The story
DC Black Pride in Washington
D.C. Black Pride is held annually on Memorial Day weekend and is recognized as the first official Black gay pride event in the United States. Founded in 1991 by Welmore Cook, Theodore Kirkland, and Ernest Hopkins with the DC Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and the Inner City AIDS Network, the event began as an HIV/AIDS fundraiser and has grown into the world's largest Black pride celebration, now run by the Center for Black Equity.
Washington's Black LGBT community had already been organizing for over a decade, through groups like the DC chapter of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays formed in 1978, when three organizers named Welmore Cook, Theodore Kirkland, and Ernest Hopkins came together with the DC Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays and the Inner City AIDS Network to plan something new.