Beating death of Harlem transgender woman Islan Nettles being investigated as a hate crime

Saturday just after midnight, Islan Nettles, a 21-year-old fashion design student was walking down 8th Avenue near West 147th Street right in front of a police precinct, when a group of men started saying some very mean things.

"They were called f****, they were called he-she's, she males, things of that nature," her mother Delores Nettles said.

Police say one of the men was 20-year-old Paris Wilson, who they say punched Nettles, knocked her down, and wouldn't stop.

She was taken to Harlem Hospital with severe head trauma where she slipped into a coma and was pronounced brain dead Tuesday. ~ ABC Local

A spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner’s office, Ellen Borakove, said on Friday that the death had been ruled a homicide and the cause was “blunt force trauma.”




ABC Local reports

Ms. Nettles, who, according to her LinkedIn page, was an intern assistant designer at Ay’Medici, a Harlem fashion company, was walking with a group of transgender friends on Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 147th and 148th Streets when they encountered several men across the street from the station house of Police Service Area 6, which patrols public housing developments in the area.

When the men concluded Ms. Nettles and her friends were transgender, a scuffle broke out, the police said, with punches thrown and homophobic slurs shouted.

A 20-year-old Harlem man, Paris Wilson, was arrested late Saturday and, according to a criminal complaint, was charged in the case by the Manhattan district attorney’s office with misdemeanor assault and harassment. At the time of the arrest, police officers did not realize that the confrontation might have involved bias. At some point later, prosecutors said, a witness went into the Area 6 station house and told the police that homophobic language had been used.

The Police Department’s hate crimes task force is now investigating the case.

Prosecutors also said that more, and graver, charges could be filed against Mr. Wilson, who on Friday remained free on bail.

MLK's "I've Got A Dream" now includes LGBT people because "We Have a Dream"

Martin Luther King said during his famous speech that "We can not walk alone" reminding his followers that there were white brothers and sisters among their ranks that day.

An epiphany of historical significance that the LGBT community has built our success on. But  MLK did not mean to include the LGBT community in "we". So for the record from day one we were "We" and continue to be "We".

A Gay Man Led the Way. 

The organizing genius behind the March on Washington was civil-rights veteran Baynard Rustin. What is less-known now, or then, is that he was gay. That might have not been known at all had Rustin not been arrested on what were then called morals charges (he was arrested in 1953 along with two other men in a parked car in Pasadena, Calif.)

King had kept Rustin at a distance under pressure from other black leaders. The late Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem had forced Rustin off of the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, didn't want Rustin running the 1963 march.

But Rustin's mentor, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, insisted. It was Randolph's idea to have a March on Washington in 1941 to protest segregation—and it was called off only when President Roosevelt desegregated the defense industry. So when the idea surfaced of a March on Washington in 1963, to demand justice on the 100th anniversary of the end of slavery, Randolph's word counted above all others. And it was Rustin who did much of the speaking that August day.

View gallery."

Participants holding hands in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington. ©Le …

Sen. Strom Thurmond denounced Rustin as a communist and homosexual in a floor statement, but the press didn't pick it up. Rustin died in 1987 and President Obama will present him, posthumously, with the Medal of Freedom.

I didn't know that the greatest speech ever made was being held hostage for profit. Mother Jones has brought it to my attention that commercial enterprises must pay a hefty fee to publish MLK's I've Got A Dream Speech.

I'm a poor blogger who never had an advert on my blog for just that reason. It allows me the freedom of speech.


So here for your viewing pleasure one of the most important moments in American history, but first a little about one of the most important figures in LGBT people struggle for our shared dream.



 I've Got A Dream.