Sylvia Rivera

Sylvia Rivera was a tireless advocate for those silenced and disregarded by larger movements. Throughout her life, she fought against the exclusion of transgender people, especially transgender people of color, from the larger movement for gay rights.

Rivera was born in New York City in 1951 to a father from Puerto Rico and a mother from Venezuela. She was assigned male at birth. Rivera had an incredibly difficult childhood. Her father was absent and her mother died by suicide when Rivera was 3 years old. Raised by her grandmother, Rivera began experimenting with clothing and makeup at a young age. She was beaten for doing so and, after being attacked on a school playground in sixth grade by another student, suspended from school for a week. Rivera ran away from home at age 11 and became a victim of sexual exploitation around 42nd Street.

In 1963, Rivera met Marsha P. Johnson and it changed her life. Johnson, an African American self-identified drag queen and activist, was also battling exclusion in a movement for gay rights that did not embrace her gender expression.

Throughout the 1970s, Rivera frequently tangled with gay rights leaders who were hesitant to include transgender people in their advocacy work. Rivera also fought against the exclusion of transgender people from the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in New York. The final bill passed in 2002 and prevents discrimination “on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation in employment, housing, public accommodations, education, credit, and the exercise of civil rights.”

Along with Marsha P. Johnson, Rivera started the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) around 1971. The group became a space to organize and discuss issues facing the transgender community in New York City and they also had a building, STAR House, that provided lodgings for those who needed it. Rivera explained in 1998 that she and Johnson “decided it was time to help each other and help our other kids. We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going. We went out and hustled the streets. We paid the rent.” Although only 19, Rivera became a mother to many of the residents of STAR House. While short-lived, STAR House was an important space for those who needed it.

In a 1989 interview Rivera said, “Before gay rights, before the Stonewall, I was involved in the Black Liberation movement, the peace movement...I felt I had the time and I knew that I had to do something. My revolutionary blood was going back then. I was involved with that.” 

Sylvia Rivera died of liver cancer in St. Vincent’s Manhattan Hospital in 2002 at the age of 50. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project continues her legacy, working to guarantee “all people are free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination, or violence.” The intersection of Christopher and Hudson streets in Greenwich Village, two blocks from The Stonewall Inn, was renamed “Sylvia Rivera Way.” In 2015, a portrait of Rivera was added to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., making her the first transgender activist to be included in the gallery. In 2021, New York City unveiled a monument to Rivera and Johnson, the world’s first monument dedicated to transgender individuals.   

CLUW would like to honor both Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson for their legacy and accomplishments in their lifelong struggle for Gender Equality and fairness throughout their lives.

In Lasting Unity, 

Sylvia J. Ramos
CLUW President

Grace Lee Boggs

Dr. Grace Lee Boggs was the daughter of Chinese immigrants born in Providence, Rhode Island. Earning her Ph.D. in 1940 from Byrn Mawr College, Boggs, spent her adult life fighting for the rights of others by speaking out against poor living conditions that many faced, and focusing on struggles prevalent in the African American community. After marrying James Boggs, a black autoworker and fellow activist, in 1953, Grace moved to Detroit where she would become a noted figure of the Detroit Black Power Movement and advocate of civil rights.

Dr. Boggs wrote five books in her lifetime, her last The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century coming four years before her death in 2015. Dr. Boggs continued to lift up her community in 1992, when she started Detroit Summer, a multicultural, intergenerational youth program that “develops youth leadership for today’s movement by involving university youth from all over the country with local youth.” In 2013, she helped open the James and Grace Lee Boggs School in Detroit, whose mission is to “nurture creative, critical thinkers who contribute to the well-being of their communities.”

Along with the civil rights and black power movements, Boggs was also active for more than seven decades in the labor, environmental justice and feminist movements. She said:

"We have to reimagine work—we can’t talk about jobs anymore. We can’t beg for jobs or hope for jobs. And we have to recognize that jobs in the industrial period were actually a way to fragment our humanity. We began to depend on higher wages and consumer goods to compensate for our dehumanization. We have to create forms of work that create community and expand our humanity.

“It seems to me that we don’t need to talk only about the hours of work but about the difference between the way women look at work and the way you have a job. You have jobs that demean you, that dehumanize you, that fragment you; that make you an appendage to the machine. We make up for it by demanding higher wages or shorter hours. What we need is the kind of work that women do—not counting the hours because they care—and that’s a real transformation from a patriarchal concept of work to a matriarchal concept of work. That’s where we are. I mean we are fundamentally [challenged] in terms of our human identity at this moment. Until we approach this moment with that challenge in mind, we’re going to get lost.

“That’s why we have to talk about revolution these days. We have to get rid of the old ideas of leadership and followership and use our imaginations to create the new.”

Grace Lee Boggs died in 2015 at the age of 100. She continues to serve as an inspiration for community activists, and we are thankful for her contributions to many of the social movements that occurred in her lifetime.  CLUW salutes Dr. Grace Lee Boggs for her contributions to improving our world.

In Lasting Unity,

Sylvia J. Ramos
CLUW President