If Tim’m West ’94 had stayed in Little Rock, Arkansas, he would have gone to Central High School – ground zero for school desegregation.
Instead, he witnessed the diversity of the Black experience in the Arkansas capital – from its thriving Black upper class to the impoverished housing projects where he learned to duck at the sound of gunfire – only into middle school. The family moved a few hours southwest to Taylor, Arkansas, a tiny town just above the Louisiana line. There, while Jim Crow oppression echoed throughout the region, his maternal grandfather spoke of the freedoms he had enjoyed in France during World War II.
“Living in a small town like that, there's a kind of visceral proximity to history,” West says.
Durham, North Carolina, was a metropolis in comparison. West arrived at Duke a closeted gay man, but he graduated out and proud. Granted, his maternal grandmother in Taylor had figured out he was gay and wrapped him in acceptance, but meeting fellow queer Blacks at Duke made West feel less like a unicorn. One of the first movies he saw at the Bryan Center was “Tongues Untied,” Marlon Riggs’ 1989 documentary about Black gay identity. West walked out of the screening determined to live openly. With the AIDS crisis and the shadow of discrimination, the early ’90s were a hard time to be gay in the U.S., but West no longer felt alone.
Today, at 52, West is executive director at the LGBTQ+ Institute at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. His Southern upbringing and education got him there.
“I'm a Black queer brother who grew up in Arkansas,” West says. “I now lead a national organization that not only fights for public health and access for people living with HIV/AIDS, but also a host of other issues.”
West was born in Cincinnati and returned to live in its Northside neighborhood for seven years as an adult. His family moved often, he explains, and he and his siblings claim the cities they were born in – New York, Cincinnati, Dallas – even if they grew up elsewhere.
“My dad was an evangelical preacher, but more of a storefront preacher,” West explains. “We were pretty unstable.”
By the time West was in kindergarten, he was in Little Rock. He has an early memory of a newspaper front-page photo of his family being evicted, part of a story about slumlords. By the time he reached sixth grade, the Wests had moved to rural Taylor to live near family and escape gang violence. Yet small-town Arkansas was no place to be gay and Black in the ’80s.
"I knew that I wanted to come out and explore who I was in college. I made decisions about where to go to college based on the possibility and viability of doing that."
– Tim'm West
“I knew that I wanted to come out and explore who I was in college,” says West. “I made decisions about where to go to college based on the possibility and the viability of doing that.”
Four years at Duke and master’s degrees from the New School and Stanford led to a passion for education and nearly a decade with Teach for America before West took his current role.
Modern day, at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, West contemplates a Freedom Riders exhibit. In one photo, civil rights leader John Lewis is the same age West was as a Duke undergraduate. West sees what Lewis achieved and believes today’s young people are just as capable. Accordingly, he shifted the LGBTQ+ Institute’s mission to embrace and encourage them the way he, too, found support and community in Durham and pockets of Duke.
“I ultimately think most people want to be good people,” West says. “I don't believe that there are these evil geniuses running rampant.”