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The Murder of Anti-Racist Activist June Knightly; Walidah Imarisha on Oregon's racist history; & The Portland LGBTQ Community Responds to Racism and Reaction
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Out-FM is a weekly progressive queer show on listener-sponsored, noncommercial WBAI/Pacifica Radio. It airs at 99.5 and wbai.org, generally on Tuesdays from 8-9 PM. Please support us by donating to WBAI. Become a member for $25 or a BAI Buddy (sustainer) for $5/month or more. Or give to our Tower Fund https://wbai.wedid.it/campaigns/10022-tower-fund/. Or go to wbai.org or call 212-209-2950 and let WBAI management know you listen to Out-FM by supporting the station with a donation. Be sure and mention us when you donate.
Sign up for Out-FM's Weekly Newsletter with show announcements.
Tune into Out-FM on Tues., March 29, 2022 from 8:00-9:00pm, on 99.5FM WBAI/NY & listen at https://www.wbai.org/listen-live/
June Knightly, organizer assassinated in Portland (Instagram)
The Murder of Anti-Racist Lesbian Activist June Knightly
June Knightly, a 60-year-old white activist in the LGBTQ community who fought alongside the Black Lives Matter movement, was assassinated by a racist reactionary in Portland, Oregon in late February. She and 4 others were shot in cold blood as their attacker tried to stop them from aiding Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
Walidah Imarisha
Walidah Imarisha on Oregon's Racist History
Walidah Imarisha discusses the long history of white supremacy and Black exclusion in Oregon, from the 1840s to the present. She is a director of the Center for Black Studies and Assistant Professor in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University. More at: walidah.com
Debra Porta, Pride Organizer in Portland
The Portland LGBTQ Community Responds to Racism and Reaction
Debra Porta is executive director of Pride Northwest, which runs the Portland Pride Festival and Parade. She discusses the years of abuse endured by the LGBTQ community, including its Black and Brown members, by the city and vigilante right-wing forces.
Celebrating the late gay radical Jerry Meyer
- Details
Out-FM is a weekly progressive queer show on listener-sponsored, noncommercial WBAI/Pacifica Radio. It airs at 99.5 and wbai.org, generally on Tuesdays from 8-9 PM. Please support us by donating to WBAI. Become a member for $25 or a BAI Buddy (sustainer) for $5/month or more. Or give to our Tower Fund https://wbai.wedid.it/campaigns/10022-tower-fund/. Or go to wbai.org or call 212-209-2950 and let WBAI management know you listen to Out-FM by supporting the station with a donation. Be sure and mention us when you donate.
Sign up for Out-FM's Weekly Newsletter with show announcements.
Tune into Out-FM on Tues., March 22, 2022 from 8:00-9:00pm, on 99.5FM WBAI/NY & listen at https://www.wbai.org/listen-live/
Prof Jerry Meyer, Gay Radical
Tune in to Out-FM on WBAI.org, 99.5 FM, on Tuesday from 8-9 PM when we will remember and honor the heroic life of Jerry Meyer, a highly accomplished historian, scholar, communist activist, and, later, an out-gay man, who defined his life around solidarity with oppressed people. He died last November at the age of 80. Jerry devoted much of his life to the fight to preserve and strengthen Hostos Community College, a unit of the City University of New York or CUNY in the South Bronx, where he taught history and organized activists. Hosted by Bob Lederer as part of our Queerly Defiant series about queers who faced consequences for their fight to win peace, justice, and human rights.
On the program, Out-FM's Bob Lederer will interview two of Jerry's dear friends and colleagues, Wally Edgecombe, retired director of the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, and William Casari, Associate Professor and College Archivist at Hostos.
According to an article last year eulogizing Jerry in The Clarion, newspaper of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union at CUNY that he helped build, "Gerald Meyer..was more than just a scholar of NYC radical activism. He lived the values he researched and taught." And longtime Puerto Rican independentista and former New Yorker Dylcia Pagan, who spent 19 years as a political prisoner, wrote, “A true supporter of our struggle for national liberation. Jerry Vive!” Dylcia’s sentiment has been shared by many Puerto Rican independence activists.
The article in The Clarion describes Jerry’s first political protest at age 15, in 1955, when his Catholic school nun teacher caught him with a book opposing Senator Joe McCarthy's Red Scare and the teacher warned the rest of her class not to speak with Jerry. He threw his books on the floor and walked out of the room, never to return. “That was very liberating,” Jerry said years later.
He went on to speak out against McCarthyism and circulated petitions for racial integration of his all-white school in Hoboken, NJ.
In the 1960s he joined Civil Rights freedom rides and organized demonstrations against the Vietnam War. In 1971 Jerry was one of hundreds who went to jail for 8 days for violating a court injunction by joining a protest supporting the 11-week strike by members of the Newark Teachers Union – even though Jerry was not a member himself.
In 1973, Jerry divorced his wife and came out as a gay man. He also joined the Communist Party USA, which he had been close to for a long time, but left within several months for reasons unknown to his friends. However, it is interesting to note that the Party – from the 1930s until the 1990s - had a firm policy forbidding membership by openly gay and lesbian people and an official view that homosexuality was both a security risk as far as state repression and a form of bourgeois decadence. Interestingly, 11 years before Jerry came out, in 1962, as an undergraduate at Rutgers, the liberal club in which he was active invited as a speaker a member of the Mattachine Society, the primary reform and support organization for gay men and lesbians in the pre-Stonewall era. This was a daring act to do during that homophobic period.
Turning to Jerry Meyer’s academic career, in 1972 he was hired as an assistant professor of Behaviorial and Social Sciences at Hostos Community College and quickly became a leading voice for students and faculty. The school’s first home -- for many years until the successful struggles led by Jerry -- was a shabby refurbished tire factory. Later that year, Jerry became founding chair of the school chapter of the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing faculty and staff.