Equality Mississippi
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Equality Mississippi is a statewide gay civil rights organization founded in March 2000.
History
Equality Mississippi came about in response to the murder of Jamie Ray Tolbert, a Laurel, Mississippi native and friend of Equality Mississippi founder and current executive director Jody Renaldo. The organizations founding also was the result of activists fighting state legislation banning same sex couples in Mississippi from adopting children.
Jamie was a gay man visiting the now defunct Biloxi, Mississippi gay nightclub Joey's On The Beach on New Year's Eve 1999. That night, he was abducted from the bar's parking lot. His body was later found in the woods in Alabama. He was beaten and strangled to death. His killers, Brent David Kabat and Jeremy Shawn Bentley, were arrested 2 weeks later after being stopped at a roadblock in California. They were still driving Jamie's Nissan Xterra.
The organization's original name was Mississippi Gay Lobby as it was the first chapter of the now defunct National Gay Lobby. National Gay Lobby took a new approach to activism, being an "online only" gay rights organization using its membership to send activism e-mails, letters to the editor and forum postings. After a year of being a chapter of National Gay Lobby, the state chapter became independent, still keeping their name, because it felt the need to be active beyond the confines of the internet.
The organization made national and international news by debuting a very rare and first ever in Mississippi, television advertisement campaign designed to bring homosexuality out of the Mississippi "closet". The advertisements were aired on local cable system advertising buys on such channels as MTV, Lifetime and CNN.
It was in September 2001, that the organization changed its name to Equality Mississippi. The change came from numerous calls by lesbian, bisexual, transgender and straight people who felt the original name did not include them. Calls either to change the name to Mississippi Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Straight Lobby or to something fully inclusive created a robust unification of LGBTS people in Mississippi. While it may seem that "Equality Mississippi" is quite an oxymoron, the name was fitting and inline with names of other state organizations across the country.
In 2002, along with the historic Camp Sister Spirit and the gay-straight student organization of the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), Equality Mississippi held the Mississippi State LGBT Summit. This week-end brought together activists from national LGBT rights organizations such as Human Rights Campaign, Lambda Legal and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as well as LGBTS Mississippians to learn and grow the movement for equality in Mississippi. The Summit is now an annual event, save for 2005 when the event had to be canceled due to Hurricane Katrina having struck Mississippi.
As a result of the Summit, Mississippi celebrated LGBT Pride statewide for the first time since 1979. 150+ people attended Mississippi Pride at Smith Park in downtown Jackson.
In 2003, the United States Supreme Court struck down Texas state law banning private consensual sex between adults of the same sex in a decision gay rights groups hail as historic. The ruling invalidates other other sodomy laws in the remaining states that had them, including Mississippi. Equality Mississippi wrote part of the historic argument against sodomy laws.