Interview with Ola Osaze

An interview with Ola Osifo Osaze, a transmasculine queer of Edo and Yoruba descent. At the time of this interview, Osaze was the Director for the Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project (BLMP) and had been a community organizer for many years, including working with Transgender Law Center, the Audre Lorde Project, Uhuru Wazobia, Queers for Economic Justice and Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Osaze has writings published in Apogee, Qzine, Black Girl Dangerous, Black Looks, and the anthologies Queer African Reader and Queer Africa II. In this oral history interview, Osaze discusses his early years of activism with Uhuru-Wazobia and other organizations, the founding, operations, and philosophy of BLMP, and the specific violence and criminalization faced by Black LGBTQ+ migrants in the United States. Specifically, he discusses the African feminist roots of his politics, his involvement with community organizing among other queer and trans Black migrants in New York City in the early 2000s, the specifics of BLMP's mission and work, and the urgency of ending the detention, criminalization, and deportation of Black LGBTQ+ migrants.

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View At: https://umedia.lib.umn.edu/item/p16022coll97:193
Citation: Cite

Item Information:

Identifier: 6682x4341
Collection: Oral Histories with People of Color
Institution: Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection, University of Minnesota
Creator(s): Osaze, Ola
Contributor(s): Beam, Myrl
Billund-Phibbs, Myra
Publisher: University of Minnesota Minneapolis Libraries
Date Created: Nov. 21, 2019
Genre: Oral Histories
Transcriptions
Subject(s): Audre Lorde Project (ALP)
Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project (BLMP)
Queers for Economic Justice
Sylvia Rivera Law Project
Transgender Law Center (TLC)
Uhuru Wazobia
Places: New York
Washington > King County > City of Seattle > Seattle
Topic(s): BIPOC
Black LGBTQ+ people
Black queer people
LGBTQ+ activism
LGBTQ+ migrants
LGBTQ+ people of color
Queer authors
Transgender people
Transmasculine people
Resource Type: Moving image
Text
Language: English
Rights: Copyright undetermined
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