She is the only Black woman in Kay Lahausen’s famous 1965 photograph of the first gay and lesbian picket line in front of the White House. She carried a sign that read, “Denial of Equality of Opportunity is Immoral.” Her name is Ernestine Eckstein.
A year after the White House picket, Eckstein was the first Black woman to be on the cover of the iconic lesbian magazine, “The Ladder,” published by the lesbian political advocacy group the Daughters of Bilitis. One of the only sources of historical material on Eckstein’s life and her politics is derived from an eight-page in-depth interview with the then-25-year-old Eckstein, Kay Tobin (Lahausen’s pseudonym), and Barbara Gittings, Philadelphia activist and Lahausen’s longtime partner and one of the founders of Daughters of Bilitis. The interview appears in the June 1966 issue of The Ladder on which a photograph of Eckstein graces the cover. [...]
Born in South Bend, Indiana on April 23,1941 as Ernestine Delois Eppenger, one of eight children of Darnell and Cecelia Eppenger, she adopted the name Eckstein to protect herself from backlash in her job and personal life. In “The Ladder” interview, Eckstein said, “I will get in a picket line, but in a different city.” She knew the dangers of being openly lesbian in those years before Stonewall.
In archival footage reported by NPR in 2019 by gay writer, archivist and host of the MGH podcast Eric Marcus, Eckstein says, “I think it takes a lot of courage. And I think a lot of people who would do it will suffer because of it. But I think any movement needs a certain number of courageous martyrs. There’s no getting around it. That’s really the only thing that can be done, you have to come out and be strong enough to accept whatever consequences come.”
Eckstein was one of those martyrs, and died quite young, just three months after her 51st birthday. Marcus said in the MGH podcast, “She was a visionary. She anticipated, predicted, and foreshadowed so many of the issues that would face the LGBTQ community in the decades to come.”
Eckstein’s early life is filled by Civil Rights activist action. She was a member of Tomahawk, a scholastic honorary society, wrote for the Indiana Daily Student, and was in Singing Hoosiers. She was also a member of Bloomington NAACP. In photographs of her from that time, she is, as she was in Lahausen’s photographs, the only Black woman.
Eckstein says in her interview with “The Ladder” that she graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana in 1963 with an undergraduate degree in journalism and a minor in government and Russian.
After college, in 1963, the 22-year-old Eckstein moved to New York City where she began attending meetings of the New York Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights organizations. Continue reading from Philadelphia Gay News
