IN GREENWICH VILLAGE
WRITTEN BY MARIAME KABA
INTRODUCTION
Greenwich Village was originally a Native American (Canarsee Lenape) fishing village, with a stream running through it known as the Manette, meaning “devil water” or “spirit water”
In the 17th century, North America’s earliest free Black settlement was established in the Village In the 19th century, it was the site of some of America’s first Black churches, and in the early 20th, it was home to many path-breaking Black artists, businesspeople, civil rights leaders, and organizations.
Greenwich Village Map- 1900's
Greenwich Village Map- Current
From the Land of the Blacks to Little Africa
The first non-Indigenous people to inhabit this land, now known as Greenwich Village, were the first 11 enslaved Africans brought to New York City by the Dutch West India Company in 1626. That was two years after the founding of the New Amsterdam colony.
The enslaved Africans successfully petitioned for their freedom in 1644, and the Dutch West India Company granted them land in an area that later became known as the “Land of the Blacks.” This first settlement of freed Africans in North America ran up the center of Manhattan, covering parts of today’s Tribeca, Soho, Chinatown, Lower East Side, East Village, and Greenwich Village
Map of Land of the Blacks
Paul D’Angola was among the first enslaved Africans brought to New Amsterdam in 1626 On July 14, 1645, D’Angola received a grant of a sixacre plot of farmland on what is present-day Washington Square Park. He holds the distinction of being the first non–Native American settler in the area
On September 5, 1645, Anthony Portuguese received an award of 12 acres of land that included Laguardia Place, Thompson Street, and Sullivan Street His land encompassed part of what is now modern-day Washington Square Park, with its southern boundary sitting just below West Third Street and its northern boundary just before Waverly Place.
Marycke, a Black widow, received six acres of land, while the Council of New Amsterdam granted Catalina, another Black widow, eight acres.
Land of the Blacks
Confirmation by the New York provincial government of an original Dutch letters patent that was issued on December 12, 1643, to a Black woman, Marijke [Marycke], the widow of Lawrence, for land in Manhattan
The confirmation was also issued to Domingo Anthony, who Marijke had married after receiving the land.
Many Black people resettled around Minetta Stream, which provided a source of water and trout and encompassed several streets in what is now considered the Sullivan-Thompson Historic District By 1830, the area had become one of New York City’s largest concentrations of African American residents and the North’s largest free Black community, comprising almost 14,000 people and many newspapers, churches, and charitable organizations. It became known as the community of “Little Africa.”
For more about “Land of the Blacks,” read - Moore, Christopher “A World of Possibilities: Slavery and Freedom in Dutch New Amsterdam” in Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds. Slavery in New York The New Press, 2005
Potter’s Field/Washington Square Park
In the 18th century, after dispossessing the Black landowners there, New York City acquired Washington Square Park to use as a public burial ground, or a “potter’s field,” where it buried indigent people who died of illnesses such as yellow fever and those who could not afford a gravestone Many prisoners were also buried at this site The city buried between 10,000 and 25,000 people in the field
The English elm at Waverly Place and MacDougal Street on Washington Square Park’s northwest corner is the oldest tree in Manhattan. People think it sprouted around 1679. According to legend, its branches were used to hang “traitors” during the Revolutionary War. The tree is called “Hangman’s Elm,” but there’s no evidence that anyone was actually hanged from the tree.
The city did hold public executions on the land through the 18th century. It hanged many prisoners from Newgate and Bridewell Prisons in the field. Legend has it that the executioners used some trees that are still standing on the east side as gallows. The last-known person to be hanged in the potter’s field was a 19-year-old Black enslaved woman named Rose Butler, who was executed for arson
Washington Square Park
Rose Butler (1799–1819)
Rose was born in November 1799 into slavery in Mount Pleasant, New York Records of her early life are sparse, but we know she was in New York City in 1817, at which time William L. Morris of Manhattan purchased her.
"Rose Butler." Malachi Lily,
Rose worked in the Morris household as a domestic servant for two years. In 1819, a fire broke out in the Morris home. The fire minimally damaged a few kitchen stairs, and no one suffered any harm. But Rose was accused of setting the blaze and tying a string around the kitchen door to prevent the Morris family from escaping.
Rose’s account of the fire was contradictory At one point, she mentioned that two white men approached her while she was pumping water and “advised me to burn the house.” She said she refused, but that the men likely set the fire In other testimony, however, Rose said she had set the fire herself, because “my mistress was always finding fault with my work, and scolding me. I never did like her.” Rose’s case went to the New York Supreme Court, where the justices deliberated whether arson could be a capital crime. They decided it could, and they sentenced Rose to be hanged.
Ten thousand people came to see her execution in Washington Square We don’t know whether Rose set the fire But we know that by New York law, she shouldn’t have been enslaved in Morris’s house in 1819 New York abolished slavery in 1817, in theory
In practice, white people dragged emancipation out for a decade. It took until 1827 for them to free the last enslaved person in New York. That was far too late for Rose. Washington Square Park was dedicated in 1826; white people built elegant residential homes around the square where Rose and others had been hanged.
For more about Rose Butler, read - Taylor, Nikki M. Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance. Cambridge University Press, 2023
Sarah J. S. T. Garnet (1831–1911) - 175
MacDougal St. [1880s]
From 1880 to 1883, 175 MacDougal was home to the city’s first female African American principal, Sarah Jane Smith Tompkins Garnet, and her husband, the famous abolitionist and minister Henry Highland Garnet Sarah Garnet was born in 1831. She was the child of Sylvanus Smith, a free Black man and farmer, and one founder of the African American community of Weeksville in present-day Crown Heights
Portrait of Mrs. Sarah J.S. Garnet, (1860 - 1925) |Source: =Digital Collections, The New York Public Library
She began teaching at the African Free School of Williamsburg in Brooklyn in 1854; she became the first Black woman principal of a public school when she was hired as the head of Manhattan’s Colored School No 7 on West Seventeenth Street in 1863
In the late 1880s, Garnet founded the Equal Suffrage League, the first suffrage organization founded by and dedicated to the suffrage of Black women. For its first few years, the organization met in Garnet’s seamstress shop in Brooklyn; it then moved to the YMCA on Carlton Avenue and later merged with the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs
In 1892, Garnet took part in establishing the Woman’s Loyal League of New York and Brooklyn with Ida B. Wells, Maritcha Lyons, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Susan McKinney Stewart Garnet’s younger sister, who was the first Black woman doctor to earn a degree in New York State.
Garnet died suddenly on September 17, 1911, of arteriosclerosis at her Brooklyn home at 748 Hancock Street. She is buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
Lorraine Hansberry
(1930–1965) - 112
Waverly
Place [lived here 1960–65]
Lorraine Hansberry was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago She moved to New York in 1950 to study under W E B Du Bois. In New York, Hansberry published a few poems, wrote anonymously for a lesbian journal, and was a writer and associate editor at the pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, published by Paul Robeson.
Lorraine Hansberry
Besides being a writer, Hansberry was a full-time organizer and activist who often gave speeches at Speaker’s Corner in Harlem. She actively protested against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Jewish communist couple who faced accusations of sending information to the USSR. Ethel was held in the Women’s House of Detention on 10 Greenwich Avenue.
After marrying theater producer and songwriter Robert B Nemiroff in 1953, Hansberry moved into his home on 337 Bleecker Street. She wrote her famous play A Raisin in the Sun at that location. It became a major hit after they staged it in 1959, and was the first Broadway play written and produced by a Black woman.
Although Hansberry was married to a man for most of her adult life, she identified as a lesbian and had many women partners in her lifetime. After the success of Raisin, she moved into 112 Waverly Place, where she had a relationship with another woman tenant She wrote two other plays before dying of cancer in 1965, when she was only 34. Paul Robeson gave a eulogy at her funeral in Harlem, which was attended by thousands of people.
For more about Lorraine Hansberry, read - Perry, Imani. Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. Beacon Press, 2018
Faith Ringgold (1930–2024) - Judson
Memorial Church - 55 Washington
Square S.
Faith Ringgold, along with two other artists, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks, organized a controversial art exhibit at Judson Memorial Church in 1970 called The People’s Flag Show. The exhibit was inspired in part by opposition to the Vietnam War and aimed to challenge and test the limits of free speech and protest.
In one performance, artists placed bones and rotten meat on a flag and then burned them all. Choreographer Yvonne Rainer and other dancers performed naked with flags tied around them. Police raided the exhibit, arrested Ringgold and two other organizers, and fined the artists $100 each, though the New York Civil Liberties Union helped overturn the convictions.
Faith Ringgold speaking at the opening of the People's Flag Show at Judson
Credit: MollyNZ
Ringgold was born Faith Willi Jones in 1930 in Harlem. Her mother, Willi Posey, was a fashion designer and seamstress who encouraged her daughter’s creativity.
Ringgold channeled that creativity into a sprawling array of projects over her lifetime. After graduating from City College with a degree in fine art in 1955, she began teaching in public schools while working on and exhibiting her own work. During the 60s, she focused on oil paintings and posters that showed the Civil Rights Movement from a Black woman’s perspective.
Ringgold abandoned traditional painting in the early 1970s. She worked on unstretched acrylic paintings on canvas with rich fabric borders like Tibetan thangkas Over time, she began including handwritten texts, creating narrative “story quilts.” Ringgold also collaborated with her mother; together, the two created African tribal–inspired hooded masks and fabric “dolls” and stuffed figures. These works used craft techniques to emphasize family and roots and blurred the line between fine art and craft
In 1991, Ringgold wrote a children’s book, Tar Beach, based on one of her story quilts. Its critical and popular success inspired her to write others, such as Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (1992) and Harlem Renaissance Party (2015).
Ringgold combined art and activism throughout her life The People’s Flag Show exhibit is the most striking example, but she also organized a demonstration against the racism and sexism of the Whitney Museum of American Art in the early 70s. With her daughters Michele and Barbara Wallace, she founded the group Women Students and Artists for Black Art Liberation, which organized exhibits and protests. Ringgold died at her home in New Jersey on April 13, 2024
For more about Faith Ringgold, read - We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold Bulfinch Press, 1995
Cynthia Hesdra (1808–1879) - 212
Sullivan St., 103 MacDougal St., and 102 W. 3rd Street
Formerly enslaved businesswoman Cynthia Hesdra lived with her husband Edward Hesdra at 103 MacDougal Street, then at 212 Sullivan Street. She also had property on Amity Street (now West Third Street).
Cynthia was born in Tappan, NY, in 1810. Her father, John Moore, was a wealthy free Black mill owner. Her mother Jane was probably enslaved, and it is believed that Cynthia was born into slavery. She met Edward Hesdra, a free Black Jewish Haitian man, sometime before 1840; the two married and purchased Cynthia’s freedom.
Cynthia and Edward moved to Little Africa in Greenwich Village and opened a thriving laundry business. Using their profits, Cynthia also essentially became a banker, loaning money to people in the community at interest. With the proceeds of her businesses, she purchased the house at 103 MacDougal Street, and over time acquired many other properties These included houses on Sullivan Street and West Third Street, five houses in Nyack, NY, and a farm in New Jersey. She rented some of these properties to abolitionists (including Henry Highland Garnet) and Black teachers.
At the time of Cynthia Hesdra’s death in 1879, the value of her estate was between $100,000 and $200,000, equivalent to around $7 million in today’s currency. It was rare at the time for Black women to amass such a fortune; for a formerly enslaved person to do so was almost unheard of
Nina Simone (1933–2003) - The
Village Gate
- 160 Bleecker St. [opened in 1958 in the basement at the corner of Thompson St. and Bleecker St.]
The Village Gate operated from 1958 to 1994 and was central to Greenwich Village’s development as a center for art and music. One performer most associated with the Village Gate was singer, songwriter, pianist, and activist Nina Simone Her 1962 live performance from the venue (with a young Richard Pryor opening) became one of her most celebrated albums; it featured a mix of blues, jazz, folk, show tunes, and African songs.
Simone was born Eunice Kathleen Waymon to a poor family in North Carolina. She was a piano prodigy and could play by ear when she was only three. Despite graduating from the Juilliard School of Music, she was denied admission to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, most likely because of racism
Opened in 1958 in the basement at the corner of Thompson St. and Bleecker St.
Lorraine Hansberry and Nina Simone
Her hoped-for career as a concert pianist stymied, she began playing in Atlantic City, performing under the name Nina Simone to prevent her family from finding out she was playing blues and jazz. She started singing at the behest of club owners, and by the time she was 25 years old, she had attracted a following and signed a record contract with Bethlehem Records. She had her first hit record, I Loves You Porgy, in 1958.
Influenced in part by friends and colleagues like Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Langston Hughes, Simone became increasingly involved in and committed to the Civil Rights Movement. She performed benefit concerts for groups like the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Her most explicitly political songs included “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” “Four Women,” “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” and especially 1964’s “Mississippi Goddamn,” which denounced the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
Disillusioned by ongoing racism and by a diminished interest in her music, Simone left the US in the 1970s and spent most of the rest of her life abroad. She died of cancer at her home in France in 2003.
Angela Davis (Jan 26, 1944–- ), Little
Red School House - Elisabeth Irwin High School - 196 Bleecker St.
Black radical intellectual, activist, writer, and educator Angela Davis spent her final years of high school at Greenwich Village’s Elisabeth Irwin High School, also known as the Little Red School House (LREI). LREI was a progressive high school that took part in an American Friends Service Committee program to place Southern Black students in integrated schools in the North.
Davis was born in 1944 into a progressive family in Birmingham, AL Davis’s mother, Sallye Bell Davis, held a national officer position in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, an organization affiliated with the Communist party, and exposed Davis to radical ideas and thinkers from an early age
Angela Davis by Billy Dee
After graduating from the Little Red School House, Davis received a scholarship to Brandeis University After she graduated, she studied philosophy first at the University of Frankfurt in Germany and then at the University of California, San Diego
She became involved with the Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and in 1968, she joined a local affiliate of the Communist Party. The next year, after she took up a post teaching philosophy at UCLA, California governor Ronald Reagan tried unsuccessfully to have her barred from teaching at any university in the state because of her political views
Davis supported the Soledad Brothers, three prisoners charged with killing a guard at Soledad Prison. In 1970, the armed brother of one of the men stormed a courtroom where they were on trial; in the ensuing firefight, four people, including a judge, were killed. The guns used in the shoot-out were registered to Davis. She fled, but was quickly captured She was held awaiting extradition to California at the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village. African American celebrities and students actively campaigned for her release, but authorities kept her in prison for 16 months before she was acquitted in 1972
Davis has remained a symbol of resistance and a vital writer, thinker, and teacher at UC Santa Cruz. Among her classic works are If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971), a volume of Black writings on prison, and Women, Race and Class (1981).
Minetta Lane - Little Africa
From the mid-1800s to the late 1910s, people referred to the area around Minetta Lane, Minetta Street, and Minetta Place as “Little Africa” because it served as the hub of the largest African American community in New York.
Minetta St./Minetta Lane in 1925:
Jacob Riis - Black & Tan Dive, Thompson St
The African American roots of the area go back to the Dutch colonial era, when free and “partially free” Black people could settle in Minetta Lane to provide a buffer between the Native American inhabitants and European settlers on the southern tip of Manhattan. At its largest, Little Africa comprised several streets in the South and West Village, including Amity Street (now West Third Street), Bleecker Street, Laurens Street (now LaGuardia Place), MacDougal Street, Thompson Street, Sullivan Street, Gay Street, and Waverly Place.
Originally, many Black people found homes around a brook that flowed into the Hudson River. The Lenape people called it “Mannette” or “Spirit Water” Over time, it became known as “Minetta.” Black-owned businesses and churches dotted the area. Humble brick houses dating from the 1820s to the 1840s continue to stand here today
The South Village included people of all social classes and professions Actors, waiters, butchers, and clergy rubbed shoulders with the famed abolitionist Reverend Henry Highland Garnet and wealthy business people like the caterer and restaurant owner Joseph Ten Eyck.
The racist 1863 Draft Riots targeted the South Village; the area was home to nearly a quarter of the city’s African American population. After the Civil War, the community grew larger with the influx of recently freed refugees from the South. It continued to be a vital center of African American life into the early 20th century.
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) - Pony Stable Inn - 150 W. 4th St.
From 1916 to about 1930, the basement of this building was the location of the Mad Hatter Greenwich Village’s first bohemian tearoom It was owned for several years by Eliza “Jimmie” Criswell and her partner M
Audre Lorde
The Pony Stable Inn, a lesbian bar, succeeded at this location in 1945. The clientele were mostly working class white women who adopted strict butch/femme roles One of the bar’s few Black patrons was poet Audre Lorde.
Lorde described her experiences at the Pony Stable Inn and at other Greenwich Village lesbian gathering spots in her 1982 memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Lorde remembered, “There were always rumors of plainclothes women circulating among us, looking for gay girls with fewer than three pieces of female attire. That was enough to get you arrested for transvestism, which was illegal”
Despite the danger, though, Lorde said the Pony Stable Inn was vital to the lesbian community: “What we…needed was the atmosphere of other lesbians, and in 1954, gay bars were the only meeting places we knew.”
Lorde was born in Harlem to West Indian parents on February 18, 1934. She began writing poetry at Hunter High School in Manhattan in the late 1940s, where she was one of the few Black students. She attended Hunter College in the 1950s and would often hang out at the Waldorf Cafeteria (390 Avenue of the Americas), also a favorite restaurant of Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin.
Lorde then attended Columbia University and worked as a librarian in Mount Vernon. She took part enthusiastically in the queer and Black life of Greenwich village. She spent most of her life in New York, becoming renowned as a poet Her essay collection Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) is widely influential in Black, feminist, and queer studies. The Pony Stable Inn closed in January 1970, not long after the Stonewall Riots Lorde died of cancer at 58 in 1992.
For more information about Audre Lorde, preorder Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
Gay Street
The short Gay Street was originally a secluded living quarters for enslaved Black people In the 1830s, many Black servants working in the area lived here. During Prohibition, it became a popular speakeasy strip.
Cafe Society - 1–2 Sheridan Square [1938–1950]
When the basement jazz club Cafe Society opened on December 18, 1938, it became Greenwich Village’s first integrated nightclub
Advertised as “The Wrong Place for the Right People” and “The Rendezvous of Celebs, Debs and Plebs,” the club booked stars including Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Lena Horne, Mary Lou Williams, Sarah Vaughan, Harry Belafonte, and Ella Fitzgerald.
Cafe Society, 1947
Billie Holiday (1915–1959)
Billie Holiday
Source: NYPL Digital Collections
Cafe Society may be most famous, though, for its association with singer Billie Holiday
Born Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore to a poor single mother, Holiday’s childhood was difficult. In 1929, she moved to Harlem. By the age of 14, she had become captivated by the recordings of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. By the time she was 18 in 1933, she had a recording contract. Her association with musicians led her to reconnect with her father, a rhythm guitarist, but he died soon afterwards in Texas on tour when a racist hospital would not treat his lung condition.
Holiday was the house singer for Cafe Society at its opening in 1938 and for the next nine months. At 24, she was already a star, but she debuted her most famous number at the club in early 1939
“Strange Fruit,” a vivid, brutal antilynching protest song written by Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol. Holiday wanted to record it, but her regular label, Columbia, thought the song was too controversial. Holiday instead released the song on Commodore; it became her best-selling record. Holiday herself was initially uncertain about singing “Strange Fruit”; she worried it would make her a target for racist violence. At Cafe Society, she performed it at the end of her sets, and then would immediately exit the room, the lights going out instantly, often with a burst of applause.
Holiday was right to be concerned about the song’s reception. The powerful message about lynching and racism in the song angered the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, motivating him to send agents to follow and trap her. In 1947, authorities imprisoned her for narcotics possession. When she got out a year later, they took away her cabaret performer’s license The cabaret laws of the time notoriously targeted Harlem jazz clubs, often denying licenses to queer performers and individuals with prior convictions.
When Holiday returned to singing, she could not perform at any jazz clubs that sold alcohol, which was effectively every jazz club in the US Despite these obstacles, she performed a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall and recorded some of her biggest hits
The government also targeted Cafe Society itself It was the subject of hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the detrimental attention forced it to close in 1948 Holiday lived another eleven years, but the FBI continued to hound her. In June 1959, when Holiday was hospitalized, Anslinger confiscated her belongings, interfered with her treatment, and handcuffed her to her bed She died surrounded by FBI agents
In her autobiography, Holiday said “Strange Fruit” always depressed her because it reminded her of her father’s death in Texas “But I have to keep singing it,” she said, “not only because people ask for it, but because twenty years after Pop died, the things that killed him are still happening in the South.”
Hazel Scott (1920–1981)
Portrait of pianist Hazel Scott from concert program cover, 1949.
After Billie Holiday, the performer whose career is most associated with Cafe Society is Hazel Scott. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Hazel Scott moved to the US with her family when she was four. She was a musical prodigy, studying with a Juilliard professor at eight and performing on piano and trumpet in her mother’s all-female band when she was 13.
After Billie Holiday ended her engagement at Cafe Society in 1939, she insisted Scott should be her replacement Scott, then 19, was already a polished performer who had established a signature style She would begin by playing a familiar classical piece, then would improvise, adding jazzy runs and flourishes to its melodies. Her Cafe Society performances were an enormous success; at the club she met Adam Clayton Powell Jr., preacher, civil rights activist, and congressman. They married six years later.
Like her husband, Scott was passionately engaged in civil rights struggles; she refused to perform for segregated audiences in any of her venues. In 1949, she sued a restaurant in Washington State for refusing to serve her. Scott was defiant in hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950; she was blacklisted after her appearance, and her prime-time television variety show (the first one hosted by a Black person) was canceled. In 1957, she departed from the US for Europe and divorced Powell, only eventually making her way back to the States in 1967. She continued to perform occasionally until her death in 1981.
Stonewall Inn and Queer Uprisings- 53 Christopher
Street [1969]
Stonewall Inn, 1960's.
Stonewall Inn, today.
The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar and dance spot. Like most gay clubs at the time, the Mafia ran it. And also like most gay and lesbian clubs in the area including Stewart’s Cafeteria, the Sea Colony, the Haven, the Pony Stable Inn, and the Snake Pit police raids were common. Patrons would generally submit to police harassment and abuse, and bar owners would often resume business as usual once the raid was over.
On the night of June 27, 1969, the owners of Stonewall had received a tip that the police might raid, but they let their guard down as the evening wore on past midnight. Then, at 1:20 am, the Sixth Precinct barged in, announcing, “Police! We’re taking the place!”
Police usually took patrons to the bathroom for humiliating inspections, after which they would arrest “cross-dressers.” Instead of going along with the officers’ demands as they usually did, several bar patrons refused to cooperate. Those who were released stayed outside the bar, and a sizable crowd formed. One woman, believed to be Stormé DeLarverie, who the officers had arrested, cried out that her handcuffs were too tight, and an officer struck her. A trans person fought back by hitting with her purse and fists after the police shoved her into the police van.
The growing crowd pelted the outnumbered police with garbage, beer cans, and bricks. After being forced back into the Inn, the police were besieged and used their guns to threaten the resisters. Eventually police reinforcements arrived and tried to make arrests, though the crowd continued to fight back. Thirteen people ended up getting arrested, and the riots ended though they resumed the next night, and for several nights following. The Village Voice published a homophobic column about the riots, and a crowd besieged its offices.
The Stonewall Riots inspired the formation of the militant Gay Liberation Front. They also led directly to the creation of the more moderate Gay Activists Alliance In many cities, organizers celebrated the first anniversary of the riots with the first Gay Pride parades. Many credit the uprising as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement
Stormé DeLarverie (1920–2014)
Stormé DeLarverié, 1956.
Stormé DeLarverie has generally been identified as the butch lesbian whose struggle with the police ignited the Stonewall uprising. DeLarverie herself said that after she said her handcuffs were too tight, a police officer hit her with his baton, and she then scuffled with four police officers. This may have inspired others to resist, or may have been part of the ongoing pushback against the police. Whether or not DeLarverie sparked the uprising, she is an important figure in LGBTQ and Black women’s history.
Stormé DeLarverie was born in 1920 New Orleans to a wealthy white father and his Black domestic worker She realized she was a lesbian in her late teens and formed a long-term partnership with a dancer named Diana. In 1955, she began performing as an emcee and singer with the Jewel Box Revue. The Revue was a racially integrated group of female impersonators founded in Miami around 1939 by lovers Danny Brown and Doc Brenner. DeLarverie was the sole male impersonator of the group
Stormé DeLarverié (center), surrounded by three female impersonators at Roberts Show Club, Chicago, Illinois, 1958.
DeLarverie retired from the Revue in 1969 She moved to the Chelsea Hotel in the 1970s; her partner, Diane, is believed to have died around this time. DeLarverie worked as a bouncer, or as she said, a “babysitter of my people,” at various Greenwich Village lesbian bars, including DT’s Fat Cat, Cubby Hole, and Henrietta Hudson.
DeLarverie’s gender nonconformity, both on and off stage, influenced the burgeoning popularity and societal acceptance of gender fluid expression and of lesbians She was proud of her role at Stonewall, and insisted that “it was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience it wasn’t no damn riot.” She continued as a bouncer and unofficial watch woman at the Chelsea well into her 80s, but by 2010, her declining health required that she move to a nursing home in Brooklyn. She died there in 2014.
Marsha P. Johnson (1945–1992)
Marsha
P. Johnson.
Credit: Barbara Alper-Getty Images
Marsha P. Johnson was an important advocate for gay and trans rights. She is best known as one leader of the Stonewall uprising Johnson and her friend Sylvia Rivera arrived at the Stonewall Inn when the uprising was already underway and quickly assumed leadership roles Johnson returned to the uprising in the ensuing days; one person said they saw her climb a lamppost and drop her purse on a police car, shattering the windshield.
Johnson was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She moved to New York City directly after high school and began using she/her pronouns and dressing as a woman; she referred to herself as a gay person, a transvestite, and a drag queen.
Like many LGBTQ people, Johnson was inspired and energized by the Stonewall uprising. She worked with the Gay Liberation Front and the more moderate Gay Activist Alliance, though she criticized both for their transphobia and racism. In 1970, she and Rivera founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to provide shelter to young trans people rejected by their families.
In a 1972 interview, she said she wanted “to see gay people liberated and free and to have equal rights that other people have in America.” Johnson received an AIDS diagnosis in 1990, and she publicly addressed the diagnosis and the importance of accepting those with the disease.
Johnson’s lifeless body was discovered in the Hudson River in 1992. Police initially ruled the death a suicide, but LGBTQ communities waged a campaign for years to force the police to investigate her death as a possible homicide. Many documentaries have focused on her and people widely consider her one founder of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
Women’s House of D - 10 Greenwich Ave [1932
–1971]
The Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village was a longstanding site of oppression for Black, queer, and marginalized people. It was also an important site of resistance and solidarity
Ten Greenwich Avenue was the location of a series of prisons beginning in 1833. The address became home to the Women’s House of Detention, or the House of D, in 1932. Built with the original intention of establishing a model of prison reform, the facility emphasized rehabilitation and displayed WPAcommissioned artworks. The first superintendent promised the prison would usher in “a new era in penology.”
The promised ideals were not fulfilled. Within a decade, the House of D became chronically overcrowded
House of D
Detainees included women who couldn’t make bail and were awaiting trial; women who had already been convicted and were serving their sentences; addicts; the mentally ill; sex workers; teenagers; and others. Roaches and mice infested the cells, and the food contained worms.
Many famous women spent time in the House of D. Labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was detained there in the 1950s; so was Ethel Rosenberg, later executed on charges of nuclear espionage. Artist and feminist Valerie Solanas was held in the House of D after she shot Andy Warhol in 1968 Participation in an antiwar protest led feminist Andrea Dworkin to be incarcerated in the prison, and her mistreatment there played a major role in closing it Audre Lorde wrote about how the windows of the facility allowed the incarcerated women to communicate to passersby, lovers, and friends on the outside.
Black Panther Angela Davis served time in the House of D in the early 70s while awaiting extradition. While there, she worked with activists inside to create a group bail system. This was an important precedent for present-day bail fund movements.
The Panther 21 and Stonewall
The House of D became an important meeting ground for women involved in the Black and queer liberation movements. In 1969, a group of 21 Black Panther members known as the Panther 21 were arrested and accused of conspiring to attack police stations. The 21 people arrested consisted mostly of men, but Afeni Shakur and Joan Bird, two women, were also among them. They waited to be released on bail in the House of D.
Bird identified as a lesbian, d during their time in prison, Sha formed a relationship with woman named Carol Crooks, wh they carried on after be released. When Afeni’s son, famous rapper Tupac Shakur, born, Afeni originally named Lesane Parish Crooks in hono her partner. Bird and Shakur w in the House of D on the nigh the Stonewall uprising, and m have taken part in solida demonstrations that occur inside Women in the prison shouted “gay power!,” set fire to what possessions they had, and threw them out the window to show support for the protests. Shakur, an important leader of the Panthers, was vocal in arguing that the Black Power movement should also embrace gay liberation. Similarly, some gay organizers wanted to show support for Black liberation
Afeni Shakur at the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in September 1970.
Credit: David Fenton - Getty Images.
A protester outside the New York Women's House of Detention at the Prisoners' Rights and "Free the Panther 21" demonstration
Taken by Diana Davies in 1970.
The Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organization, held meetings following Stonewall to build support for gay rights. Young radicals at the gathering, like Martha Shelley and Jim Fouratt, argued that they should stage a protest against the House of D to support Shakur and Bird The Mattachine leaders balked, and the younger organizers formed the Gay Liberation Front, a radical queer organization. The GLF quickly organized round-theclock protests at the House of D, demanding solidarity “for peace, freedom, and the rights of all peoples.”
Historian Hugh Ryan argues that prison, and the House of D in particular, served as crucial locations for integrating queer politics with other left movements “For radical women,” Ryan said, “prisons made a spectrum of sexuality visible, encouraged antiprison solidarity across identities, and propelled women to explore their own emotions away from men and heteronormative society.” The House of D was closed in 1971. In 1974, it was demolished and replaced with a garden.
For more about the House of D, read - Ryan, Hugh. The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. Bold Type Books, 2022.
Shiloh Presbyterian Church [1870s]-
450 6th Ave.
The members of Shiloh Presbyterian Church, a Greenwich Village African American church, dedicated themselves to the cause of abolition and civil rights. The church served as a stop on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. During the racist Draft Riots of 1863, the Church’s minister, Henry Highland Garnet (husband of educator Sarah Jane Smith Tompkins Garnet), helped the injured and spoke out against the violence.
This Abyssinian Baptist Church on Waverly Place
The church was also the home of a famous bust of John Brown, created by the great sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907). Lewis was born in Greenbush, NY, to a Haitian father and an Ojibwe mother. She studied sculpture at Oberlin College and then in Boston before moving to Rome, Italy, in 1866. Her work was celebrated internationally and in the US Lewis made several medallions to commemorate John Brown, the abolitionist who helped to start the Civil War with his raid on Harper’s Ferry and his effort to lead an armed slave rebellion.
After the war, she worked on a larger bust of Brown, which she completed in 1878 and donated to the Shiloh Presbyterian Church, where Henry Highland Garnet was still the minister Many regard the bust as one of Lewis’s greatest works. It depicts Brown with a clear, direct gaze and a noble, determined look. This sharply contrasts with many depictions by white artists, who present Brown as wild or insane.
Lewis unveiled the bust at erian in person She received commissions to create bu mportant American figures, including President Ulysses S. Grant and abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner. She never resettled in the US, however, and died in 1907 in Rome By that point, her neoclassical style had gone out of fashion, and her fame had diminished. The US issued a commemorative stamp honoring her achievements in 2022.
John Brown Bust, by Edmonia Lewis. Courtesy of Village Preservation
E. Lewis. Sculptor, 1870 - 1879