Stonewall Rebellion: Crowd rage ignites
Lavender & red, part 66
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 15, 2006 8:55 PM
Acts of resistance, some of them virtually
simultaneous, presaged rebellion as prisoners were being loaded into the police
wagon and precinct cars outside the Stonewall bar the night of June 28, 1969.
Many of the following precious first-hand accounts by Stonewall combatants are
compiled in books about the rebellion by David Carter and Martin
Duberman.
A number of accounts of the confrontation between cops and the
crowd outside the Stonewall bar mark the prolonged struggle between police and a
cross-dressed butch lesbian as a qualitative turning point. According to Village
Voice journalist Howard Smith, “It was at that moment that the scene
became explosive.”
Smith wrote that the crowd roared: “Police
brutality! Pigs!”
Gino, a Puerto Rican construction worker, joining
in the shouts of “Let her go! Leave her alone!” reportedly dislodged
a loose cobblestone and heaved it across Christopher Street. Eyewitness Steve
Yates remembered, “It landed on the trunk of a police car with a terrible
screech, ‘scaring the shit’ out of a policeman who was standing next
to the car.”
According to Stonewall employee Harry Beard, one or
more people in the crowd were able to slash all four tires on the police cruiser
with the butch lesbian prisoner inside.
Raymond “Ray” Castro,
a Puerto Rican baker, recalled how he fought his own arrest. “At that
point I started pushing back and wound up with two plainclothes police pushing
me. The next thing I know, there’s two plainclothes cops and two uniformed
police in the melee. I was knocked to the ground by one of their billy clubs,
[which,] put between my legs, tripped me. At that point the handcuffs got put on
me, and they had a [police] wagon right in front of the entrance to the
Stonewall. When I got shoved up to the door of the [police] wagon, I had two
policemen on each side of me. I didn’t quite go willingly into the
[police] wagon. I didn’t want to be arrested. Even thought I was
handcuffed, I jumped up and [put] one foot on the right side of the door and one
foot on the left of the door. I sprung up like a jumping jack and pushed
backwards, knocking the police down to the ground, almost against the wall of
the Stonewall. Well, they finally dragged me into the [police]
wagon.”
Tom, a participant, remembered Ray battling against arrest.
“A couple more were thrown into the van. We joined in with some who wanted
to storm the van, free those inside, then turn over the van. But nobody was yet
prepared for that kind of action. Then a scuffle at the door. One guy refused to
be put into the van. Five or six cops guarding the van tried to subdue him with
little success. Several guys tried to help free him. Unguarded, three or four of
those in the van appeared then quickly disappeared into the crowd. This was all
anyone needed.”
As police hurriedly tried to load other prisoners
into the police wagon, one 18-year-old participant saw “a leg in nylons
and sporting a high heel shoot out of the back of the [police] wagon into the
chest of a cop, throwing him backward. Another queen then opened the door on the
side of the wagon and jumped out. The cops chased and caught her, but Blond
Frankie [who worked the door at the Stonewall] quickly managed to engineer
another escape from the car; several queens successfully made their way out with
him and were swallowed up in the crowd.” (“Stonewall,”
Duberman)
Michael Fader reported seeing the cops “leave the van
unattended—the doors were open, so they left. That raised the emotional
level, the excitement of them getting away.”
The multinational crowd
of hundreds massed around the police was made up of those brave enough and angry
enough at oppression to be drawn to a confrontation with the police. Stonewall
combatant Sylvia Rivera stressed a very important point about the rebellion that
ensued. Rivera was a Venezuelan and Puerto Rican transgender youth who had lived
homeless on the streets of Manhattan since she was 10 years old. Before her
death, she stressed the role in the rebellion of the homeless gay/trans street
youth—Black, Latin@ and white, and gender-defiant—who could not
afford the Stonewall door admission charge or the overpriced, watered down
drinks. The vest-pocket park across the street from the bar was their home.
(Personal interview, 1997)
Rivera emphasized that at the moment of
ignition of the rebellion, “It was street gay people from the Village out
front—homeless people who lived in the park in Sheridan Square outside the
bar—and then drag queens behind them and everybody behind us.”
(Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue,” Feinberg)
Danny Garvin described
how police tried to push back those gathered around them. This allowed the crowd
to make an important discovery: a big stack of new bricks at a Seventh Avenue
South construction site. Garvin explained, “They would come at us with
nightsticks, and we would have to disperse onto Seventh Avenue, where the people
were able to see the bricks.”
Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, who led
the raid, ordered police to drive off quickly with prisoners in the police wagon
and three cop cruisers and “just drop them off at the Sixth Precinct and
hurry back.”
People in the crowd around the police wagon began
beating on its sides, demanding to know the names of those imprisoned inside.
According to Voice reporter Lucian Truscott, “A cry went up to push the
[police] wagon over, but it drove away before anything could happen.”
The slashed tires of one or more of the vehicles slowed down the police
exit. According to accounts compiled by David Carter: “The crowd, however,
was beyond being intimidated by mere sirens and the caravan had to push slowly
through the furious protesters, who, enraged, pounded on the police vehicles.
Danny Garvin recalls the noise as ‘people would run over, grab the
[police] wagon, and start shaking—ba-boom! ba-boom!!”
Martin
Duberman reported, “One queen mashed an officer with her heel, knocked him
down, grabbed his handcuff keys, freed herself, and passed the keys to another
queen behind her.”
Inspector Pine was left with eight plainclothed
detectives and one uniformed cop, all surrounded by an enraged crowd. Those
among the hundreds who surrounded police threw their precious pocket change in a
hard hail, shouting, “Dirty copper!” and “Here’s your
payoff!”
They hurled bottles, cans, bricks, a dam aged fire hydrant,
and dog excrement at police. A youth named Timmy reportedly heaved a wire-mesh
garbage can, which shattered the Stonewall’s plate-glass window, which was
reinforced with plywood.
Cries of “Gay power!” and
“Let’s get ‘em” articulated the detonation of mass
rage.
There was nowhere for the police to retreat except back into the
Stonewall—the very bar they had raided.
Next: Police barricade
themselves inside Stonewall bar; crowd lays siege.
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