For each of the four weeks of Black History Month, I will discuss a different figure in Black American LGBT history. This week is about Ernestine Eckstein.
Ernestine Eckstein was a prominent Black and lesbian activist. She was active first in the civil rights movement before realizing she was a lesbian in the first half of the 1960s and subsequently getting involved with the gay rights movements of the time. She soon became a leader of the New York City chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, a major early lesbian civil rights organization. At the time, she was one of the only visible Black gay rights activists.
She was also one of the more radical of the Black and gay civil rights activists. What that meant, in that period, was that she supported visibility in the first place. Many of the things we take for granted now were seen as radical even by other minorities at the time. Picketing — a legal, nonviolent activity where you hold signs and shout slogans to draw attention to something — was often seen as too far. Many gay people at the time just wanted to live a double life in peace (at least, those that had the ability to live a double life in the first place). Black activists often didn’t support public protests as well, feeling that the ire that they provoked outweighed any help they proffered. Eckstein felt differently; she felt that public demonstrations were necessary to draw attention to the injustice that Black Americans and gay Americans were subjected to by society.
Most of the information we have on Eckstein’s views and life come from a 1966 interview she did with The Ladder, a magazine published by the Daughters of Bilitis. While she supported public demonstrations, she did not feel like civil disobedience was right for the gay rights movement at the time. While months earlier, the civil disobedience of Black civil rights activists led to the nationwide shock at the brutality of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Eckstein believed that the time was not yet right for civil disobedience for the gay rights movement. This was roughly three years before the Stonewall riots inspired outrage and courage in gay communities across the country, culminating nationwide in increased civil rights and rapidly growing acceptance.
Near the end of her interview with The Ladder, Eckstein makes a prescient suggestion:
Q. Are there any ways in which you feel our movement should emulate other movements more?
A. I don’t find in the homophile movement enough stress on courtroom action. I would like to see more test cases in courts, so that our grievances can be brought out into the open. That’s one of the ways for a movement to gain exposure, a way that’s completely acceptable to everybody.
Courtroom action has led the way on LGBT rights in America, from Lawrence, to Windsor, to Obergefell, to Bostock. Each of these landmark Supreme Court decisions only occurred after decades of push through legislatures and courts at the lower level. By bringing their grievances out into the open and exposing them to larger audiences, it laid the groundwork for some of the biggest successes in modern American political history.
You can read more about Ernestine Eckstein in her interview with The Ladder here (PDF) and in this article from LGBTQ Nation.