Remember the Stonewall Rebellion Veterans!
DECEMBER 24 IS THE 105TH ANNIVERSARY of the birth of Stormé DeLarverie, who is known to many as the Rosa Parks of the gay community’s struggle.
DeLarverie was an established entertainer and singer when they helped to spark the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion by loudly resisting arrest at the beginning of a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay-friendly bar in Greenwich Village. DeLarverie was one of a small group of the bar’s patrons whose challenge to police persecution of sexual minorities was quickly imitated by other club patrons being targeted for arrest. It was one of the first instances of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment in the U.S.
What had started with resistance by DeLarverie and others to a routine police shakedown turned into an angry crowd that put the outnumbered police on the defensive, then to a gathering of hundreds of people standing in the street shouting insults at the police, and then to at least two nights of large, spontaneous anti-police demonstrations in the vicinity of the Stonewall Inn.
The Stonewall Rebellion was "the shot heard round the world" according to historian Lillian Faderman, explaining, "By calling on the dramatic tactic of violent protest that was being used by other oppressed groups, the events at the Stonewall implied that homosexuals had as much reason to be disaffected as they." https://www.stonewallvets.org/StormeDeLarverie.htm
Just Who Might Be a War Criminal, Anyway?
DECEMBER 25 IS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY of a reasonable, but very disturbing request from a war criminal.
The war criminal, a Japanese admiral, was not denying his responsibility for his heinous actions during World War 2, but he was challenging a U.S. military court to understand that even a war’s winners might be guilty of horrendous war crimes.
The speaker, Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara, admitted he had committed a war crime when he had ordered the execution of 98 unarmed U.S. civilians who had been captured by the Japanese in late 1941.
Knowing that he was about to be condemned to death, Sakaibara told the court, "As we are about to receive a decision by an American court, I would like to make a request that the people who planned and carried out the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan should be regarded in the same light as we." https://opiniojuris.org/2005/08/11/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-war-crimes
Your Constitutional Rights Can’t Defend Themselves
DECEMBER 30 IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY of the day when a class-action lawsuit filed by 16 political activists against the New York City Police Department ended in a substantial victory. The NYPD had to agree to enforceable limits on its authority to investigate political activists and political activity.
The lawsuit was settled when the NYPD agreed that its future investigations of “purely political activity” would be governed by the terms of a court-approved agreement, which required the NYPD to obtain a warrant from a 3-person “Handschuh Authority.” For the NYPD to apply for such a warrant, it was required to show that it had reasonable grounds to suspect that “criminal” and not “purely political” activity was taking place.
The agreement also prohibited indiscriminate police videorecording and photographing of public gatherings when there was no indication that unlawful activity was occurring. The NYPD was also prohibited from sharing information pertaining to political activity with other law enforcement agencies unless those agencies agree to abide by the terms of the Handschuh agreement.
The Handschuh agreement was in full effect for more than 22 years, but after the 2001 terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center, the NYPD requested that the agreement be relaxed. The judge in the case would not agree to all the modifications requested by the police, but he did allow a substantial revision that gave the police a great deal more discretion.
Four years later, a lawsuit by the New York Civil Liberties Union succeeded in tightening up some of the loopholes that had been opened in 2003. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/revised-settlement-enhances-protections-discriminatory-nypd-surveillance-american
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