No Pride For Some of Us Without Liberation For All of Us (Marsha P. Johnson)

In celebrating Pride month, outside of a New Season grocery store in Tualitan, Oregon, there was a rainbow sign with the message "No Pride For Some of Us Without Liberation For All of Us. Marsha P. Johnson."

There was a lot being said in that sign. So much was going on in the sign that I stopped and took a picture of it, with the intent of doing exactly what I am doing: writing about it. 

The phrase reminds me of Alexandre Dumas and the Three Musketeers expression, "One for all and all for one." Or the Apostle Paul writes to the church in Corinth, "If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it" (1 Cor. 12:26, NRSV). There is a theme of solidarity, unity in diversity, an inseparable bond between people, come hell or high water.

Let's begin with the author of the phrase Marsha P. Johnson, a well-known gay civil rights leader, who was in Stonewall Inn the night it was famously raided by the police in June 1969. She, along with other drag queens, pushed back against the police practice of leveraging a payout in order that no problems would come to those LGBTQIA + people in the Stonewall Inn in the evenings. It was a bribe. A payoff. When the LGBTQIA+ people pushed back, the police set fire to the Stonewall Inn. At 2 am in the morning, she famously threw a shot glass against the broken mirror in the bar and declared that she had her human rights. It was recorded as the "shot glass heard around the world."

The result of this riot at the Stonewall Inn was the first Pride demonstration, then march, and years to come, parade, for the LGBTQIA+, to declare, still, to the world, that we LGBTQIA+ people still have our civil rights. 

More to the point, though, is the message: No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us. This is a higher, critical consciousness and awareness of how oppression of one minority group effects other minority groups as well. To go back to Paul and paraphrase his message to the church in Corinth, if one minority group is celebrated, then all minority groups should be celebrated. If one minority group is oppressed, then all of us in various minority groups are oppressed. 

In this month called "Pride," we have a lot of minority groups within the LGBTQIA+ community who are being singled out and oppressed by Republican state legislatures and many Republican governors, namely those in the transgender community. But there is also the reminder of intersectionality: there is also oppression of people because of one's race, one's gender, one's socioeconomic class, one's ability or disability, or one's age, or religion, to name a few. 

No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.

We've got some work to do in this world during not only "Pride month," in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. That arc of justice only dips when we do the work of justice. 

No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.

May it be so.