“He took away the fear”
She approached Bevel and asked him if his vision would include a place for same-sex couples.
“He said that it wouldn’t,” she said.
She called it “an eye-opener for me about solidarity intersectionality” that someone like Bevel, “who had been such a freedom fighter when it came to racial justice wasn’t at that place when it came to LGBTQ rights.”
“Of all the conversations we had with civil rights leaders on that trip, this was the one that stuck with me over time,” Wesley recalled recently.
“I didn’t know anything about his history at the time, some of which would come out subsequently, but I remember how clear what I was witnessing, in that dynamic between him and [his wife, Erica Henry] on the stage did not speak to me about my understanding of civil rights or justice or relations between people.
“I have the memory of their dynamic and how uncomfortable it made me feel as a young woman witnessing it and the cognitive dissonance between having been introduced to someone as a champion of justice and seeing that dynamic play out.”