A year later, the first Pride march took place. Some witness accounts say Johnson was a leader of the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, when patrons of a Greenwich Village bar resisted a police raid and sparked the modern gay rights movement.įollowing the raid, Johnson and others - including Sylvia Rivera, a Latinx gay and transgender rights activist who passed away in 2002- led a number of protests against the raid. Johnson, who died in 1992 at age 46, is considered a pioneer of the movement for the rights of transgender people, although the term transgender was not widely used during her lifetime.
After a subdued 2020, this year's NYC Pride March and street festival are scheduled to take place Sunday - with people taking to the streets of the Big Apple in celebration, although it won't be the grand scale of years pre-pandemic.Įvery June, Pride Month commemorates the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan - a “tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States,” according to the Library of Congress.
