EAST PEORIA, Ill. (WMBD)– Illinois Central College in East Peoria is hosting the Legacy Wall, featuring notable LGBTQ leaders in over 4,000 years of history.
The wall will stand in ICC’s student lounge until October 20th. The Legacy Wall is a traveling 400-square-foot exhibit. It features mini-biographies of LGBTQ people who have contributed to over 20 distinct fields of history and culture.
Some people included on the wall are figures like British mathematician Alan Turing, U.S. Baseball Player Glenn Burke, and Michelangelo.
The legacy wall was created by the Legacy Project based in Chicago. It’s a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and researching LGBTQ people who have made an impact on history and culture.
The Co-founder and Executive Director of the Legacy Project Victor Salvo spoke at today’s Legacy Wall reception. He works to incorporate LGBTQ education into the classroom as well as traveling with the Legacy Wall. Salvo says many LGBTQ teens and kids today are bullied.
He says one way to stop that is to educate and continue to keep the LGBTQ history alive.
“The simplest way, the most honest way, the most direct way to change these messages is to reintegrate LGBTQ contributions to history and culture through the classroom back into humanity’s story from which they should never been removed in the first place,” said Salvo.
The peer counselor at ICC, Brooke Poling, says she hopes as students and faculty walk by the Legacy Wall, they will get inspired by those featured on the wall.
Poling said, “I hope they can see, maybe learn something new that they didn’t know before especially if they are interested in a certain field. What’s really cool about the wall is it has all these different fields, so our students staff faculty they’re probably teaching or taking courses in some sort of field so maybe seeing someone they either look up to or hadn’t heard of that they can find out more.”
