The National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays (NCBLG) was the United States' first national organization for African American and Third World gay rights. The NCBLG was organized by A. Billy S. Jones, and Delores P. Berry in Columbia, Maryland in the spring of 1978 to provide a national advocacy forum for African American gay men and lesbians at a time when no other organization existed to express their views. The organizers were motivated in part by the belief that existing gay and lesbian organizations did not represent the views and experience of African Americans. The new organization quickly gave rise to local organizations in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland, and other cities across the U.S. NCBG's creation was contemporaneous with new visibility and activism on the part of African American gay men and lesbians. In 1979, NCBG was the primary organizer of the Third World Conference held simultaneously with the first March on Washington for gay rights (October 12–14, 1979).
In contrast to other Washington, D.C.-based gay rights organizations' opposition to the march, NCBG's support for the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights smoothed the way for the event in Washington. Jones served as logistical director of the organizing committee for the march until the month before the event when he turned his attention to organizing the Third World Conference.
It was one of the first organizations to initiate HIV/AIDS prevention efforts in the black community, including pamphlets that used coded terms familiar in the black community with men who would never identify with the gay community.
NCBG added Lesbian to its name in 1984 to become the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, but by 1986, several key leaders had left, and eventually the group (without any official announcement) faded out of existence.
- ↑ Gilberto R. Gerald, The Down Low: New jargon, sensationalism, or agent of change?, March 26, 2007
- ↑ "NCBLG: Making History", p.2, by Sidney Brinkley; at Blacklight Online, accessed 25 July 2010
- "National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays" at the website of the course "The LGBTQ Civil Rights Movement 1960 - 1990: Exploring History and Current Consequences" at University of Wisconsin-Madison; accessed 18 August 2010.
|This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays. The list of authors can be seen in the . As with LGBT Info, the text of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.|