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2.20.25: Vigil for Martyred Journalists
Outside of the National Press Foundation Awards Dinner at The Ritz-Carlton, Washington, D.C., organized by LiberationLensDC.
1.18.25: People's March
A friend and I took a bus from New York City to D.C. for the very first Women’s March in January 2017. It was just a day trip—we left from 42nd Street at 3 am and began the return trip around 6 pm. We were in a crowd so densely packed that by the time our section actually started “marching” we had to break off and head back to catch our bus. I had little concept of where I was the entire day, and even looking back at my photos after living in D.C. for five years I can’t exactly orient myself.
8 years—and countless marches later—I photographed the rebranded People’s March and below is just a small slice of what I saw on the Saturday before inauguration day in Washington, D.C.
I love this person’s whole vibe: the handwritten sign (double-sided is the way to go!), the bright pink gloves, mask, smiley face hat, and shirt that says “discomfort.” I know it’s superficial and beyond the point to focus on looks in Trump’s America, but compassionate, intelligent, interesting, cool people are just so much hotter than your standard MAGA.
People are so creative! I’ve seen this guy in his patriot outfit and paper mache toilet before. It’s a great visual and it’s fun to photograph people like this who are clearly there to be seen—I like the toilet paper and the real handle. A+
I love a petty slogan as much as I love an eloquent one. “Trump you’re tacky and we hate you,” made me laugh.
Carrying a sign and an iced beverage—trust women to do it all!
I told this woman that I was from Ohio and I agreed with, and appreciated, her sign.
“When will I be mine?” really gutted me. What a sign! I got unexpectedly emotional at this march, despite my ever-shifting views on their efficacy in affecting real change. Don’t hate on the people out there marching or making pithy signs or puss hats; they are not your enemy!
The people in power are! And so are your neighbors or uncles or husbands or grandmothers who voted for a ra(c)pist with mythical powers to lower egg prices. You know who isn’t your enemy? The trans person using a bathroom or an immigrant doing what’s best for their family or a person with a body making their own decisions about what that body endures. How do you reconcile two ideologies where one believes everyone matters and the other thinks almost no one does.
This person was so proud of their outfit, and I love this energy.
What we mean when we say “not all, but most men,” here are three examples of how to be an ally.
This person was so cute twirling two flags: a pride flag and one with a picture of Princess Leia that says “We are the Resistance.” They did an entire Little-Edie-esque flag dance for me, and it’s one of the rare times I wish I were taking video instead of stills.
Nadine Seiler hopes she’s wrong
Election day, November 8, 2022
Nadine Seiler and I have different recollections about the first time we became aware of the other. Mine takes place on January 11, 2020, at the Lincoln Memorial. I had been visiting D.C. for a climate crisis protest and had time to kill before my train back to New York. I spotted a group that had unfurled a large black-and-white “Remove Trump” banner on the steps just below Lincoln; when they started to walk toward the White House, I grabbed a corner and walked with them in silent solidarity. Nadine marched beside the banner, carrying her own handmade anti-Trump sign. I didn’t talk to her then, but I never forgot her.
Six months later, when I moved to D.C. in June 2020, I would come to associate Nadine with the fence that had been erected around Lafayette Park to protect Trump’s fragile ego and upside-down Bible from the Black Lives Matter protests. Although she quickly became a near-constant presence on the plaza until fence camed down at the end of January 2021—and is crucial to preserving its oral and visual history going forward—Nadine insists that she has marched into the roles of curator, historian, and prolific protestor the same way most of her life has unfolded: accidentally.
“I’m not that smart,” she tells me several times when we talk in depth on November 1, 2024. “Almost everything is an accident. I’m not a visionary, I’m not a leader-type person. I’m a people watcher. I observe.” As an observer myself, I regret not asking more about her life sooner. But whenever I’ve been lucky enough to spot Nadine over the past four-and-a-half years—whether she’s among a crowd of thousands or standing solo outside of the Supreme Court with one of her signature spray-painted sheet banners—there always seems to be something more pressing to discuss than backstory. When we finally sit down and I ask what motivated her to start protesting Trump in particular, she says it was the third season of The Apprentice.
“The overqualified Black guy won and Trump wanted him to share the prize with a white woman,” Nadine recalls. “That pissed me off immediately and I never watched after that.”
Trump indictment celebration tour, August 3, 2023
Living in Maryland since the early 2000s, she says she was aware of the emergence of the Tea Party and had attended rallies in favor of the Affordable Care Act and Black Lives Matter protests. But she never forgave Trump—and still doesn’t understand how anyone with critical thinking skills could support him. “When he came down that escalator I thought ‘America is going to laugh him off the stage,’” she says. “And then he actually got into office and I just couldn’t believe it.”
On January 21, 2017, Nadine says she ended up in the inaugural Women’s March by accident—and she’s been a fixture in activist spaces in D.C. and across the country ever since. “Whatever is going on I’m just there, I find myself in it,” she says. “I’m an all or nothing person, when I get into something I really get into.”
When I ask what inspires her to keep going, what gives her the energy to keep pulling her omnipresent cart (overflowing with signs and telescopic poles, and blasting protest anthems) through the streets, she offers her favorite African proverb as an explanation:
“I am because we are.”
She adds: “If someone says to me ‘Thank you for being out here, you give me energy to come out,’ that gives me energy. Nobody asked me. Nobody appointed me. Nobody elected me. But if I can get people to come out and help get us to the goal line, I’ll do it. That motivates me.”
Women's March, May 14, 2022
Black Lives Matter
While she was at Lafayette Square at the end of May 2020 (shortly before it would be symbolically christened Black Lives Matter Plaza), Nadine noticed that signs that had appeared organically on the fence during the protests had begun to fall down and litter the sidewalk. Her work as a home organizer had dried up during the pandemic, but when she overheard people complaining that the area was dirty, she put her organizational skills to work.
“Initially I just pushed it aside, then I started intentionally tending to it,” she says. Soon she was joined by (a good) Karen—who Nadine describes as the fence’s “stage manager”—and a handful of other volunteers who protected and maintained the public space from tourist crowds by day and would-be vandals at night. Using tape, zip ties, and a knitting needle, Nadine’s primary goal was to make the signs harder to destroy.
Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 5, 2020
After a lot of the ephemeral artwork was vandalized by a MAGA group in late 2020, volunteer art builds helped to recreate or replace what had been lost. This is how Nadine remembers first meeting me—I was helping to reattach signs to the fence and she begins our interview with an apology, saying she thinks she may have been short with me. I don’t recall her ever being anything but friendly, but the way she treats people matters to her—and things stick with her. Although by any metric she is one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met, she insists her giving mindset is largely self-serving.
“I’m an immigrant,” Nadine says. “I’m a Black female and I’m also an atheist. In all those groups we are all marginalized in some way, so I help people because I want people to show up for me if I’m in trouble. If nobody steps up because they think someone else is going to do it, then nobody is going to do it. It has to start somewhere.”
Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 5, 2020
‘Nobody owes me anything’
It wasn’t long before Nadine was not only rehanging, but rearranging the artwork, and organizing fence sections into themes. When a friend from Texas sent her a photo of the fence taken from the plaza, Nadine finally understood the power of the platform for which she had accidentally become a steward.
“First I would spend five minutes cleaning up, and then it was ten minutes and then it was days and then months.” She’d arrive around 10 pm each night and leave at 4 am—although there were plenty of days where I saw her at the fence both day and night—and she rarely took a full day off (in her estimate, she was only absent two days “for rest”).
Nobody asked her, but plenty of people were thankful for her service. When the fence finally came down, a decision was made—shepherded by Aliza Leventhal, a Library of Congress employee who documented the fence on her personal time, and with help from a few others and a grant from the Washington Conservation Guild—to rent a storage unit and preserve what they could. There have since been exhibitions in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Amazing Grace Lutheran Church in Baltimore, and at D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. Nadine hopes her story will get the attention of an institution interested in preserving the now-historic artifacts that most people were content to throw away.
She has taken on the majority of the storage costs herself while she works on forming a foundation and securing funding to properly maintain the increasingly-fragile artwork. “I take on stuff that nobody asks me to do,” she says. “That’s why I always say nobody owes me anything because anything I do, I decide to do it on my own. But if I die tomorrow, no one else knows how it all came together and how it’s all connected.”
Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 7, 2020
A colonized mind
Nadine was born at 10:30 p.m. on May 11, 1965, in Port of Spain General Hospital in Trinidad. She says she grew up in an “uber-dysfunctional family,” and would find out later in life that her older brother’s conception was the result of a date rape. Her father—a Black man with blue eyes—forced himself on her then-17-year-old mother, a Black woman whose Black mother was prone to making racially-disparaging remarks to her daughter and grandchildren.
Nadine now sees her difficult childhood as a result of two overlapping issues: the “colonized mind,” which she says is still common in countries like Trinidad (they gained their independence from Britain in 1962, but the consequences still ripple across generations), and her mother’s lack of options and bodily autonomy.
“It wasn’t easy,” Nadine says, choking back tears. “It wasn’t easy with people around you constantly telling you you’re not good enough—we were too dark, or had the wrong hair, or a too-broad nose—as a kid you’re taking it all in and you don’t know it, but then you encounter it again out in society. I felt like a burden.”
Although her father was “horribly abusive” to everyone, Nadine’s mother (whom she refers to as her “incubator”) had nowhere to run to so she stayed in the relationship—and ended up having two more children, which only made the situation worse for everybody.
“She was resentful, so I don’t fault her for wanting to get out,” Nadine says. “It wasn’t malicious, but she largely left us to fend for ourselves.”
SCOTUS June 24, 2022
Nadine cites this neglect as her personal connection to the pro-choice movement. At 59 years old, she says she may be too old to have children of her own, but she’ll never stop being angry with the dismal circumstances that led to her birth—even if it means entertaining the thought that she might never have been born at all.
“If my incubator had a choice, my life would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t be here, but who cares? If she had access to abortion, she wouldn’t have wrecked the psyche of three other people. The repercussions [of her lack of choice] are still being felt today.”
‘America or bust’
Nadine describes her maternal grandmother as “a religious zealot who believed in a lot of nonsense,” including that the end of the world was imminent. As a result or this conditioning, Nadine grew up apathetic and aimless, thinking ‘Ok, if the world is coming to an end, what’s the point of doing anything?’”
She left her father’s house shortly after turning 18; months later, when he tried to bring her home by force—violently confronting her on a public street—she was rescued by a group of men whose unwanted advances she had rebuffed moments before. By the time she was in her early 20s, Nadine realized that “while the world may be coming to an end at some point, it’s not ending right now,” and she scrambled to find a purpose.
Nadine dressed as an illegal immigrant for Halloween, November 1, 2024
She got a coveted office job for the Trinidad government, but quickly realized it was a dead end. “The people who worked there had been there 20 years and they would boast about being there 20 years,” Nadine says. “But they were doing the same damn thing and I’m thinking to myself ‘Ain’t no goddamn way I will be here after 20 years.’”
Because her father worked for an airline, Nadine traveled to the U.S. frequently as a kid, flying free until she turned 18—but even if it hadn’t felt familiar, Nadine says there was never any question that she would end up in the U.S., a common aspiration among Trinidadians. “When I set my sights on getting an education, it was America or bust.”
She saved money, gave away everything she owned (keeping only some personal letters and a few dresses), secured a visa, arranged to stay with a cousin in New Jersey, and entered the U.S. on October 31, 1987. She was 22 years old. “I had no back up plan if they didn’t let me through,” Nadine says, insisting that she wasn’t scared of the journey because she had no other options.
“Did I come prepared? No,” she says.
“They’re eating the pets,” November 1, 2024
2nd class citizen
Although her life in the U.S. has been anything but easy, Nadine insists she’s been very lucky. “I don’t have financial luck—I have never been able to win money or anything like that—I have luck with circumstance.” But the obstacles she’s overcome suggest that more than luck is at play—and Nadine is clearly smarter than she admits.
She’s been consistently working since she was a teenager; her first job after she came to the U.S. was pulling plastic off of jackets ahead of the steamer at a Members Only factory. When she was transferred to the mending department, an older coworker would pass the workday by telling Nadine all of her personal problems and occasionally crying.
She was hired to be a home aide to an elderly woman and moved from majority-Black neighborhoods to white ones and back again with the help of newspaper ads in which she began to solicit opportunities instead of simply going whichever way the wind blew her. A job at a furniture store led to her first marriage (he was a customer).
Over the course of their contentious, years-long coupling, his carelessness got her suddenly evicted from an apartment and he cheated on her constantly. Their marriage may have been unstable but it was Nadine’s final hurdle to clear in her path to citizenship.
When I ask how long they were together, she says: “He started being a dog from day one—but I liked him and the sex was good. My relationship was genuine, but his needs superseded mine.” She got her green card, applied to be a citizen, and became one as soon as she was able. “I’m all good now,” she says. “Until Trump gets back in office and declares that I’m illegal, which could happen.”
And her first husband? “He was a dog and I couldn't put up with it any longer so I moved on.”
Election day, November 8, 2022
Decolonizing the mind
Although she insists she used to be really, really shy (and still detests banal small talk), it’s almost impossible not to notice Nadine wherever she sets her sights on attracting attention.
She doesn't approach or preach to people and prefers to let the curious come to her. She’s always willing to have a constructive conversation based in reality, but it’s not always been easy for her to recognize at first when she’s being purposely trolled. She cites a recent incident outside of the White House, when someone approached her and seemed to inquire earnestly about Project 2025. They asked her how they could find out more information and balked when she suggested Google.
“He says to me ‘... And I'm supposed to believe Google?’ I ended the conversation. We’re being coddled in this world where everybody’s opinion is supposedly on par—and it’s not. I won’t be a part of it. I will not hesitate to tell you if you ask a stupid question.”
Women’s March, June 24, 2023
She may be quick to tell it like it is, but that applies to praise as well as criticism. Nadine credits her third—and current—husband for breaking her out of the generational trauma bubble where she had been taught explicitly and implicitly by family members and society alike that “white is right.”
Before she was cognizant of her own bias, she admits to looking for—and elevating white men—above all others. “Fortunately for me, I found an asshole,” she says, showcasing her seemingly inexhaustible ability to make lemonade out of the lemons life keeps throwing at her.
She says she’s thankful that she met her “idiotic” husband and not a different white man who put her on a pedestal and treated her well enough to validate the damaging racial hierarchies she worked so hard to free herself from.
“Now everybody is just somebody who happens to be white, happens to be Black, happens to be East Indian, Asian, be whatever, and I'm dealing with you on that level—how you treat me is how I treat you,” Nadine says.
Going home
Lately, Nadine says that it’s begun to feel like her big American Dream might end up being a bust afterall: The world hasn’t ended (yet) but she’s found herself thinking about leaving the U.S.—even if she’s not quite sure where she would go next. She still has family in Trinidad, but she doesn’t think her decolonized mind would survive long there; she’s looked into Canada and Australia, but there are too many hoops to jump through.
Conversely, the stubborn part of her (she is a Taurus, after all) says “If I leave, they win. Right? Because it’s me that they want to go—a Black atheist immigrant—and if I leave, I'm giving them the win. So the stubborn part of me doesn’t want to go.”
Right now, she’s more concerned with where she’s going to spend election night. Earlier in the month, she told me she was trying to arrange a reunion of sorts at the new fence that encircles Lafayette Park in anticipation of election turmoil. But while we’re having our conversation on the grounds of the Capitol, a man walks by and recognizes her. He says he has a Howard University connection—does she want to spend Election Night at the Harris campaign party? She makes no commitments (“I prefer to be outside because I already made my banner,” she tells me), but gives him her phone number and seems pleased with the serendipity of it all. “See?” she says as she saves his contact. “I have situational luck.”
Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 7, 2020
During the 2020 election, Nadine was holding court at the fence like she had done for so much of the six months preceding; only this time, she was surrounded by a crowd that grew larger and more energetic as they anxiously waited for several days to ensure every vote was counted.
In a photo I took on November 7—shortly after the Biden/Harris victory was reported—Nadine sits on a step ladder and leans against the artwork-covered fence. A large black-and-white sign looms above her. It says “You’re fired” (an Apprentice reference), but in my closely-cropped photo I read it as “tired,” because that’s how her blue-lined eyes look to me. She’s wearing a t-shirt that she designed in her signature cartoonish style; on the back it says “Flush the turd on November 3rd.” Each day that passed without results, she crossed out the date and wrote in a new one.
Black Lives Matter Plaza, November 7, 2020
This time around, she’s not sure what she’ll do or where she’ll go if Trump secures a second term, but she is sure what she won’t be doing: protesting.
“If he wins, I’m not protesting again,” she says with conviction. “That’s my hard line. You had the whole of 2017, ‘18, ‘19, ‘20, ‘21, ‘22, ‘23, and now until November 5th, 2024, and you let him get back in there? No. I’m done. It would be hard. It would be very hard. But I’m done.”
When I agree that she has more than earned a break after the countless hours she has spent reminding passersby why immigrants like her have always made America so great, she is quick to clarify that she’s not looking for accolades—and admits that her not-quite-infinite well of patience may finally be drying up.
“I have done so much to get people’s attention,” she says. “We are the majority of this country. America has had enough time. America is willing to let people die again and again and still claim to be ‘pro-life?’ No. No. I want her to win, I want to be wrong. I so want to be wrong.”
Women’s March, November 2, 2024
A Trailblazer is Riding Free
Photo: Kristine Jones
I don’t remember when I first met Kathalene Kilpatrick, or how I got to wherever in Washington, D.C., our introduction took place. The most likely location is outside of a tall, “unscalable” fence that encircled Lafayette Park and the White House in the last six months of 2020 and beginning of 2021. A few weeks after George Floyd’s late-May murder, Mayor Muriel Bowser directed city officials to paint “BLACK LIVES MATTER” in large, yellow block letters stretching from I to H streets just outside of the park. The temporarily-car-free plaza, bisected by 16th Street NW, became a gathering space for activists, trauma tourists, and anyone else who felt they had something to say or see.
The Black Lives Matter Memorial fence was an unofficial, living makeshift monument to (mostly) American lives and dreams lost too soon; it both seemed as if it would last forever and was constantly in danger of disappearing overnight. Personal experience can be painful, but it’s a surreal privilege to witness history being made in real time as old, ordinary pieces from the past are cobbled together and reimagined into something new and extraordinary. Anyone moved in any way by the messages beamed out—at a time when most people suddenly had little to do but pay attention—may not realize there is a relatively small band of very real guardian angels to thank, at least in part, for their transformation.
Members of the scrappy, unofficial chosen fence family, which almost always included Kilpatrick and other equally-impressive women, remained at the plaza through rain, snow, wind, oppressive humidity, petty political photo ops, and Stop the Steal rallies. The collective was one of the only constants in a chaotic period which included clouds of tear gas in the summer, tears of tenuous joy and champagne spritz on election day, and covid droplets spewing from MAGA mouths planning a January insurrection.
More than a year after the fence finally came down and the park reopened, it seems now that the show of force was mostly a farce; a death rattle by the flailing Trump administration meant to intimidate. Instead, the main thing it proved was that chain link could became a canvas for protest posters, artwork, and other mementos of the movement—as long as it was lovingly maintained and protected by a small, but resourceful group of passionate people with a singular purpose: to fiercely defend the promise of a country that had almost always let them down more times than it had lifted them up.
Photo: Kristine Jones
A BAD START
On August 29, 1942, Kathalene Hughes Kilpatrick was born premature and severely underweight at a 666 street address in Tallahassee, Florida. That the roots of her family tree are tangled, gnarled, and hardy shouldn’t be a surprise; in a nation stocked by waves of immigrants and built on the labor of those they enslaved (officially or otherwise), things get hard real fast. She admits that some details of her long life have blended together over the decades in a game of generational telephone. “At the age of 80, it takes a little thinking to go back that many years,” Kilpatrick says recently, and apologetically.
But other things only become more clear in the rearview: She knows for sure that at least some of her ancestors had no choice whether or not they wanted to come to America in the first place—and few good options once they arrived. Her relatives are mostly Black, but also Cherokee and Seminole, a lot of whom appear to, at least anecdotally, have possessed especially robust genes. Several lived full, healthy lives well into their 100s, and if they were anything like their still-living legacy, they no doubt made the most of their limited opportunities and chose gratitude when they had a choice. Kilpatrick mentions several times that, even into her eighth decade, she still has “a sound mind and good vision.” But even if she didn’t—and if it was possible to get one—I don’t think Kilpatrick would accept a cosmic do-over.
Some people might be hardened after a life like hers, one in a which a lot of time appears to have been spent doing the right things for the wrong people; but there is no trace of bitterness in her voice when she says, “Because I love all people, people seem to love me,” or “I am very happy because as the Bible states, my latter days are better than the beginning days.” I know the first statement is accurate because I’ve seen its truth with my own eyes—but I can only hope the second is as well. Kilpatrick never asks for anything more than her fair share of equality—and even that appreciation of self seems to have arrived only after a lifetime of karmic debt operating in the red from the very beginning.
“My life just started out in a bad way,” she says.
Photo: Kristine Jones
Kilpatrick’s first days—and many that followed—were by any metrics, indeed quite bad. But she is careful not to be too critical of others, including her parents, siblings, ex husbands, friends, coworkers, extended family, and even passersby. Like a lot of women, she lavishly compliments others and directs her harshest thoughts back at herself: when presented with photos of herself, she scrutinizes her appearance despite the indisputable fact that she always looks impeccable. She constantly apologizes for things that I would have never thought to consider as intrusions in the first place.
While she was growing up in the post-war Florida panhandle, Kilpatrick’s parents must have ached under the weight of juggling several kids with multiple jobs including nursing, phonograph repair, at a furniture store, and in a beauty salon. She says it was a stable, if also stressful and largely loveless, environment. But after she became a young single parent herself, Kilpatrick mostly thinks her less-than-ideal childhood was a fair price to pay for her family to achieve the American Dream: “They worked hard,” she says. “But they always had homes.”
When Kilpatrick was 16 in the late ‘50s, she was raped by a religious leader and family friend, and forced to give birth to a child she didn’t choose but loves unconditionally, nonetheless. “I had no choice because it was 1959,” she says in late September 2022, just a few months after the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v Wade. “I don’t think a man should have a say—period. It’s not about a man. It’s not about the faith. It’s a power thing. It’s about doing the right thing.”
Photo: Kristine Jones
For most of her life, Kilpatrick has followed in her family’s multitasking, hardworking footsteps, usually with at least one of her feet on the gas pedal or brake of a public transit vehicle or tour bus. Briefly, she drove a taxi cab while she was enrolled in night school and raising two children on her own. She’s been married twice, divorced and widowed; one husband was haunted by demons from his military service in Vietnam, and another inspired Kilpatrick to move from Florida to D.C. in the late ‘60s “to put as much space between us as we could,” she says.
In the early ‘90s, her son-in-law violated a restraining order, marched into a Fort Lauderdale grocery store, and shot himself and Kilpatrick’s only daughter in the head while she worked. He died at the scene, but her daughter lived in a hospital for more than 30 days, eventually dying in Kilpatrick’s arms and leaving behind a teenage son. Kilpatrick cared for her grandson too, until he enlisted in the Navy (and died young in a motorcycle accident). She credits God for guiding her through the darkest days, and says, despite it all, she tries to focus on the light and considers herself lucky.
“God has just been really good to me,” she insists.
STATE OF INJUSTICE
If I had boarded a D.C. Metro bus back the ‘70s, the driver most likely been male, and probably also white. Or the bus driver might have been Kilpatrick, who was the first female to operate buses in Tallahassee before also driving for Metro and other public and private transit fleets.
During the summer of 2020, I mostly walked everywhere. But even if I had taken one of the buses that stops frequently outside my apartment—and Kilpatrick was on it—she wouldn’t have been behind the wheel. Although I didn’t know it when we met, at an age when others with lesser credentials are reaping the earned rewards of retirement, Kilpatrick spent nearly her entire seventh decade living down on the same streets that she had once so nimbly navigated from above.
It’s hard to go far in the world without being confronted with marble monuments erected to, and by men who decided it was they alone who made America great. Outside of Union Station, the District’s main transit hub, stands a gleaming white statue of Christopher Columbus, erected in 1912 and looming nearly 50 feet tall over a grass-and-concrete ellipse. Today, the fountain’s basin is empty, covered in white-washed wooden boards; it’s unclear whether work on the monument has just begun, paused, or if it was a temporary fix that turned permanent by neglect.
Early in the pandemic, as planes, trains, and buses coming in and out of the city slowed to a trickle (and still haven’t reached pre-2020 levels), more tents and temporary structures sprung up in—and were inhumanely cleared from— triangle parks, underpasses, and a lot of the land surveyed by Columbus: The man who “discovered” America, sentenced in stone for all of eternity to watch what it had become. The plywood continues to be splintered by the feet of too many tourists, protestors, birdwatchers, pigeons, and people who, for one reason or many, by choice or circumstance, are dangerously close to falling through the cracks themselves. People whose backstories overlap more often than not with Kilpatrick’s: they’re Black, or Native, or a murky mix of marginalized identities, homeless on land that has been stolen from someone at least once.
Through it all, they emerge with improbable empathy and energy, but low on favorable options. Every day, in a country famous for its bottomless buffets and glut of Airbnbs, too many good people are still looking for a sturdy and safe place to spend the night. While Kilpatrick lived for a time outside of Union Station, most nights in early 2020 she spent curled up less than a mile north of the White House, on the storied steps of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Referred to as “the President’s church,” even in the times before Trump’s now-infamous upside-down Bible photo op, the yellow Greek revival house of worship was consecrated in 1816.
Photo: Kristine Jones
A more compassionate and uncontrived portrait was taken not too long before Trump’s: Made by Kristine Jones, the black-and-white shot shows Kilpatrick sitting alone on a city bench in downtown D.C. She’s looking outside of the frame, considering what, or who, we can’t know. Or maybe she’s thinking about nothing much at all, figuring she’s earned the moment of rest in a life spent on the move. Maybe she’s filled with a mix of awe and annoyance that life is somehow too full and yet falls short on both pure tragedies and comedies; maybe she’s thinking about how nothing—and no one—is ever objectively all good or all bad. Or maybe that’s just how looking directly at Kilpatrick’s indirect gaze in the photo makes me feel. Ambiguity makes it all interesting, but uncertainty is nerve-racking to navigate alone. It’s easy to lose your way or get turned around when you’re too tired to know exactly what it is, or who you are supposed to be looking for—or at.
Kilpatrick, of course, looks good as always, despite her weariness and the weather, wrapped in a nest of pristine jackets and fuzzy scarves, with a shiny, chic purse dangling from her shoulder. She holds a stark sign that succinctly sums up the state of her outside circumstances only; her inner thoughts may always largely remain a mystery. We might not be able to determine the state of her mind with vision alone, but luckily for the rest of us, when she sees something wrong, she usually says something.
A SMOOTH TRANSITION
Kilpatrick’s been dipping her toes into activist waters, at least unofficially, since the early ‘60s when a group decided it was time to integrate a Tallahassee movie theater. She says she remembers segregation, cross burnings, and student protests, but decades later, she describes her collective memory of tumultuous time periods with umbrella terms that both seem innocent (“very calm”) and slightly more insidious (“Southern hospitality”).
She was driving a public school bus, one of, if not the very first Black women in the area to do so, when Florida began to integrate. If the students had a problem with it, they never said as much to Kilpatrick—she was in the driver's seat every day and they weren’t there yet. “They found a vacant seat and that’s where they sat,” she says. “It was a smooth transition.”
I’m positive that she’s incapable of abusing whatever power she earned over the years, but I also get the sense she never felt quite right apologizing much for it either. And still, even after all that she’s experienced before and since the official end of segregation, she still thinks the solution to division in America is simple. “We should have equality,” she says. “It shouldn’t be a problem to live together and get along.”
Photo: Kristine Jones
Today, the idyllic Florida of Kilpatrick’s early years may feel as foreign as a time when women were rarely allowed—let alone trusted—to drive their own destinies (or vehicles) and make their own choices (or maybe not). But it was a place that allowed Kilpatrick to hit a lot of the milestones newly available to women of her generation: She was a Brownie, a Girl Scout, and Miss Freshman at Lincoln High School. As a teen she played softball, volleyball, and basketball. “I was a guard and we were a little hard to beat,” she says, flashing a mischievous smile in the way she handles disclosing most of her accomplishments, no matter how impressive they may be: humbly and humorously with more than her fair share of humility.
Kilpatrick has been the subject of several features over the course of her illustrious life—for both her ups, as well as her downs—but it’s not long into a conversation for this profile that she apologizes for focusing so much on herself. “If it’s too much, get the best part and leave the rest,” she says. “You surely don’t have to include everything,” she offers, as if that’s even possible with someone as prolific, selfless, beloved, and thoughtful as she is.
Maybe her wisdom comes from having been a Christian since the ‘50s, one who despite a lifetime of navigating a world built purposely to oppress her, still maintains an unshakeable faith in the goodness of humanity. Or maybe it was just learned the hard way, by a breadth of extraordinary experience that includes photos with presidents and chauffeuring a bus full of nuns who were also nurses.
DO YOUR OWN THING
Kilpatrick has been working and volunteering (officially or not) in some capacity and almost constantly since she was a teenager. Her resume lists so many inspiring entries for anyone, let alone a Black woman from the South, that it begins to feel like a frustrating question without a good answer, or a crude, unfunny joke with no payoff: What do you get when you deliver a bus full of nuns, politicians, and “the most famous band in Panama” safely to their respective destinations? Depends on who you ask and their metrics for success, but the best drivers usually aren’t afraid of the unexpected detours. And if they’re really special, like Kilpatrick, they’re able to turn their personal pain into inscrutable but inspiring photo ops, spinning their own garbage into gold for others to reap benefits historically denied to them. They bring souvenirs back for the rest of us who may not be able to get there just yet—or ever, on our own—but are willing, at the very least, to pay attention and expect nothing but gratitude in return.
Kilpatrick has volunteered in hospitals, libraries, and at the DNC headquarters; she’s been a public school tutor, an election worker, and a foster grandparent, receiving recognition from at least two sitting presidents (Clinton and Obama) for her myriad efforts. Photos fade and certificates can be damaged in a leaky storage unit—but there’s a better reason Kilpatrick doesn’t put much stock in material possessions. Despite the well-deserved accolades, she’s always known what really matters in the end: “The only real true thing is love,” she says. “You can’t live on Mother Theresa’s legacy. You’ve got to do your own thing.”
Photo: Kristine Jones
Today, Kilpatrick tries to sprinkle pleasures in between the protests, but mostly she can be found doing a combination of both. She lists her hobbies as “reading, writing, drawing, and helping (assistance).” She says she very much enjoyed driving tour groups across the country to California, and loved the Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, and “seeing all those lights in Las Vegas.” But no matter how much she sees or how far she goes, Kilpatrick always comes back to the state where she feels most at home: her unconditional love for others. “Driving buses was very interesting,” she says. “But ultimately it just helped me take care of my kids.”
Kilpatrick has always been busy, working hard to keep herself (and others) afloat. Even as she fights the strong currents always seemingly working against her, she still tries to make the most of her limited time down on earth. She advocates for the homeless (work she did while unhoused herself), mentors foster kids, and offers a seemingly infinite amount of smiles or encouragement to a number of people who still call her “Miss K,” or simply, “mom.” When Kilpatrick thinks she has texted me too early, she offers an explanation wrapped in another unnecessary apology: “I am so sorry,” she says. “I text a lot of homeless people early in the morning to wake them up and sent yours by mistake.”
Photo: Kristine Jones
Whether she has a history with them or not, she has a kind word to offer most people we pass inside of Union Station. Outside, in a new shadow cast by old Chris, she tells a tourist not to sit down on a step because it’s covered in bird droppings. She greets strangers as if they’re friends, and some quickly turn from the former into the latter after receiving a well-timed compliment conjured out of thin air or common interest. She talks about a North Carolina basketball team with a person sitting next to her because of their t-shirt and instantly recognizes and hugs an old friend who is making their rounds cleaning the station’s bathrooms.
Although Kilpatrick admits that, the older she gets, she may need to sit for longer than she used to—or accept help when it’s genuinely offered—eventually she always stands up tall for herself and at every turn, tries to protect others from the bad luck dump truck that has followed her too closely for much of her life. She is self-conscious about sometimes needing to rely on anything solid for support, but mostly just uses her walking stick to push cigarette butts and a pencil out of the way so no one accidentally slips on the slick stone floors.
She frequently says, “Let me tell you something,” often followed by a Bible verse: “Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.” It’s clear that not only does she practice what she preaches, Kilpatrick has perfected it. She is such a local celebrity around certain D.C. landmarks that I find myself wondering if there’s any historic moment or famous person she hasn't encountered in some capacity while doing her own thing over the years.
My suspicion is confirmed when our unofficial interview officially ends. We’re eating burgers at Shake Shack when Kilpatrick queues up a video on YouTube and slides her phone across the table. It takes me a few moments after she hits play—on a music video for the early-2000 hit earworm, “Thong Song,” by R&B singer and Baltimore native, Sisqó—to get my bearings and understand not only what I’m looking at, but why.
She’s transported me back to my teenage years, but not in an attempt to make a Christian comment on the morality of a song composed of poetic phrases such as “She had dumps like a truck, truck, truck,” and “Thighs like what, what, what.” One of the ever-present bangles jangling on her wrist might feature a charm that says “Earth Angel,” but Kilpatrick is no pearl-clutching saint. She’s also not exactly a star either, at least not in a video as memorable for what it doesn’t contain (many clothes) as for its catchy chorus. She doesn’t have a recognizable cameo, per se, but as one of only a handful of people—man, woman or otherwise—with skills to drive the standard shift Baltimore bus in the shoot’s Miami beach location, Kilpatrick was integral to the final product.
Kilpatrick says she was fired from The Pharmacy Corporation of America (where she was the only Black woman among more than 50 employees) for speaking out about the need for equal pay. She stopped driving for Metro because she felt that the bus wasn't safe to drive and the agency pushed her (and other drivers) to continue past her comfort zone. She says she was following the safety guidelines outlined in official manuals and always tried to do the right thing: “I always got my proper rest and had safe equipment,” she insists.
Since she left, she’s received nothing but the runaround from governmental agencies regarding records and benefits. As a result, she’s also been engaged in an ongoing, unofficial protest of her own (Kilpatrick v Metro) that she explains to me while we’re sitting on the steps of the Supreme Court under the inscription “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.” She carries a neatly-hand-lettered sign in her bag that formally introduces herself to city bus operators—some of whom she still knows—and explains why an otherwise respectful woman fully intends to stiff them, intentionally breaking the law every time she boards without paying the fare.
“Hello! I’m a Trailblazer for D.C. transit and Metro (Local 689),” the sign speaks on her behalf, naming union credentials and highlighting yet another type of passenger bus she’s qualified to operate. A copy of her CDL is attached to the paper, along with a picture of Obama in case anyone looking at Kilpatrick needs yet another example of a real, live trailblazer. She’s attached a valid senior Metrocard too, just to prove that yes, she understands the rules—she has always been, and still is, a woman of sound mind and vision, afterall—but sometimes, she disagrees.
Photo: Kristine Jones
She also sees that guidelines are rarely one-size-fits-all, morality isn’t always able to be rendered sharply in black and white, and systems don’t always benefit those they are purportedly designed to help. Look no further than all of the very real guardian angels, caught in cracks everywhere on earth, for proof that it’s often easier to advocate for others than it is to stand up for ourselves. Kilpatrick’s sign ends with a reasonable, but revolutionary statement made by someone who has more than earned the right to ask for whatever she wants—even if it is to do nothing. But in doing nothing, she’s saying everything, including refusing to pay yet again for the same privileges that others receive automatically, without even a fraction of the work she’s already put in.
“I am riding FREE,” her sign simply states. And like its creator, her message may not always officially work, but it always makes a difference.
SALVATION ARMY
Kilpatrick became homeless in the summer of 2012, like most people do: due to a series of unfortunate events mostly beyond her control. She was evicted from a senior housing complex in D.C. after bogus claims that she couldn’t pay her $49-a-month rent. She says that she was bitten with bed bugs almost immediately after she moved in; when she spoke up, filing complaints and keeping her unpaid rent in an escrow account as she was advised to do, she was still evicted in what she thinks was just another cruel attempt to silence her.
She says she chose to sleep outside on the streets instead of inside of shelters because she doesn’t like to feel controlled, unsafe, or confined. Despite incidents of theft, sexual assault, and other indignities disproportionately doled out to people who share her demographic details, she insists she never really that nervous or too scared sleeping outside. She repeatedly expresses gratitude for those who have helped her out, anonymously or otherwise, including a white man who used to seek her out specifically just to give her money several times a week. She never knew his name and they lost track of each other, but she’s certain he was an angel with whom she shared a philosophy and a few moments of kindness every week, if not much else.
Kilpatrick never complains about, or romanticizes, the struggles of herself and others. “It seems as if this life is not for me—it is for me to do for others,” she says. “This is fine, but I need a little break once in a while. I pray that I will get the service that I need if it comes to that point of time in my life.” Her faith may be invisible and unstoppable, but it’s not improbable. She believes miracles happen to her all the time, and with the right perspective, it appears that they do.
Photo: Kristine Jones
While she was taking one of her rare breaks in 2020 and sitting on a bench outside of a congressional office building on Capitol Hill, Kilpatrick recognized a sister-and-law she hadn’t seen in 13 years. Thanks to the coincidence—and ongoing financial support from particularly generous members of her chosen family—Kilpatrick now lives with her sister-in-law in Maryland. “I am very grateful to all of my friends who didn't want to see me on the streets nor leave me on the streets of D.C.,” Kilpatrick says, speaking both specifically to her own experience and universally. “For a senior citizen of the U.S. to live on the streets for nearly 10 years is a disgrace.”
Though she is off the streets, Kilpatrick still admits to feeling confined, forced by circumstance to share a home with someone she had lost touch with long ago. “I am inside now, although I am still in a homeless state,” she says. Space is tight, Social Security payments are small, and she’s currently working at the Salvation Army six days a week. She has Sundays off—and clearly has earned more than just one day of rest—but she’s learned how to lean on her patience, her people, and above all else, her faith.
“I trust God with all my heart and he has brought me through many trials and tribulations,” Kilpatrick says. “Footprints are real in my life because God carried me through all the obstacles, valleys, danger, toils, and snares. He is my healer, my provider, and my evening. That is the end of my story.”
A CLASSY LADY
Like all good stories about guardian angels, Kilpatrick’s time down on earth will eventually come to an end—but that inevitability seems too far in the future to worry much about right now. I’m counting on the power of a combination of prayer, positivity, and those God-given good genes. Yes, many things start off badly, but if you put in the work and change your point of view, there can be no limit to the fulfilling middles or happy endings.
Photo: Kristine Jones
By the time we meet again outside of Union Station, a few weeks after her 80th birthday, Kathalene and I have seen each other countless times. We’ve sat together, marched, danced, and protested alongside each other for more than two years. There are a lot of chances to exercise the right to protest in our nation’s capital and a lot of really unjust reasons to take every chance and choice we’re given.
I offer to carry her purse out of generational duty, genuine kindness, and because she deserves a break, not realizing it contains another heavy bag full of Queen Elizabeth commemorative coins. Her Majesty has only been dead a day or two, but after we finish our burgers, Kilpatrick plans to catch a bus to a coin shop to see how much they’re worth. She knows their value, so she won’t let them go for less, but she’s also never been one to squander a good opportunity when she sees it. I ask her if she was a fan of the Queen, and Kilpatrick says: “Oh, yes. I liked her purses and her outfits. She was a classy lady and always looked so put together.”
“Let me tell you something,” she says. “I just love people. You never know who you can touch. They might be going through something and fellowship will give them a different feeling. When you’re nice to people and change your attitude, other people change too.”
What unfortunately can’t be seen in any photo or read in any profile, is how changed I, and others, feel after just a few minutes spent in Kilpatrick’s presence. She exudes a sense of inner peace and genuine kindness that I suspect no outside force—no matter how corrosive—can penetrate. She clearly knows where she is, a woman of sound mind and vision in every sense of both words. Yes, she got dealt a bad start, but she’s always had a good sense of direction. She knows it was sometimes very bad where we came from, but recognizes that there is always some good mixed in there too. She always acted as if she knew where we were going, even if it took more than a few, twisting detours to get there. She knows that it’s worth the extra effort to learn how to drive a standard shift; even if she could have never predicted that she would end up on a pristine beach with Sisqó, surrounded by the finer things in life.
Photo: Kristine Jones
But no matter what kind of history or personal tragedy unfolds around her, Kilpatrick seems to have always possessed a superhuman ability to focus on the task at hand and fulfill her mission (chosen or otherwise) to the highest standards possible. Whether she was driving radio legend Cathy Hughes, “Washington’s premier Go-Go band” Rare Essence, authors, students on a field trip from Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, groups from the CIA (allegedly), honor guards on their way to Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown, sports teams, members of the military to secure locations, or those nuns who were also nurses, Kilpatrick has remained steadfast in her love of all people—not despite their circumstances, but because she knows how much there is that we can never know about another person. She just starts with the good, and sees how far it can take her.
She comes from a hardy stock, so in some ways unavailable to others, she can afford to fight fiercely and patiently await positive results. No matter where she’s going or how far, she knows that we all deserve better, that progress is possible, and the finer things are always more fun if you share them. She has always deserved the right to ride free—not because of all the years she gave to a system that only takes, or the selfless acts of service she still willingly doles out, but because she’s a real human woman who deserves to be safe and feel clean.
Luckily for us, she’s determined to take as many people with her, and along for the ride, as she can. But if she needs to take a Metro bus to get there, one thing is certain: Kilpatrick won’t be paying the fare, and I think that’s more than fair. She’s paid enough already. The only shame is that she is no longer the one driving the bus—because there’s no one, not even Jesus himself, that I trust more to take the wheel than Kathalene Hughes Kilpatrick, D.C. trailblazer.
Kathalene was born into a country that has done nothing to make her feel good about herself and everything to ensure she feels as bad as possible—which she has stubbornly refused to do, anytime she had any real choice in the matter. But after all she’s done in her long life, Kathalene expresses so much gratitude for her good fortunes that she is still too modest to take credit for much of anything, or ask for help directly.
So that's why we started a fundraiser on her behalf.
So if you feel moved by her story—and whether you’ve met her in person, just through this profile or Kristine’s photos, or feel connected in spirit, mission, philosophy, style, or otherwise—I hope you’ll consider donating what you can to help lighten her load and balance the scales of injustice, if only for a moment: 100% of the funds collected will go directly to Kathalene to use where needed, specifically in this instance, but dedicated to all of those committed to doing the same, or so much more, to drive all of us forward.
❤︎ Thank you ❤︎
The most fantastic thing about the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Orchid Show is the orchids themselves