Speaking before a crowded room of historically Black college presidents who had gathered at an HBCU Summit sponsored by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities in 2014, Sharon J. Lettman-Hicks took to the podium to issue a harsh warning.
“The public eye is on HBCUs,” Lettman-Hicks, the chief executive officer for the National Black Justice Coalition (NJBC), told the leaders who had assembled in an Atlanta hotel ballroom on that summer afternoon in June to listen to her keynote address. “We have to stop otherizing our LGBT community.”
The past few years had been particularly trying for the LGBTQ movement in general and Black colleges in particular. The 2011 death of Robert Champion had been weighing heavily on Lettman-Hicks’ mind. Sadly, the 26-year-old gay Florida A&M (FAMU) marching band drum major had been hazed to death by fellow band members.
“Black LGBT are Black people, too,” an angry Lettman-Hicks told the college presidents in a fiery speech. “But within Black spaces, they are often regulated to second-class citizenry.”
In an era where attitudes are shifting — albeit slowly — when it comes to securing rights for LGBTQ people, Lettman-Hicks has emerged as a national voice for inclusiveness, barnstorming the country to push HBCU leaders to step up their games by addressing the visages of homophobia still visible on their college campuses.
It’s a struggle for sure, given that many HBCUs — both public and private — are deeply rooted, by tradition and customs, to the Black church. “Publicly, our position is straightforward and clear: We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” one HBCU president who asked to remain anonymous told Diverse in 2014. “But I would be lying if I said that we’ve done everything in our power to stamp out the vestiges of bigotry based on sexual orientation.
We’ve got a long way to go, and there is a lot of resistance from senior administrators, members of the board and many of our alumni, who are now parents.”
