Today in Labor History November 27, 1978: Former cop and supervisor Dan White assassinated San Francisco’s mayor George Moscone and openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk. A jury later acquitted White on the Twinkie Defense, claiming that he had gone temporarily insane from junk food. This travesty of justice led to the White Night Riot, after decades of police harassment and physical abuse of San Francisco’s LGBTQ community. People attacked the windows of City Hall. When the cops tried to protect the building, people hurled rocks and bottles at them, forcing them to run inside. Where ever the cops showed up, people threw rocks at them. At least a dozen cop cars were torched. They busted windows in the financial district and in government buildings. Many people were injured. The riot caused hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of property damage to City Hall. And when the riot was finally subdued, the cops made a retaliatory raid on the Elephant Bar, in the Castro District. Cops in riot gear beat patrons. They arrested 24 people.
The double assassination of Moscone and Milk dramatically altered the political landscape of San Francisco. Under Moscone and Milk, the city was moving in a progressive, pro-neighborhood direction. With the new mayor, Diane Feinstein, city politics returned to the traditional, conservative, pro-Chamber of Commerce, law and order framework that preceded Moscone and Milk. And Feinstein parlayed her success as SF mayor into a long and sordid career in Congress, where she was a strong proponent of Capital Punishment, vitriolic opponent of the Green New Deal, supporter of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and generally supported U.S. imperialist policy abroad.
#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #lgbtq #homophobia #Riot #HarveyMilk #SanFrancisco #police #PoliceBrutality #feinstein #israel #palestine
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