Miss Main Griffin-Gracy, a pioneering Black transgender rights advocate who protested on the 1969 Stonewall uprising, has died. She was 78.
Miss Main’s dying was confirmed Monday by House of GG, the Arkansas-based instructional and historic nonprofit she based in 2019.
“She affirmed that our lives maintain which means and that we stand on the shoulders of giants like her, whose brave love and relentless struggle assured our proper to reside with dignity,” the group said in a statement shared on its social media platforms. “We’ll ceaselessly honor her reminiscence, her steadfast presence, and her enduring dedication to our collective liberation.”
The Home of GG additionally shared in its assertion that Miss Main died Monday at her residence in Little Rock, Arkansas, surrounded by her family members. As of Tuesday afternoon, a explanation for dying had not but been launched, though The Advocate reported she’d entered hospice care final week after being hospitalized for a bloodstream an infection.
Nykieria Chaney through Getty Photos
She is survived by her longtime accomplice, Beck Witt Main; sons Asaiah, Christopher and Jonathon; her many daughters; Janetta Johnson, the successor of the Miss Main Alexander L. Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Heart; and sisters Tracie O’Brien and Billie Cooper.
Information of Miss Main’s passing drew an outpouring of tributes from LGBTQ+ rights advocates and organizations.
“Mama Main and I selected one another as household. She was a mentor, a sacred inspiration, a robust, sensible and resilient Black lady who saved it actual and liked on me deeply,” National LGBTQ Task Force President Kierra Johnson wrote in an e mail assertion despatched to JS. “The opening left in my coronary heart by her ascension is immeasurable, and but it fills with the stardust she has left behind. Her magic lives on and we are going to stick with it the struggle in her identify.”
Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings echoed these sentiments, noting in a press release: “For greater than 50 years, Miss Main devoted her life to uplifting probably the most marginalized members of our neighborhood—notably Black transgender girls, previously incarcerated folks, and intercourse employees. She remodeled her lived expertise into fierce advocacy to make sure nobody would face these struggles alone.”
“We decide to carrying ahead her imaginative and prescient of a world the place all transgender folks can reside with dignity, security, and freedom,” the assertion continued.
Born in Chicago, Miss Main relocated to New York in 1962, the place she labored briefly at a hospital morgue. She later turned a intercourse employee, an expertise she documented in her 2023 memoir, “Miss Main Speaks: Conversations With a Black Trans Revolutionary.”
On June 28, 1969, she was among the many many protesters who fought again in opposition to a police raid at New York’s Stonewall Inn as a part of the Stonewall rebellion, which many activists take into account the symbolic begin of the modern-day LGBTQ+ rights motion within the U.S.
“You heard folks within the buildings round there yelling out their home windows on the women beating the police up,” Miss Main recalled in an interview with USA Today earlier this yr. “Some folks yelled out, ‘Go get ’em, women!’ The truth that we had been attacking the police was a giant deal.”
Within the a long time that adopted, she resented the ways in which the trans rights activists who had protested at Stonewall had come to be widely overlooked by historians. “The gays and lesbians have taken over – it turned their riot. For years, I didn’t have something to do with it as a result of I believed they’d overshadowed us,” she told USA Today.
Nonetheless, Miss Main remained dedicated to her advocacy work, and within the Nineteen Eighties turned energetic in addressing the HIV/AIDS disaster, first in New York and later in California. She additionally was the first executive director of the Transgender Gender-Variant and Intersex Justice Venture, a job she held till she retired in 2015, and advocated on behalf of victims of police brutality and trans girls housed in males’s prisons.
“We’ve to eliminate the folks in cost – the 70- and 80-year-olds who maintain us down, who wish to attempt to suppress us. You eliminate them, and we will construct up, and transfer ahead,” she told The Guardian in 2023, when requested concerning the legislative pushback in opposition to trans rights in lots of conservative states. “Individuals have to prepare and get it collectively, and we additionally should vote. I do know the world I wish to reside in. It’s in my head, however I strive my finest to reside it now.”
