Video: 'Stonewall Uprising - full movie'

(Saturday, June 28, 1969, 1:20 a.m. EDT) — The Stonewall riots, a milestone in the modern gay rights movement in the United States, began this morning in New York City when an angry crowd of bystanders began throwing bottles, rocks and even a parking meter at NYPD patrolmen who were carrying out a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay hangout at 53 Christopher Street in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan.

Seven policemen came in to the Stonewall Inn, locked the doors, arrested the employees, and began lining up the patrons to transport them to a detention center and then releasing them, the usual practice for roundups.

As one author would note later, “On that night, though, the customers did not slink off into the darkness. On that night, they stayed, gathering outside the Stonewall Inn. These raids — and the horrible treatment of gay people — had to stop.”

The trigger, on one of the hottest and most humid days of the summer, was when the police were forcing their way through the angry crowd to put one of the last customers into a police van (accounts differ as to whether it was a lesbian who resisted arrest or a transvestite man who was violently shoved into the van).