CHICAGO — More than one million people are expected to attend Chicago’s LGBTQ Pride Parade Sunday afternoon. In year’s celebration marks a milestone for the event credited with triggering the modern movement for equal rights for LGBTQ Americans.
In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, a police raid by New York City police at the Stonewall Inn bar set off a weekend of rioting in Greenwich Village. The event is now seen as a tipping point.
In 1970, the one year anniversary of the riot, a march by hundreds of demonstrators from Stonewall Inn to New York’s Central Park, is now seen as the nation’s first “Pride Parade.”
In the years that followed, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles held their own marches — at first, the protests were attended by a few hundred people. A half century later, there are hundreds of parades across the country and world marking the event.
WGN travelled to New York City to talk with those who were there during the raid, and are now looking back at how a routine police raid became the flashpoint for a movement affecting the lives of millions of Americans.
Sean Lewis has the story.
