History
Equality Mississippi (EM) was founded in response to the murder of Jamie Ray Tolbert, a Laurel, Mississippi native and referred to as a friend by EM founder and executive director Jody Renaldo. Tolbert was a gay man visiting the now defunct gay nightclub Joey's On The Beach in Biloxi, Mississippi on New Year's Eve 1999. He was abducted from the bar's parking lot. His body was later found in the woods in Alabama, having been beaten and strangled. His killers, Brent David Kabat and Jeremy Shawn Bentley, were arrested two weeks later after being stopped at a roadblock in California. They were still driving Tolbert's Nissan Xterra. It's not clear if the crime was in any way related to the victim's sexuality.
The organization's original name was Mississippi Gay Lobby as it was the first chapter of the National Gay Lobby (NGL). NGL's approach to activism was that of being an Internet-only gay rights organization using its membership to send activism e-mails, letters to the editor and forum postings. After a year of being a chapter of NGL, the state chapter became independent, still keeping their name, because it felt the need to be active beyond Internet activism, felt the $25 membership dues should not be sent for nation-wide activities and disagreed with a recent protest action discouraging users from using AOL.
Read more about this topic: Equality Mississippi
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“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
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—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)