From the Desk of Our Co-Founder, Jay-Marie Hill
Note from MO Ho Justice staff:
With full hearts, we are proud and honored to publish this powerful reflection on movement building and MO Ho Justice’s origins—thoughtfully penned by Jay-Marie Hill, a MO Ho Justice Co-Founder and Visionary in their own right.
The publication of this piece culminates a year-long leadership succession process, commemorates Jay-Marie’s leadership offerings, and publicly marks their transition out of a MO Ho Justice staff role. We are forever indebted to and inspired by their vision, mentorship, and leadership.
To learn more about MO Ho Justice’s current staff, please visit mohojustice.com/staff.
Follow Jay-Marie and support the emergence/work of Black Transcendence:
(Note for Readers: In this piece, Jay-Marie switches between third person and first person to both emphasize the Collective and simultaneously highlight their intimate knowledge of the work. Thank you for joining the lineage of those of learning to love and value each other, newly.)
Where It All Began
From St. Louis to Columbia, Jefferson City to Kansas City, early May 2020 found people stuck in the house and fed up with the usual.
Under the guidance of artist-organizer Jay-Marie Hill, with the support of SWOP chapter lead and co-founder Indigo Hann, MO Ho Justice’s humble beginnings were as a collective commitment to uncovering and staring honestly at what had been tucked away in the underbelly of Missouri’s realities.
Following several murders of Black trans people statewide from 2018-19, noting the rising & disproportionate rates of People Living with HIV among Black, Trans & MSM populations, and with COVID cases rapidly impacting people and paychecks, folks survived the early stages of this pandemic and MO Ho was born.
The movement began as a simple weekly meeting of coalition partners who had decided enough was enough.
An early logo for MO Ho Justice
Humble Beginnings
MO Ho Justice, birthed as a grant and concept in 2019 but raised in a post–Nina Pop, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd world, has its roots in an unapologetically Black, trans, and relational theory of organizing.
When A Black Trans Month of Action was declared by local St. Louis organizers in June 2020, it was a way of intervening with the narrative moment. Encompassing an energy if international solidarity with those in mourning and outrage over the pandemic alongside news of more careless US policing and murders, declaring this Month strategically built on a campaign that preceded it just a few months before - 10 Days of Trans Demands 2019.
10 Days, an annual campaign originally developed by Jay-Marie’s team at Music Freedom Dreams in consulting partnership with the ACLU of Missouri in 2018, created a foundation for a month of Action highlighting the intersections with St. Louis Abolitionist Organizers’ 5 Point Plan.
The Month of Action’s lead organizers (including Fern Galindo, Maxi Glamour, and Charles Buchanan, all founding members of MO Ho Justice) helped sow the seeds of an unapologetic commitment to Black and Trans folks, People Living with HIV, and sex workers, groups of people who are often not consulted in moments of rapid response mobilization nor the ensuing political conversations, let alone those in Missouri.
Spring 2021 MO Ho Retreat
(Photo credit: Cami Thomas)
As a so-called “flyover” state of 6 million people, Missouri was then and is still now full to the brim with legislators who unapologetically sport a disinterest in the 23 years of attempts to enshrine gender-affirming nondiscrimination protections, yet somehow also find time to legislate against a haunting ghost story of trans students taking over youth sports.
Nationally, these half-hearted anti-trans solutions to the unfounded conservative fear of this new world to come — where no body is wrong for how they inherently exist — were actively being dismantled by the likes of Chase Strangio & ACLU, and the ACLU-MO locally. Via an emerging group of statewide Trans Leadership Table members convened by Jay-Marie starting in 2018, 2019 was a second year spent actively training and lobbying these electeds, and their fellow Missourians for a new way, holding the line such that out of over 45 bills introduced, not one passed — which is no small feat.
The stressful conditions of 2020 and the statewide cohorts of trans leaders poised to support their communities under Jay-Marie’s direction of ACLU-MO’s Trans Justice Program meant that local leaders were ready to fire on all cylinders by July 2020. But not all of those interested were sex workers!
So first came collective study.
Spring 2021 MO Ho Retreat — Jay-Marie holding Assata Shakur’s autobiography and the book Unapologetic by Charlene Carruthers
(Photo credit: Cami Thomas)
On Building the World We Deserve
It is easy to be outraged, but the work of changing conditions is arduous and must be based in a commitment to learning from those who have come before us. The discipline required to forge a way for sex workers and trans people to be taken seriously in the Missouri political climate — not only as essential workers but also as legitimate political interventionists — was shown through strategic and careful engagement with lawyers, prosecutors, police records, and lay citizens alike from 2018 to 2020.
Before any pandemic-push-for-policy-change, let it be known that the work of MO Ho Justice was built on a foundation of care via the development of the Sweet And Mutual Aid Fund in Spring 2020. In a time of hopelessness, Jay-Marie & their cadre of leaders partnered with Solidarity-Economy-backed STL Mutual Aid and the Metropolitan Community Church to see that over $30,000 was raised in just a few short weeks. These funds were distributed to over 125 Black, trans, disabled, and sex-working folks who received identity-affirming wellness calls as well as non-banking monetary support in the form of no-strings attached payments of $200 to help them hang on for a brighter day.
Jay-Marie holding a sign for 10 Days of Trans Demands: #ThankASexWorker edition — “What have sex workers taught you? Make your own sign and post a selfie!”
Later — it became clear this care work had set the stage for a 2020 Sex Worker survey, interview campaign and professional report. This care work is what made it possible for community to trust that a robust political campaign was going to be built by a team of Black, trans-focused researcher interviews that led to nearly 200 criminalized workers responding. Through all of this — including the October-December development and report launch during 10 Days of Trans Demands 2020: #ThankASexWorker Edition — a reality was made plain by our hardworking volunteer co-visionaries and the hundreds who joined our early monthly education sessions and STL + KC prosecutor debates: the downtrodden were ready to rise up.
In 2021, Tishaura Jones’ unapologetically trans & sex worker–affirming campaign for Mayor served to only stir the possible-change-pot further, as St. Louisans were unfamiliar with leaders so willing to name the forgotten. Despite starting the year with the news of the Jan 6th insurrection and ACLU-MO’s defunding of the Trans Justice Program, our 100 Days Memo to Mayor Jones and Worker/Advocacy Boot Camp — under the continued leadership of Jay-Marie and our brilliant, first-ever Coalition Coordinator Miyonnee Hickman — helped to hone the political discipline and vision of the 20 volunteers and 12 workers, coaches, and program staff who went on to graduate from the program in July 2021: some of our boot campers organized our first-ever Heaux Tells/Heaux Tales sex worker open mic night, while others presented our “MO Ho U” webinar about the 100 Days Memo campaign.
Jay-Marie & MO Ho community at the I Wanna Love music video shoot (Photo credit: Nyara W.)
Organizational Dreaming into a Black Trans–Accountable Future
In the time since founding MHJ, via a strategic and unapologetic commitment to Black Transcendence — my vision and strategic incubator rooted in gathering community as reparative spiritual practice — I have supported the coalition in finding its footing beyond policy, outside of the ACLU of MO, and beyond its initial shape as a container for a meeting of statewide minds committed to this juncture in theory.
From the 2021 Boot Camp photo shoot(s), to Black-artist-led I Wanna Love music video shoot and Dutchtown all-day party, to strategic community tabling, and even to St. Louis legends Miyonnee Sateek and Maven Lee’s inclusion in the National Black Joy Experience 2.0 Album (released March 2022 ft. Big Freedia), MO Ho is now much more than a motley crew of folks, gathered for the sake of fighting a big bad other.
It is now a political container ripe for creativity, dreaming, and connection — the very realities that sex workers have always reminded us we deserve.
Fall 2022 finds the group ready to continue the mission as a stand-alone organization, at once developing its own leaders and its own visions to help fully realize the Missouri our communities deserve.
While my work and Black Transcendence helped birth and incubate the project, I am moving on as its de facto Director, and the community is called on now to show up as its new Core implores!
Only when we turn toward each other, unafraid to fall, struggle, fight and fail, will we grow through conflict and become able to support ourselves birthing the world as we deserve to see it. As long-time Detroit-based scholar and visionary Grace Lee Boggs taught us,
“The main reason why Western civilization lacks Spirituality or an awareness of our interconnectedness with one another and the universe, according to Gandhi, is that it has given priority to economic and technological development over human and community development. Advanced technology has made it possible for people to perform miracles, but it has impoverished us spiritually, because it has made us feel that outside forces determine who and what we are …
Instead of pursuing rapid economic development and hoping that it will eventually create community, we need to do the opposite — begin with the needs of the community and create loving relationships with one another and with the Earth. As Jimmy Boggs reminds us, revolutions are made out of love for people and for place.”
The new leaders of MO Ho Justice are a powerful group of directly-impacted leaders who love Missouri and those fighting for a future in it.
They need you and you need them.
May Missourians at large be better for the ways we show up — for Black, trans, queer, neurodivergent people and sex workers — out of true love for its people and this place.
Photo credit: Cami Thomas
Fall 2022
Jay-Marie / J Holy
Artist, Doula, Dreamer
Co-Founder | MO Ho Justice
Creative Director | Black Transcendence