Auraria Students Raising Funds to Bring Black Excellence Tour Here

Trans activists and prison abolitionists CeCe McDonald and Joshua Allen are hitting the road for the Black Excellence Tour, and students on the Auraria campus, including Westword MasterMind and Titwrench co-founder Sarah Slater, are raising funds to bring them to Denver.

Organizers have secured support from ten different organizations, among them Community College of Denver, the University of Colorado Denver and Metropolitan State University of Denver, but they need more money to pull off the event. So they’re running a GoFundMe campaign in hopes of bringing the activists to town this spring.

McDonald garnered international headlines and support from LGBTQ activists when she accepted a plea bargain and served time in prison after stabbing a man, defending her friends from a racist, transphobic attack. Since her release in January 2014, she has toured the country talking about the experience of being black and trans. Her story is the focus of a feature documentary titled Free CeCe!

“Everyday trans, gender non-conforming and queer people, that are also people of color, have to wake up with their lives in question from fear of how this world will fail them,” McDonald has said in a statement. “I do this work so those questions never have to be asked again.”

Allen has built a career speaking about racial and gender justice to the media, in classrooms and at workshops.

“Queer, trans and gender non-conforming people of color have been at the forefront of movements for social justice for thousands of years,” Allen has said in a statement. “Our voices, our experiences and our lives matter.”