HISTORY REPEATS
On ann’y of Stonewall, cops clash with Pride protesters
Gay pride protesters, joined by BLM activists, clashed with cops during march Sunday in the Village.
Gay pride and Black Lives Matter protesters clashed with police in Washington Square Park on Sunday — the 51st anniversary of the landmark, culture-changing Stonewall riots.
The Queer Liberation March protest, starting off as peaceful march from Foley Square, became heated just before 4:30 p.m. after a crowd of about 2,000 crowded into Washington Square Park.
According to police, someone was allegedly caught trying to mark up an NYPD vehicle with graffiti. There was no immediate information on how many arrests followed the confrontation.
“Everyone had been super chill. It was relaxed, people were having dance parties. Then all of a sudden everyone sees that cops are trying to arrest this one person. In a second there was a whole bunch of cops surrounding all of us,” said Marlyn Suarez, 24, a community organizer.
“They came rushing on the street. And then they just started pepper-spraying everywhere, all over in the crowd. It all happened fast. I didn’t know what had happened.”
A now-deleted video on Twitter showed a man being arrested shortly after 4:20 p.m. as protesters started shouting around him. It wasn’t clear why cops singled him out.
Another video shows a group of cops pulling and pushing protesters out of the way of a slow-moving NYPD vehicle trying to pass through the crowd.
At one point, two cops led a third away after he had been caught in a blast by a pepper spray.
The officers then retreated down Washington Square North toward Sixth Ave. The crowd followed, chanting “Let them go!” and “How do you spell racist? N-Y-P-D!’
Police regrouped near the northwest corner of the park, but there no further clashes.
The Stonewall uprising started in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a well-known gay bar on Christopher St. LGBT advocates fought back against the police crackdown, sparking several days of running battles in a neighborhood that had become a mecca for the community.
Historians and activists credit the Stonewall Uprising for giving rise to the global LGBT rights movement, lead
ing to marriage equality and laws barring discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Sunday’s Queer Liberation March was meant as a smaller alternative to the city’s massive annual Pride parade, which was canceled because of the pandemic — focusing primarily on linking the struggle of the LGBT community with the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It’s a great thing to see because the original Pride started with the civil rights movement,” Matthew Fischer said as he passed out hand sanitizer at Foley Square. “So we’re really going back to the roots of that and making sure we encompass everything that empowers people to be who they are.”
A number of marchers at Foley Square held signs reading “All Black Lives Matter,” with a black fist surrounded by rainbow colors.
Most wore masks, though some scrapped social distancing and one man held a sign advertising free hugs.
At Rockefeller Center, where more than 100 rainbow flags were placed around the center rink, the plaza was lit up in rainbow colors. In the West Village, a rainbow light art installation next to the Stonewall Inn was expected to illuminate the sky in tribute to the uprising and the original march, as well as those who have marched and fought through the years.
“The feeling doesn’t go away because of the coronavirus,” Mayor de Blasio said in an interview with WABC-TV.