Last year, during the 2017 HistoryMaker Awards ceremony, The History Project awarded the Lavender Rhino Award to Allison Wright, staff attorney at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders. Below is an excerpt of her remarks.

We need more attorneys of color working in this movement. We need more people of color in leadership positions. We need to accept that racial and economic justice are LGBTQ issues, and most importantly, we need to be open to thinking differently about how we do our legal work with communities of color.

Unwillingness to make these changes is what will keep the LGBTQ movement from tackling some of our most urgent issues that strike at the heart of poverty and racism, which impacts so many LGBTQ people of color. Now more than ever, we need our white allies to speak out, act up, sometimes step aside to make room for people of color, and be open to change.

I am still pursuing my dream of being a bad ass litigator because my former client, a Black transgender 19-year-old woman who suffered chronic homelessness, had the courage to stand up to a shelter that denied her equal services. I have not given up because my former client, an LGBTQ activist from Uganda, risked his life and his safety to fight for his people.

I still fight because the mother of my Black transgender client knew her daughter was being treated differently at school because of her race and gender.

I stay in this fight because of my Latinx client, whose struggles with addiction and homelessness did not stop them from challenging a religiously-affiliated service organization’s differential treatment of queer people of color. I accept this award for my clients whose resiliency and courage led to change not only for them but for others in similar circumstances. By accepting this award, I also promise myself and my queer POC family that although I may get tired or angry, lost and dismayed, I will never stop advocating for us.