History
The CSD is held in memory of the Stonewall Riots, the first big uprising of LGBT people against police assaults that took place at the Stonewall Inn, a bar on New York's Christopher Street in the district of Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969.
On June 28, 1970 the Christopher Street Liberation Day marked the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots with an assembly on Christopher Street and the first Gay Pride Parade in United States history. To accommodate the interests of the many different groups participating, the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee named the days leading up to the march, Gay Pride Week. New York has since continued to remember and celebrate the Christopher Street Liberation Day on the last Saturday of each June. It has become an international tradition to hold a demonstration for the rights of LGBT people in the summer. The first German CSDs took place in Berlin in 1979. Other parades before 1979 still had different names. The first documented LGBT parade in Germany was in Münster on 29 April 1972. The first parade in Switzerland was celebrated on June 24, 1978 in Zürich and was called "Christopher-Street-Liberation-Memorial Day."
Read more about this topic: Christopher Street Day
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)