LGBTQ students are under attack. GLSEN’s Melanie Willingham-Jaggers is ready to fight back.
21.02.2022 - 14:33
/ metroweekly.com
METRO WEEKLY: Let’s talk about your earliest years and what your family was like as a child.MELANIE WILLINGHAM-JAGGERS: I was raised by a single mother. She was single by choice, and a mother by choice. There’s some complexity here, because I actually come from a really big extended family.
I’m number 18 of 25 of my grandmother’s grandchildren. So I’ve got 25 first cousins, probably 75 second and third cousins, just on my mom’s side. And everyone was living in Cincinnati, Ohio, at the time, or most people were.
Then when I was 11, my mom got a job out in California and we moved out there. In 1993, just a year after the unrest and uprisings in Los Angeles, my mom and I moved to Altadena, California.The one thing I would just say about Cincinnati is that in 1985, my mom and I actually integrated a neighborhood on Cincinnati’s West Side. That was really the place where what child development experts would call my racial identity formation took place.
It was an experience that really shaped me in many ways.My mom and I were the first Black people to move into that neighborhood, period. And because she was a professional working woman of the eighties, she was involved in Model Cities during the seventies.I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Model Cities, but that was a federal program that gave block grants to U.S. cities with large Black populations to help support President Johnson’s War on Poverty.
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