The Stonewall uprising that began 40 years ago this month in Greenwich Village has come to be seen as a defining event in the development of the gay rights movement, but little visual evidence has survived from the six nights of the disturbances, in which gay men fought back against a pattern of police harassment.
A series of photographs that were taken by a New York Times photographer on the sixth and final night of the disturbances, but not published, has surfaced, offering what David Carter, who wrote a comprehensive history of the riots in 2004, says are the only known images from the uprising’s tumultuous finale.
The images were shot by a Times photographer named Larry Morris on the evening of Wednesday, July 2, 1969, five nights after a raid on the Stonewall Inn, a nightclub on Christopher Street popular among gay men and lesbians, touched off the disturbances.
As Mr. Carter explains in his book “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution,” protesters, most of them young gay men in the Village, were angered by articles about the disturbances published that day in The Village Voice that were seen as disparaging of gays. In addition, Mr. Carter wrote, some nongay activists from radical leftist organizations had descended on the Village, impressed by the riots as an example of resistance to authority.
By around 10 p.m. on July 2, a crowd that The Times estimated at 500 had gathered outside the Stonewall Inn. Some began shoving and throwing bottles; others set fire to garbage at Christopher Street and Waverly Place. Riot officers from the Police Department’s Tactical Patrol Force, wearing helmets and armed with nightsticks, descended on the scene. By the evening’s end, numerous people had been injured, including a patrolman who was struck on the face and had to be treated at a hospital, and at least five people were arrested.
The Times published a short article the next day, “Hostile Crowd Dispersed Near Sheridan Square,” but did not include Mr. Morris’s photographs.
The photographs remained away from public review for nearly four decades. In 2006, a photography researcher for The Times found the original prints and, noticing that the captions on the photographs identified them as being of the Stonewall riots, scanned the images into the newspaper’s internal image database. Eventually the pictures were logged in by Redux Pictures, a photo agency that sells stock photographs and has an arrangement with The Times.
And in April, The Times published one of the images to accompany an article in the Week in Review section, with the caption: “The Village, 1969: Near the Stonewall Bar in Greenwich Village a week after the raid and rebellion.”
At the same time, Dana Kirchoff, an archival researcher working on a documentary film about Stonewall for the PBS history series “American Experience,” encountered the images on the Redux Web site. Since March, she had been poring over records at the New York Public Library, identifying news photographers who were active in the Stonewall era in the hopes of encountering previously unpublished images from the riots.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Carter called The Times’s images “extremely important” from a historical perspective, because only a handful of images from the riots survive. They include a photograph taken by a freelancer, Joseph Ambrosini, from the first night of the riots and published in The Daily News, and some posed images taken by Fred McDarrah for The Village Voice from the second night of the riots.
“I’m very grateful The Times preserved and cataloged them,” Mr. Carter said of the images from the final night of the riots. “This is a wonderful gift for the gay community to get in the month of the 40th anniversary of the riots.”
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