Marsha P. Johnson
Marsha P. Johnson was at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, when police raided it. What happened next sparked the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. She was a Black transgender woman who had been homeless, who made her living on the streets of Greenwich Village, who said the P stood for 'Pay it no mind.' She co-founded STAR — Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries — with Sylvia Rivera, providing housing and support for homeless trans youth. In 1992, her body was found in the Hudson River. The police ruled it a suicide. The community said otherwise. The case was reopened in 2012.
Marsha P. Johnson arrived in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s from Elizabeth, New Jersey with fifteen dollars and a bag of clothes. She was eighteen or nineteen years old. She had no housing, no income, and no family support. She built a life in the Village — she did drag, she did sex work, she was part of the community that gathered at the bars and on the piers around Christopher Street.
She said the P stood for "Pay it no mind." That was her answer when anyone asked about her gender. She wasn't interested in explaining herself to people who'd already decided what they thought.
She was at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969. The New York City police raided the bar in the early hours of the morning — a routine harassment of a community that had no legal protection and no political power. What happened that night, and for six nights after, was not routine. The community fought back. Marsha P. Johnson was there at the beginning. The exact moment she arrived and exactly what she did varies across accounts — but her presence in those first hours is documented, and her role in the community that fueled the uprising is not in dispute.
In 1970, she and Sylvia Rivera — another trans woman of color and Stonewall veteran — co-founded STAR: Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. They rented a building in the Village and turned it into a house for homeless trans youth, many of whom had been thrown out by their families. They paid the rent by working the streets. They fed the young people in the house. They organized politically.
She was part of ACT UP during the AIDS crisis, marching, demanding research funding, demanding treatment, demanding that the government acknowledge that people were dying. She was part of the piers community — the area along the West Side Highway where homeless LGBTQ+ youth, many of them Black and Latinx, gathered for safety and community.
On July 6, 1992, her body was found floating in the Hudson River near the piers. She was forty-six years old. The police ruled it a suicide without significant investigation. The community, which knew her, said she had not been suicidal. They said there had been reports of harassment in the area that week. The case was closed.
In 2012, twenty years later, the NYPD reopened the case and reclassified the cause of death from suicide to undetermined. The case remains open. No one has been charged.
In 2019, a state park in Brooklyn was named Marsha P. Johnson State Park. She had spent much of her life homeless. The park is on the waterfront.
How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race?Marsha P. Johnson
She spent most of her adult life in poverty, doing sex work to survive, providing for homeless trans youth out of her own meager income. She was a Black transgender woman in a city that offered her no legal protection and little safety. She died under circumstances the police did not investigate adequately, and the case went unresolved for twenty years before even being reclassified.
Marsha P. Johnson helped start a movement that became one of the most significant civil rights expansions of the late 20th century. She did it while being homeless, while doing sex work to survive, while providing housing to other young people who had nowhere to go. She is often cited after the fact in LGBTQ+ history — but the material conditions of her life, the poverty and the violence and the inadequate investigation of her death, are the part of her story that connects to a much longer history of whose deaths get investigated and whose do not.
She also represents a direct line between the Black freedom struggle and the LGBTQ+ rights movement. She understood them as the same fight — a fight for the dignity and safety of people the dominant culture had decided to discard. She lived that understanding until the day she died.