Source:
Gay City News,
New York Times 
New York Times published this photograph of the Stonewall Inn taken on July 2, 1969 – the final night of the Stonewall uprising. The bar put up the string of lights to encourage patrons to return. Photo by Larry Morris discovered in the
Times archives and printed yesterday for the first time.
New York Public Library is marking the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots with an exhibit of photos, newspaper articles, and other materials documenting one very important year in the gay rights movement.
“The exhibit is just about gay and lesbian activism from 1969 to 1970,” exhibit curator Jason Baumann told Gay City News. Baumann is the library's coordinator of collection assessment and LGBT collections. "The tone of gay and lesbian activism changed that year.”
Meanwhile, New York Times has uncovered and printed yesterday a group of photos from the pivotal sixth and final night of the Stonewall uprising.
The spontaneous uprisings, which continued for several nights, began 40 years ago this month after a police raid at Stonewall Inn, a dive bar on Christopher Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. Although there were similar uprisings elsewhere before those June nights, the Stonewall uprising has come to be seen as a defining event in the development the gay rights movement.
But, as New York Times reporter Sewell Chan writes, “little visual evidence has survived from the six nights of the disturbances, in which gay men fought back against a pattern of police harassment.”
New York Library opens Stonewall exhibit; Times finds Stonewall photos in archives [contd.]
The library’s exhibit seeks to shed more light on those events that are now commemorated with LGBT Pride observances throughout the world.
"What changed in 1969 and 1970, there really is an uprising of energy," Baumann told Gay City News.
“The year 1969 marks the first time homosexuals united, demanded, and were willing to fight for full inclusion within American society,” Baumann writes in a press release. “As a result of the actions taken during this time gays and lesbians marked a paradigmatic shift not only in the ways that they saw themselves but also in how the world would see them.”
“Ida” is a 1970 photo by Diana Davies included in the NYPL exhibit.
The relatively modest library exhibit includes “original photographs, pamphlets, police reports, newspapers, and letters” from that year, with a focus on records from the Gay Liberation Front, the Radicalesbians, the Gay Activists Alliance, and the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, according to a library press release.
Many of the photos were taken by Diana Davies, who gave the library rights to her images.
The exhibit opened yesterday in a third floor hallway at the main building, and will be open until the end of the month. With 100,000 monthly visitors, the exhibit is sure to gain exposure, as many will have to pass through it on their way to the third floor reading room.
The photos of the uprising printed yesterday for the first time by New York Times were uncovered in the paper’s own archives.
The Times photos were taken by photographer Larry Morris on sixth and final night of the disturbances, but were never published by the newspaper, which mostly ignored the events as they were happening.
David Carter, who wrote a comprehensive history of the Stonewall uprising in 2004, says are the Times images are the only known photograph uprising’s tumultuous finale.
“I’m very grateful The Times preserved and cataloged them,” 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.”
Carter pointed out that the sixth night, on July 2, helped cement “Stonewall” as a rallying cry for gay activists throughout the country.
On that night protesters, most of them young gay men in the Village, were reinvigorated by anger about articles on the disturbances published that day in The Village Voice that were seen as disparaging of gays.
Some nongay activists from radical leftist organizations had also been drawn to the Village, impressed by the riots as an example of resistance to authority, according to Carter.
New York Times reporter Sewell Chan explained yesterday what the newspaper devoted a couple of inches to 40 years ago:
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.
In addition to the materials shown in this month’s exhibit, the New York Public Library has also digitized roughly 2,000 images of early gay rights and AIDS-related events and documents, according to Gay City News. Those are already accessible on the library's website. Much of gay material the library owns was collected by Mimi Bowling, who ran the library's manuscripts division, but has retired.
"She was really instrumental in building a lot of these collections," Baumann said. "That's what we're working on right now, to take care of what she amassed."
Source: 40 Years After Stonewall, Public Library Looks at 1969 | Gay City News
Images From the Stonewall Uprising’s Final Night | New York Times