Several hundred people started marching up 6th Avenue, toward Central Park. Gay activists in New York organized the Christopher Street Liberation March to cap off the city’s first Pride Week. On June 28, 1970, on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the first Pride parade set off from Stonewall. We’re going to create a community where you wouldn’t allow us to have community,’” Segal said. “And it was that night that we said to the police, ‘We are taking our street back. And the New York City Police Department that night, when they violently came into Stonewall and beat people up against the wall and extorted money from people, got us angry,” Segal continued. “We were enraged because, in a sense, 2,000 years of repression built up in us. “That night in June of 1969, we felt rage at the police,” Segal told ET’s Denny Directo, as Pride has become a stark reminder that these modern-day celebrations once started as a protest. Johnson picked up the first brick thrown in rage, kicking off the modern LGBTQ rights movement. Mark Segal was one of the many LGBTQ people outside Stonewall Inn, where a stand was being taken against the latest police raid of one of the community’s few safe spaces to gather in New York City.
