On the Mississippi coast, a transgender woman who had retired from the Air Force and was working as a broadcast engineer, opened her email to find … perfectly pleasant emails from colleagues and family, as she had every week since becoming Molly Kester four years earlier.



The Starkville Board of Aldermen meeting on that same day was unusually packed. After comments on a clogged sewer system, Ms. McDaniel stepped to the podium and made her case for why she should be granted a permit for the city’s first Pride parade, which she hoped to hold on March 24, strategically timed between spring break and finals.

She told them how she had grown the L.G.B.T.Q. group at Mississippi State University from just five people sitting in the library four years earlier to 135 and emphasized how the festivities would bring the community together.

What she didn’t tell them was that she and her friends were accustomed to being greeted with “Oh, it’s the dykes,” when they walked into bars; that someone threw a can at her professor when he walked down the street holding hands with his husband; that a repairman left a swastika on the wall of a local drag queen’s house.

As other organizers followed, with their own carefully crafted, generally upbeat speeches, Rosa Dalomba, 29, the owner of a local popcorn store, found herself moved and disturbed. Why did these residents have to beg for a permit in 2018? She eyed the lectern.

“I’m having a convo with myself and telling myself, ‘Dalomba — stay,’ ” she recalled, thinking about her own struggles as a black business owner on Main Street.

Ms. Dalomba, born in the Cape Verde islands in West Africa, had recently moved to Starkville with her boyfriend, a grad student, after a long stint in Rhode Island and several Southern locations.