Image courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle
"Hope Will Never Be Silent:" Harvey Milk's Crusade for LGBTQIA+ Rights
National History Day 2023
Frontiers in History: People, Places and Ideas
"If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door."
~ Harvey Milk
Dan White's Grievances
White represented a broader conservative perspective that opposed Milk’s recent progress towards greater LQBTQIA+ acceptance. His later actions are best said by himself, as follows below.
" I've been under an awful lot of pressure lately, financial pressure, because of my job situation, family pressure... Then when the pressures got too great, I decided to leave...After I left, my family and friends offered their support and said whatever it would take to allow me to go back in to office, well they would be willing to make that effort...And then it came out that Supervisor Milk and some others were working against me to get my seat back on the board. They put a lot of pressure on me and my family."
~ Dan White
Supervisor White. Courtesy of SFGATE.
"Then I, I just shot him, that was it, it was over."
~ Dan White
"Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot...and killed."
~ Dianne Feinstein
"In the prime of his life, he was silenced by the act of another but in the brief time in which he spoke and ran and led, his voice stirred the aspriations of millions of people."
~ President Barack Obama
The Moscone-Milk Assassination
The White Night Riots. Courtesy of HISTORY.
On November 27th, 1978, Dan White burst into Mayor Moscone's office and shot him dead, subsequently shooting and killing Milk as well.
That night, thousands came to candlelight vigils held across San Francisco. In a march on Washington, 100,000 protesters chanted “Harvey Milk lives!”
White would be sentenced to only 8 years in prison, leading to violent protests called the White Night Riots.
"We were trapped there in the office as the police bundled up the bodies and I just thought, 'Everything's over'. But then the sun went down and tens of thousands of people gathered here at this intersection and marched down to City Hall, filled Civic Center, and I realized I was, you know, completely wrong. It wasn't over. It was just the beginning"
~ Cleve Jones, Harvey's protégé and friend
Image courtesy of The SFO Museum..