2026 Pride Month
UMB Celebrates Pride Month
Dear UMB Community,
June is Pride Month, a time to honor and celebrate the life, achievements, and identities of our LGBTQIA+ community.
The University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) honors innovators and leaders who have inspired us with their perseverance, courage, and brilliance. Bayard Rustin was a civil rights strategist and key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, helping shape one of the most significant protest movements in American history. Working largely behind the scenes, he left a legacy in social justice and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was a Baltimore-born lawyer, poet, priest, feminist, and civil rights activist whose ideas influenced generations of legal and social reformers. Murray co-founded the Congress of Racial Equality and helped shape the thinking of leaders such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Murray’s legacy continues to resonate across movements for racial justice, gender equality, and LGBTQIA+ rights.
Shail Maingi, MD, is a hematology-oncology and palliative care physician whose work advances compassionate, inclusive care for patients with serious illness. An openly lesbian physician and national leader, she has advocated for LGBTQIA+ health equity and stronger representation of LGBTQIA+ clinicians in medicine. Her work highlights the impact of queer women of color in shaping a more just health care system.
As we observe Pride Month, we also recognize that members of the LGBTQIA+ community lack protections for fundamental rights and continue to experience threats, homophobia, and acts of violence in our society. We acknowledge that transgender women of color continue to experience violent and deadly attacks that exist within a backdrop of a rise in anti-transgender legislation across the country.
We at UMB affirm our commitment of support in the struggle for dignity and justice, as we live our core values of Respect and Integrity and celebrate our colleagues and friends in this community. UMB is pleased to support and celebrate our LGBTQIA+ community with events during June.
In collaboration,
Diane Forbes Berthoud, PhD, MA
Chief Inclusive Excellence and Institutional Effectiveness Officer and Vice President
Professor, School of Graduate Studies