentioned the fund to Ribal Maatouk, national chairperson of the LGBTIQ+ Task Force in Lebanon, he told me he already knew it well. Through Israel’s devastating invasion and war, the Task Force, alongside its member organizations, notably specialized local LGBTIQ+ CSOs, have continued to provide humanitarian support to queer people.
“From all the funding initiatives, the Bessy Ferrera Fund was the most easily accessible for our community, allowing for a faster deployment of emergency support than other organizations,” he said. “I need to give credit where it’s due.”
Hope for the long haul
Emergency funds provide a vital lifeline during a crisis, but activists and their movements also need lasting support. For Cosmas, the lesson is hopeful: governments change with elections, and funding changes with them, but movements can outlast both. For activists in the Global South, that has often been the reality.
“Maybe the question is not how we survive this crisis,” he said, “But how we build a movement infrastructure that’s strong enough for us to thrive through whatever comes next.”
He also sees an opening: with the U.S. stepping back, the Netherlands could once again be the champion of gender equality and LGBTIQ+ rights it used to be. With a new Dutch government in place, there are signs of greater political will, and now is the moment to turn it into funding.
What comes after the parade
The activists I met have been holding their communities together, standing alongside feminist and queer movements everywhere to defend rights and freedoms for all. As we often say in the gender equality movement, imagine what they could do with the right support. Solidarity beyond the parade means that governments, funders and allies invest in queer aspirations.
Chandreyi Guharay is a Nicaraguan-Indian gender justice specialist by training, and — in Sara Ahmed’s words — a feminist killjoy by political choice. She’s the Global Advocacy Officer at Walking the Talk/Hivos, weaving together strategic advocacy, policy analysis and coalition-building for gender equality financing. She’s previously worked with Oxfam, Plan International, She Decides, CIVICUS, and Share-Net on research, organizational development and political education. Outside of work, you’ll find her co-conspiring with Feministas en Holanda, a decolonial grassroots collective of Latin American people in the Netherlands, where she is a community organizer around anti-racist and migrant justice struggles.
Opinions
Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin are all war criminals
We are living in a world of chaos as a result
Today there are war criminals leading three major governments. President Trump here in the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. The world would be a better place if they were thrown into a jail cell together, and the key tossed away.
We are living in a world of chaos. Although these three are not responsible for all of it, they have a major role. All three are carrying out wars that they can’t win. Wars that should have never been started. In the process they are not only killing their stated enemies, but they’re also causing the deaths of their own people.
Here in the United States, we have a felon in the White House, who has done nothing but create chaos in the world since he took office. He has broken every promise he made to get elected, and while many of us knew they were all lies, he won anyway. He promised lower rents, lower mortgage rates, lower inflation, lower gas prices, lower grocery prices, and importantly, no new wars. He has accomplished the exact opposite in each of those areas. He began a war with Iran and started by bombing a school, mistake or not, killing innocent children. This after declaring war on immigrants here at home using his ICE Gestapo. He apparently thinks if he creates chaos, and then gets things back to close to where they were before he acted, he can claim victory. But even that seems out of his reach.
Then there is Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel. His actions have made things worse not only for his enemies, but for Israelis at home, and Jews around the world. He began a war against Iran that he can’t win. He has committed war crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and the West Bank, and by his actions brought out more anti-Semitism around the world. For me personally, he has made it more difficult to explain to people when I say I am a Zionist, it means I support the existence of the State of Israel, not its war criminal leader, and his government. He should have heeded what President Biden said to him after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. While retribution and getting back the hostages Hamas took was crucial, Biden counseled not to go overboard in response, like the United States did after 9/11. Instead, Netanyahu has killed thousands of Palestinian women and children, and has not made Israel much safer. He then began the war with Iran, and sent troops to fight in Lebanon. Yes, the Iranian government funds Hezbollah and Hamas, but one must ask if anything is better after Netanyahu’s actions. Israelis continue living in a state of active war.
Then there is Putin in Russia. He believed he could attack Ukraine and walk away with pieces of their country, maybe even all of it. Instead, he has Russia embroiled in a four-year war, killing thousands of Ukrainians, including many women and children, destroying parts of their country, and losing thousands of his own troops in a war he can’t win. His own people are suffering, and now, four years later, Ukraine has shown it still has the ability to attack Moscow. All three of these men have managed to show the weaknesses of their own countries.
In his effort to bluster through his many failures, Trump has destroyed relationships with our allies. It will take years, if ever, for them to trust the United States again. He invaded Venezuela and stole their oil, is starving Cuba, and created unease with Canada and Mexico on our own borders. He thinks this makes him look like a strongman, when it really shows all of his weaknesses. People should remember the treaty he abrogated with Canada and Mexico, was one he negotiated in his first term. Now he invites Chinese President, Xi, to the United States, and gives him the same red-carpet welcome he previously gave to Putin in Alaska, and in both cases, received nothing in return. He tries to keep the press he doesn’t like from having access to him.
All three are facing crucial elections that could severely impact their futures. Only Putin, a true dictator, is assured of winning because he controls the process. Trump is trying to emulate him, to keep from losing the Nov. 3, mid-term elections. Thankfully the courts are trying to stop him. Netanyahu could face being thrown out on Oct. 27, if Israelis do the right thing.
Again, I truly believe putting the three of them in a jail cell together would make our troubled world a little safer, and a much better place.
Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist.
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