Transmissions: Remembering at the White House
Transmissions
Published 12/01/2011

by Gwendolyn Ann Smith

http://ebar.com/columns/column.php?sec=transmissions&id=177

One evening in late November 1998, I was walking home with a friend of mine. I was venting my frustration with the transgender community of the time, and the world at large. Rita Hester had been murdered a day or two before, and I was angry that those in her community could not even recall the murder of Chanelle Pickett in the same general area just a couple years earlier.

Pickett's murderer, William Palmer, had received a light sentence only a few months prior to Hester's death, and while it was clear there was no direct connection between the cases, it was also clear that here was yet another African American transwoman in Massachusetts, murdered on another November night.

I was telling my friend that I wanted to do something about this, try to show people these deaths. Their killers wanted them erased, and we were helping these murderers by forgetting our own.