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 examples of perseverance, courage, and brilliance. People like Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, who was born in Baltimore and was a lawyer, feminist, civil rights activist, priest, and poet. Murray founded the Congress of Racial Equality with Bayard Rustin in the early 1940s and influenced, among others, a young Martin Luther King Jr., the National Organization for Women, and late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Rustin was one of the main organizers of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the most important organized protests in American history. He was a gay man who suffered discrimination due to his skin color and for loving other men, and his work with events such as the March on Washington was largely done behind the scenes. President Barack Obama posthumously honored Rustin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH, made American Medical Association history as the first openly gay president of the organization. For the past two decades, he has been a nationally recognized advocate for LGBTQ individuals. Ehrenfeld divides his time among clinical practice, teaching, research, and directing a statewide $560 million health philanthropy.
As we observe Pride Month, we also recognize that members of the LGBTQIA+ community still lack protections for fundamental rights and continue to experience threats, homophobia, and acts of violence. We acknowledge that today, 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 United States.
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 educational and community programming and events during June. (See list below.)
In partnership and collaboration,
Diane Forbes Berthoud, PhD, MA
Chief Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Officer and Vice President, UMB
Professor, School of Graduate Studies