Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” The White Night Riots of 1979 was the language of thousands of queer people whose voices had been unheard. A prominent figure of the San Francisco queer community was assassinated, and his murderer was sentenced to a lesser charge; people were angry and took to the San Francisco City Hall to express their feelings in the form of a riot. A riot was the only way these people thought they would be heard after having a significant voice from their community silenced. This paper strives to tell the story of Harvey Milk, his assassination, and the aftermath of the assassination. Harvey Milk was born in 1930 in Woodmere, New York. He came from a family where both his mother
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On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk was assassinated by Dan White. White was a former police officer and a member of the Board of Supervisors who represented a more conservative side of the government, including real estate interests and the Police Association. He entered the San Francisco Government Offices through the basement window, armed after reportedly being angry with Mayor Moscone’s decision not to reappoint White to the City Board. White first entered Mayor Moscone’s office and shot and killed the mayor. He then reloaded his pistol, walked down the hall, and shot Harvey Milk three times and then two more times in the head when he was down (Krassner, 1993). White was caught very soon after the murders and even confessed to murdering both Moscone and Milk. The night Harvey Milk was killed, a crowd of thousands of people marched to City Hall to hold a silent candlelight vigil. During White’s trial, he pleaded a diminished capacity defense with his lawyers, saying that the large amount of junk food he was eating, combined with the stress from the loss of his job, caused him to suffer mental problems. This was known colloquially as the “Twinkie defense” (Carlsson, …show more content…
Along with the school, San Francisco has named a federal building, a recreation center, a library, and a plaza after Milk with a memorial plaque that reads, “His life is an inspiration to all people committed to equal opportunity and an end to bigotry.” In 2008, a statue of Milk was erected in the rotunda of the San Francisco City Hall. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Milk a Medal of Freedom, and a bill was passed denoting May 22, Milk’s birthday, as Harvey Milk Day (“The Official Harvey Milk Biography,” n.d.). The work Harvey Milk did for his community, the queer community, was not unnoticed, as seen by the riots and the memorialization of him many years after his death. The White Night Riots are not just for milk, however. These riots were a sign from the queer community that they would no longer be silent and peaceful in their fight for equality. The queer community had been relatively silent and peaceful even with the police raids of gay bars that had happened years prior (Martinez,
On November 27, 1978, Harvey Milk was assassinated by Dan White. White was a former police officer and a member of the Board of Supervisors who represented a more conservative side of the government, including real estate interests and the Police Association. He entered the San Francisco Government Offices through the basement window, armed after reportedly being angry with Mayor Moscone’s decision not to reappoint White to the City Board. White first entered Mayor Moscone’s office and shot and killed the mayor. He then reloaded his pistol, walked down the hall, and shot Harvey Milk three times and then two more times in the head when he was down (Krassner, 1993). White was caught very soon after the murders and even confessed to murdering both Moscone and Milk. The night Harvey Milk was killed, a crowd of thousands of people marched to City Hall to hold a silent candlelight vigil. During White’s trial, he pleaded a diminished capacity defense with his lawyers, saying that the large amount of junk food he was eating, combined with the stress from the loss of his job, caused him to suffer mental problems. This was known colloquially as the “Twinkie defense” (Carlsson, …show more content…
Along with the school, San Francisco has named a federal building, a recreation center, a library, and a plaza after Milk with a memorial plaque that reads, “His life is an inspiration to all people committed to equal opportunity and an end to bigotry.” In 2008, a statue of Milk was erected in the rotunda of the San Francisco City Hall. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded Milk a Medal of Freedom, and a bill was passed denoting May 22, Milk’s birthday, as Harvey Milk Day (“The Official Harvey Milk Biography,” n.d.). The work Harvey Milk did for his community, the queer community, was not unnoticed, as seen by the riots and the memorialization of him many years after his death. The White Night Riots are not just for milk, however. These riots were a sign from the queer community that they would no longer be silent and peaceful in their fight for equality. The queer community had been relatively silent and peaceful even with the police raids of gay bars that had happened years prior (Martinez,