At noon tomorrow, civil rights leaders and activists will march down to the at U.S. Justice Department of Justice to serve notice that the feds have done a miserable job of taking on open hate crimes. With nooses being used around the country to intimidate and beatings based on racial and ethnic heritage on the rise, this march is going to bring attention to the matter.

HRC's Chris Johnson announced that Donna Payne (the org's HRC Associate Director of Diversity) will deliver remarks on behalf of the Human Rights Campaign; she joins Reverend Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, both supporters of LGBT rights, at the march. 

What's also notable about Donna Payne's appearance there, as Chris points out, is that there has been progress on inclusion of black LGBTs in this kind of event. The last large-scale gathering the Million Man March was held in DC in a acouple of years ago, and it was a fiasco of black homophobia,

In 2005, the black GLBT community was outraged when HRC's Donna Payne, leaders of the National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC), and other black GLBT activists were blocked from addressing the thousands of citizens who had assembled on the National Mall to take part of the Millions More Movement (MMM) demonstration.

Prior to the march, these leaders were assured during discussions with MMM march organizer Louis Farrakhan and Washington minister Rev. Willie F. Wilson, the march's executive director, that GLBT activist/blogger Keith Boykin would be able to address the crowd from the main stage. However, their agreement was inexplicably annulled by march organizers at the last minute and Keith was prevented from addressing the crowd. Black GLBT leaders and Keith, who was president of NBJC at the time, spoke out forcefully on the snub, which was largely attributed to the influence of Rev. Wilson, an outspoken critic of gays and lesbians.

I blogged about it here.

This time around, Wilson has invited Donna Payne to take part in Friday’s rally for justice. That’s progress — of course one has to see whether that actually pans out this time.

Wilson by the way, to my knowledge, has never apologized for what has to be one of the most homophobic sermons ever recorded. Read it and hear it after the jump.If he’s had a change of heart about gays and in this case, lesbians, it hasn’t been communicated to anyone.

“We live in a time when our brothers have been so put down, can’t get a job, lot of the sisters making more money than brothers. And it’s creating problems in families. That’s one of the reasons our families’ breaking up. And that’s one of the reasons many of our women are becoming lesbians. You got to be careful when you say you don’t need no man.  I can make it by myself. Well, if you don’t need a man, what’s left? (Screams)

Lesbianism is about to take over our community. I’m talking about young girls. My son in high school last year, trying to go to the from…uh…prom, he said, ‘Dad, I ain’t got nobody to take to the prom because all the girls in my class are gay. There ain’t but two of them straight and both of them are ugly. I ain’t got nobody to take to the prom.’

Now, let me park it here for a moment? I ain’t homophobic, because everybody in here got something wrong with him. Whoever you point at, you can point at your own self. You got something wrong with your life. But when you get down to this thing, women falling down on another woman, strapping yourself up with something, it ain’t real. That thing ain’t got no feeling in it. It ain’t natural. Any time somebody got to slap some grease on your behind, and stick something in you, it’s something wrong with that. Your butt ain’t made for that. [He’s screaming; the audience yells out in approval.]

You got blood vessels and membranes in your behind. And if you put something unnatural in there, it breaks them all up. No wonder your behind is bleeding. It’s destroying us. Can’t make no connection with a screw and another screw. The Bible says God made them male and female. The Hebrew word “neged,” which means complementary nature – there is something unique to man and unique to woman and it takes those two things to complement each other.

You can’t make a connection with two screws. It takes a screw and a nut! (screaming).”

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