1960s

The Stonewall Uprising

Categories 1960s, US HistoryLeave a Comment on The Stonewall Uprising

The year is 1969. In Greenwich Village, on Christopher Street, sits a dingy, Mafia-owned bar serving bootlegged liquor in dirty glasses. Though the Stonewall Inn may not have looked like a haven, it was, in fact, a safe place for a large group of marginalized New Yorkers.

In the 60s, homosexual relationships were illegal in New York. LGBTQ+ persons could be arrested for holding hands, dancing, or kissing. The only places they could be themselves were the gay bars in the city. Gay bars were raided almost constantly, including the Stonewall Inn. Normally, the police would arrest employees serving liquor without a license and patrons dancing together or wearing “gender-inappropriate clothing,” after which the crowd would disperse. However, on June 28, 1969, the crowd did not disperse. Patrons and neighbors banded together and began a five-day protest against the discrimination and violence faced by gay Americans.

While the Stonewall Uprising was by no means the beginning of the gay rights movement, it was and is considered a significant turning point. The uprising inspired LGBTQ+ people the world over to rise up and become activists on behalf of their community. The uprising also led to the creation of several civil rights groups, including GLAAD and PFLAG. This spike in activism led to the passing of non-discrimination laws in states around the country. Of course, it is important to mention that while things have improved dramatically in the U.S. for LGBTQ+ individuals, much is yet to be done, especially in regards to transgender rights and safety for Black LGBTQ+ individuals.

On June 28, 1970, one year after the Stonewall Inn raid, thousands of LGBTQ+ people and allies marched from Stonewall Inn to Central Park in a parade that is replicated every June the country over in honor of Pride Month. In 2016, President Obama designated Stonewall Inn a national monument.

Learn more here:

  1. https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/stonewall-era#:~:text=On%20June%2028%2C%201969%2C%20the,of%20gay%20and%20lesbian%20life.
  2. https://www.history.com/topics/gay-rights/the-stonewall-riots
  3. https://www.britannica.com/event/Stonewall-riots
  4. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/stonewall-inn-through-years/

Lost and Found Series: Four-Year-Old Boy Lost in Coney Island in 1967

Categories 1960s, US HistoryLeave a Comment on Lost and Found Series: Four-Year-Old Boy Lost in Coney Island in 1967

Nearly 60 years ago on the Fourth of July, four-year-old George D’Angelo, Jr. became separated from his parents while celebrating near West 12th Street at Coney Island in New York.

As reported by the New York Times, a massive search was undertaken including both police and federal agents as they sought to find young George. The search went on through the night and into the next day when a call came into an emergency line claiming that George was alive and well in the apartment of a Brooklyn woman some 25 blocks away.

When police arrived at the address provided by the caller, they found a 54-year-old woman, her 26-year-old daughter and young George in flowered pajamas.  George’s first words to the police were, “I want my mommy.”

Apparently the woman, Elizabeth Bermudez, found George wandering in the streets and led him back to her apartment where she took care of him until her daughter came for a visit the next day.

After questioning, it was confirmed that Mrs. Bermudez did try to reach out to two different police officers on the street while she led George back to her apartment, but was told to call the station.  She then became “confused” and took George home to wait for her daughter who did not arrive until the next day.

When her daughter encountered the strange child in her mother’s apartment, she immediately asked him if he was “Georgie,” having heard about his disappearance on the news.

What is remarkable about this story is not only that George was recovered, but also that his parents, Elaine and George D’Angelo, did not wish to press charges against Mrs. Bermudez.

“I’m glad that she did not hurt him and that she kept him safe,” Elaine D’Angelo told the NYT. George D’Angelo Sr. echoed his wife’s sentiments, however, he added “I’m just hoping that they take care of her and give her some help so that she won’t do this thing again to someone else’s child.”

This story would have likely been very different had it happened today.  How do you think it would have turned out?

Sources: The New York Times Archives

The Peace Corps: Kennedy’s Legacy of Service

Categories 1960s, 20th Century, US HistoryLeave a Comment on The Peace Corps: Kennedy’s Legacy of Service

On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order that established the Peace Corps, an organization of volunteers that work in countries around the world addressing agricultural, economic, environmental, educational, and medical problems. Presented as an idea to university students in an impromptu speech, Kennedy formed the organization that would send over 240,000 Americans around the world as harbingers of peace and cooperation.

About six months before its official establishment, during his campaign for the presidency, then-Senator John F. Kennedy visited the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He arrived late, at 2 a.m., but with 10,000 students waiting to greet him, Kennedy gave a short, improvised speech on the steps of the Michigan Union. In it he said:

How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend on the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can! And I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the efforts must be far greater than we have ever made in the past.”

In March of the next year, after winning the election and becoming president, Kennedy signed Executive Order 10924 and established the peace corps, asking his brother-in-law, R. Sargent Shriver to be its first director. The first group of Peace Corps volunteers left in August 1961, headed to Ghana and Tanganyika (presently Tasmania) to provide service. The service was very popular among recent college graduates, and the program grew to 15,500 volunteers by 1966. Since then, over, 240,000 volunteers have served in 141 countries around the world. Today, around 2,400 volunteers are serving with the Peace Corps.

Learn more here:

  1. https://www.peacecorps.gov/about/history/founding-moment/#:~:text=Following%20up%20on%20the%20idea,in%20five%20countries%20in%201961.
  2. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/peace-corps
  3. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-10924
  4. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Peace-Corps
  5. https://www.peacecorps.gov/peace-corps-week/
Source: Smithsonian

This week in History: 57 People Escape East Berlin Through Secret Tunnel

Categories 1960s, European History, October1 Comment on This week in History: 57 People Escape East Berlin Through Secret Tunnel

Although many of us are old enough to remember when the wall in East Berlin was still in place and the whole of East Germany was controlled by the former Soviet Union, it feels so long ago that it almost seems unreal.

In my own childhood, I remember movies and stories about great escapes in Germany as people tried to flee from East Germany to West Germany, which was controlled by the UK, US and France.  

One story in particular caught international attention, in the first week of October of 1964, 57 East German refugees were able to escape through a tunnel dug by a group of students and others from West Germany.  This was the largest and most successful tunnel escape during this era. The tunnel, which according to a wonderful article in the Smithsonian, took five months to dig, started in an abandoned bakery in West Berlin and surfaced in an abandoned apartment building on StreilizerStrasse in East Berlin.

Source: Smithsonian
Source: Smithsonian

Refugees who traversed this 400 meter underground road to freedom had to successfully share a passcode at the entrance to the apartment building. One of the escapees, Hans-Joachim Tilleman, recounted his experience to the Smithsonian. “We didn’t see a light, so we continued to the building,” he said. “There were some people inside, and we told them ‘Tokyo’ and they let us into the hallway where we took off our shoes and tiptoed to the inner courtyard. In a little outhouse in the back, they let us down a shaft, and we crawled through.”

On October 5, 1964, the tunnel was discovered by soldiers and during the ensuing scuffle, an East German corporal, Egon Schultz, was killed by gunfire.  According to a New York Times article written at the time, “The East German Defense Ministry charged, in a statement issued by the press service ADN, that agents and murderers had penetrated into East Berlin from ‘the NATO base of West Berlin’ and that one of these ‘armed bandits’ killed the corporal.”

A different New York Times article, published in 2001, clarified that in 1994, the Berlin district attorney’s office re-investigated the shooting of Egon Schultz, and found that he had been accidentally shot by another East German soldier.

In that same New York Times article from 2001, one of the West German diggers, Wolfgang Fuchs, who worked tireless to free East Germans in several less successful tunnel escapes, said of Tunnel 57, “’The marks of their knee prints in the tunnel floor looked like the ripples on a beach left behind by the receding tide. ‘I will never forget that. That is beautiful.”

To learn more about the Tunnel 57 escape, visit these resources:

Forgotten Heroes: Texas Airman Dies in 1961 Diverting Falling Plane from Suburban Neighborhood

Categories 1960s, Forgotten Heroes, US HistoryLeave a Comment on Forgotten Heroes: Texas Airman Dies in 1961 Diverting Falling Plane from Suburban Neighborhood

It’s hard to even fathom what thoughts go through a person’s head in the final moments of a crisis where they must choose between their own life or the lives of others.  

Such a crisis came to Captain Gary L. Herod on Wednesday, March 15, 1961.  A pilot for the Texas Air National Guard, Herod was barely in the air over Houston, Texas when his plane began to falter.  With the plane’s engine failing, he tried first to return to Ellington Field Airport, and radioed the control tower that he planned to eject himself from the plane.

Captain Gary L. Herod, Source: Texas Air National Guard

Somewhere in those seconds, though, he realized that doing so would leave the plane to crash into a suburban neighborhood filled with young families in a popular Houston suburb known as Meyerland.  

This excruciating choice included the fact that Herod had a wife and two children of his own.  As the tower asked for confirmation of his intent to eject, Herod’s last words were “not yet.”  

He went down with his plane into a vacant field on the north bank of Brays Bayou, the lone casualty of this tragedy.  Maybe he hoped that he might be able to safely land the plane, or maybe he fully knew the sacrifice he was making.

A couple of months later, a “Hero” tree was planted with a plaque commemorating his sacrifice at the site of the popular Meyerland Plaza Shopping Center, and in 1965, a local elementary school was named for him.  Nearly 57 years later, with the tree failing in health, his plaque and memorial were moved to the nearby elementary school bearing his name.  Herod was also posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross from the United States Air Force.

In April of 1961, a month after the accident, a memorial fund dispersed $2,600 in donations to Herod’s wife.  She wrote a thank you letter, which was published in the Bellaire Texan, a local newspaper.  

Source: Texas Digital Newspaper Program: The Bellaire Texan

“I cannot help but consider, in wonder,” she wrote, “the circumstance which could make it possible for my husband to gain for himself in a few short tragic minutes, more friends than many men gain in a lifetime.”

She went on to say that she planned to dedicate these funds to her childrens’ education. “I feel this is fitting, for I am conscious of the fact that these funds represent to a large degree the gratitude of parents for the well being of their own children and concern for our children who must face life without their father.”

She signed the letter, “Mrs. Gary L. Herod.” 

To learn more about Gary L. Herod, visit these resources: