poisonrationale:

STONEWALL RIOTS 27/06/1969

Read this article to remember!

via Huff post “The following is from an essay that appears in a new collection of LGBTQ writing about New York City, Love, Christopher Street: Reflections of New York City, edited by Thomas Keith, with an introduction by Christopher Bram, and published by Vantage Point Books. The names in the story has been changed to protect identities.

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By institutionalizing memory, resisting the onset of oblivion, recalling the memory of tragedy that for long years remained hidden or unrecognized and by assigning its proper place in the human conscience, we respond to our duty to remember. (UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura)

Friday, June 27, was the last day of school that year. And with school out, my middle-school cronies and I looked forward to a summer reprieve from rioting against Italian, Irish, and Jewish public-school kids for being bussed into their neighborhoods. However, the summer months in Brooklyn’s African-American enclaves only escalated rioting between New York’s finest — the New York Police Department — and us. During this tumultuous decade of black rage and white police raids, knee-jerk responses to each other’s slights easily set the stage for a conflagration, creating both instantaneous and momentary fighting alliances in these black communities — across gangs, class, age, ethnicity, and sexual orientations — against police brutality.”

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(Source: withamemorysofuzzy)