The History Explorers

03/07/2025

"The Montgomery Bus Station was the site of an attack in 1961 on Freedom Riders, a group of civil rights activists who rode segregated buses in an effort to desegregate interstate commerce. When the Riders arrived in Montgomery, they were met by a white mob, including several K*K members, who beat them with baseball bats and clubs."

In a joint letter to the GSA administrator, Figures and Sewell talked about the historical significance of the site and asked that it not be sold.

02/20/2025

"To this day, his [Fred McDarrah's] photographic record – consisting of barely a dozen frames or so – of the Stonewall uprisings remains one of the most important visual documents of our times and a moment that has echoed in the decades since.
And if the post-Stonewall environment was about a new freedom for New York’s gay, le***an and transgender community to be out and to be seen, then McDarrah’s lens was there to document that freedom."

From the Beats to Bob Dylan to the actors and artists of the day, Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah was there, up-close and documenting New York’s counterculture for over four extraordinary decades.

06/01/2023

The White Night riots of 1979.

On May 21, 1979, thousands of members of San Francisco’s predominantly gay Castro District community took to the streets to protest the lenient sentence received by Dan White for the murders of local politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Their anger–combined with the actions of police who arrived to quell the scene–soon boiled over into rioting. The resulting violence affected San Francisco’s LGBT community for decades to come.