The Stonewall Uprising

In the 1960’s homosexuality was, for all intents and purposes, illegal in most parts of the United States. Laws existed on the books making it a felony to solicit or engage in sex from someone of the same sex and preventing people from dressing as a gender different from what they had been assigned at birth. In some cases, the mere existence of gay people in a group was enough for police to declare a gathering “disorderly.” This created a difficult and dangerous environment for the gay youth of New York City where these laws were enforced with extreme prejudice. Frequently gay youth were unhoused and living on the street after having been rejected by their families, and drug use and illness was common due to the unforgiving living conditions. There were few places of respite for this heavily marginalized population and an underground network of gay bars and gathering places grew to provide safe haven. Unfortunately, given the quasi-legal status of these establishments, organized crime families saw in them a potential source of income.

By the late 1960’s the Genovese crime family ran most of the gay bars in New York’s Village where they could use their connections to skirt local regulations and operate outside the law. In the summer of 1969 police conducted a series of raids on one of the most important and affordable of these bars, The Stonewall Inn which had become a sanctuary for youth fleeing street and family violence. Police brutality was not uncommon especially in arrests of queer youth or youth of color, and by the time the NYPD conducted the third in a series of raids on The Stonewall, patrons had had enough of a life torn between avaricious crime bosses, homelessness, and violent police. When mixed race drag king Stormé DeLaverie scuffled with police who had raided the club on June 28th 1969, tensions boiled over and the crowd who had assembled in the wake of the raids began pelting officers with pennies, batteries and bottles. The angry crowd slashed tires of police vehicles, and the officers who were outnumbered by a crowd that had grown to five or six hundred barricaded themselves inside the bar. In addition to DeLaverie, African American trans rights activist Marsha P. Johnson and Puerto Rican trans activist Sylvia Rivera were remembered as vocal on-the-ground leaders of the insurrection which tore parking meters from the ground to break the police barricade. NYPD tactical reinforcements arrived in riot gear, but they were outsmarted by the youth who were able to use the Village’s narrow, diagonal, crisscrossing streets to outflank police battalions. At full strength the rebellion numbered in the thousands and rioting and skirmishes between police and gay rights activists would continue for several nights, inspiring solidarity protests in Philadelphia and a secondary battle in front of the offices of the Newspaper The Village Voice which had reported unfavorably on the initial uprising. While movements for gay rights were in no way new, the events of June and July 1969 introduced a new militancy to the movement which had previously focused largely on acceptance and respectability.

The Gay Liberation Front was formed in the aftermath of Stonewall, inspired by the forceful tactics of the Black Panthers and anti-war demonstrators and stood in solidarity with many pro-Black causes, like marching to the Women’s House of Detention to support Black political prisoner Afeni Shakur. One year later, on June 28, 1970, a march celebrating what was then called Christopher Street Liberation Day was organized to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Simultaneous marches took place in Los Angeles, and Chicago making them the first Gay Pride marches in history, a tradition that continues to this day. Within two years of Stonewall there were gay rights groups in nearly every major city in America as well as Australia, Canada and Western Europe and soon there were gay political coalitions in both major US parties. Stonewall marked a turning point in the fight for equal treatment for the LGBTQI community, one whose impact was directly related to the force of resistance. An archival website compiled by a Stonewall patron Willson L. Henderson notes that among the most popular songs in the Stonewall jukebox in the summer of 1969 was “Stand” by Sly and the Family Stone. The song exhorts its listeners with the following call: “Stand, for the things you know are right/it’s the truth that makes them so uptight.” This lyric represents the moral imperative that peoples throughout history have called upon to fight for their freedom.

The Black Lives Matter movement is more than just a current political event. It is part of a centuries-long tradition of the oppressed rising up to forcefully demand fair and equal treatment and access to basic human rights. And if there is abuse, injustice, and brutality, there will also be resistance by those who envision a better, safer world, a world in which we can all belong, and who are willing to fight for us to be there. As author, revolutionary, and activist Angela Davis so succinctly put it: Freedom is a constant struggle.

Explore more uprisings in Black history

The Haitian Revolution

The South African Uprisings

Ashanti Uprising & Ghana Independence

Uprisings: Catalysts for Black Liberation