Thousands of New Yorkers gathered in Brooklyn Bridge Park on Friday evening and marched into Manhattan in what was likely the city’s first ever Juneteenth event organized in collaboration with Dyke March. For about four hours, Black queer women along with many others took to the streets to demand justice for Black people killed by the police and a transformation of the criminal legal system.
Coming on the heels of last weekend’s Black Trans Pride March, the Juneteenth for the Break the Chains with Love March was also a moment of reckoning for New York City’s dyke community, an evening in which the leadership and experiences of Black women were placed front and center.
The primary organizer of the event, Valarie Walker, is no strange to New York City’s lesbian community. In a phone call on Friday afternoon, she recalled helping to organize the city’s first Dyke March, which occurred in June 1993.
Walker was also active with ACT-UP, and it was through that work that she had an especially distressing encounter with the police that rushed into the group of activists she was protesting with outside a station house. Protesters came after one of their comrades had been arrested and was being denied their medication. Walker said that one officer “raised his billy club to smite me from the planet,” but a white man jumped in front of her.
Though in some contexts white people did find ways to fight for her, said Walker, that’s not what happened in the dyke world. “[At first] I thought—because I’m here, a Black queer, I’m marching with all of you white faces, you see my heart... so when it’s time for you to come with me... I’m not even gonna have to ask.”
Yet when people started mobilizing around HIV/AIDS and other issues relevant to the Black community, the white lesbians were nowhere to be found. “That’s one of my legacies of sadness,” said Walker.
It was in late May, after a text exchange with a friend that Walker realized she wanted to organize a Juneteenth march centered around the transformative potential of love. She soon got to work getting the event off the ground. Shortly thereafter, the Dyke March committee reached out to say they wanted to throw their resources and support behind her initiative. “Collaboration with them, for this, just seemed like coming full circle,” said Walker. “It’s healed my heart, during this very, very difficult time.”
After meeting at Jane’s Carousel, the protesters walked up to the Brooklyn Bridge and took the northbound roadway to cross into Manhattan. As people marched, they chanted “Justice for George Floyd! Justice for Breonna Taylor!” and “Hands up, don’t shoot!” Women danced in small groups while participants wove through the crowds to offer snacks, water, and hand sanitizer.
Other Black women and queer people at Friday’s march agreed that white LGBTQ people had not done enough to push for the safety and liberation of their Black peers. A 47-year-old woman who went by T, held hands with her partner as the two marched over the bridge.
"I’m sick of seeing Black women dying, Black women being shot, Black women being harassed, Black trans women being murdered, and no one doing anything,” she said. “Black women started this fucking movement and it's time that some people start fighting for us as much as we've fought for everybody else."
Racism and police violence have had a particular and pernicious impact on Black lesbians or those perceived as such. As early as the 1920s, news outlets depicted Black gay women as criminal, violent, and even murderous, a stereotype that hasn’t yet faded from public view. In 2006, four Black lesbians were accused of assaulting a man. The women maintained they acted in self-defense, though news outlets ran stories with titles like, “Attacks of the Killer Lesbians.”
Self-identified lesbian, bisexual, or transgender girls —many of whom are people of color—are wildly overrepresnted in the juvenile justice system. Police often treat Black queer people who are transmasculine or masculine-presenting in a particularly aggressive manner. Last month, a Black transgender man named Tony McDade was shot and killed by police in Tallahassee, Florida.
While racism and police violence have long affected Black lesbians, these issues were not historically prioritized by those in leadership positions in lesbian communities—namely, white women. Friday’s march may be a sign that things are changing.
Mary, 67, a white woman who lives in Bay Ridge, told Gothamist she’s been to every Dyke March over the past twenty or so years and seen the community evolve, for example on trans issues. “Everybody needs to be free, everybody deserves their happiness,” she said.
Once over the bridge, the group walked to the African Burial Ground National Monument on Broadway around the corner from Foley Square. In 1991, excavators found the remains of over 15,000 free and enslaved Africans at the site, all individuals who lived in colonial New York in the 1600s and 1700s.
Protesters raised their fists in a moment of silence at the monument and then walked towards City Hall. As everyone gathered around for closing remarks, a member of the Dyke March Committee who'd help organize the event, Robyn, 24, cautioned the white participants.
“It’s not enough to show up and march across the bridge,” they said as the crowd roared, “I need you to do the work. I don’t want allies, I want accomplices!”
“It’s not enough to show up and march across the bridge,” she said as the crowd roared, “I need you to do the work. I don’t want allies, I want accomplices!”
For Walker closed out the night by talking about love, the kind that fosters a revolutionary spirit, not complacency, in her mind.
“When I say ‘love,’ I do not mean acquiescence, I do not mean laying down, I mean love that you’re going to still be here when things get uncomfortable,” she explained to Gothamist earlier in the day. “The kind of love that means you're going to stand in front of me for protection, the kind of love that you’re going to move aside and let me stand up front my damn self - that’s what I want.”
