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24/02/2024
Tributes have been paid to campaigner and activist ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, who has passed on to the realm of our LGBTQIA+ and African-American ancestors after a lifetime dedicated to helping members of minority communities. Wikipedia reports that he was eight one. Born in Antigua, he was active from the late nineteen fifties in the black civil rights movement, and as the sixties progressed, also resisted the Vietnam war. In 1978, Jones cofounded the National Coalition of Black Gays (NCBG) in Columbia, Maryland; the organization was the first national advocacy group of its kind for gay and lesbian African Americans. Jones also founded the Gay Married Men's Association, co-founded the D.C. chapter of Black and White Men Together, and founded the D.C. Coalition of Black Gays in April 1978. During the AIDS crisis of the nineteen eighties and the racism and homophobia from government that this revealed, Mr Jones Hennin volunteered at HIV clinics, before in the nineteen nineties moving towards activism in disability rights as he dealt with issues affecting his own health such as spinal stenosis. In spring 2007, the Rainbow History Project named Jones-Hennin a "Community Pioneer. In the late 1970s, Jones met his partner and later husband Chris Hennin through the Gay Married Men's Association. The two married in 2014.