A June 1969 police raid of the New York bar erupted into a days-long rebellion that lit a fire under the fight for LGBTQ rights
In 1969, police raids of gay bars in Manhattan followed a template. Officers would pour in, threatening and beating bar staff and clientele. Patrons would pour out, lining up on the street so police could arrest them.in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, things didn’t go as expected. Patrons and onlookers fought back—and the days-long melee that ensued, characterized then as a riot and now known as the Stonewall Rebellion, helped spark the modern LGBTQ civil rights movement.
, saw a business opportunity in catering to a gay clientele; they had also learned to avoid raids by greasing police officers’ palms with bribes.Photograph by NY Daily News Archive, GettyBusiness was humming, but gay bars were still dangerous places to congregate. Police officers regularly surveilled and
Dick Leitsch, the first gay journalist to document the events. “It catered largely to a group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering.”On the night of the raid, police arrived intending to follow their usual pattern of seizing the bar’s liquor and arresting its patrons. But this time, the patrons resisted, and violence broke out as the officers tried to calm the crowd.
Regardless of who started the uprising, the police raid did not go according to plan. As violence flared outside the bar, officers retreated inside and barricaded themselves in the building. Protesters burst through the barricade, exchanged blows with police, and lit a fire in the club. It took hours for officers to clear the streets. The next night, thousands came to the Stonewall Inn to taunt the police. Clashes broke out again that night and sporadically in the days that followed.
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