Story at a glance
- Marsha P. Johnson was a transgender activist known for her involvement in the gay rights movement in the late 1900s.
- Johnson was a staple in Greenwich Village, known at the time as a hub of the LGBTQ+ community in the city.
- A park in Greenwich will be named after Johnson, the governor announced.
Marsha P. Johnson’s name has been set in the stone of LGBTQ+ history. Now, it will be set atop a New York state park.
A woman of color and transgender activist, Johnson is said to have moved to New York from New Jersey with $15 to her name. East River State Park, which the Gothamist reports will be renamed in her honor, is a seven-acre waterfront park in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Johnson protested during the Stonewall uprising.
“We just were saying no more police brutality. And we had enough of police harassment in the Village and other places,” said Johnson in an interview.
As a black transgender woman, she advocated not only for the LGBTQ+ community but also sex workers, prisoners and people with HIV/AIDS. She and fellow activist Sylvia Rivera helped found the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), a group that housed homeless and transgender youth.
The announcement by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo follows the news last year that Johnson and Rivera would be honored with permanent installations in Greenwich Village.
In his speech at the Human Rights Campaign Gala on Feb. 1, Cuomo drew a line between discrimination faced by LGBTQ+ people and other minorities in America, including Latin, black, Jewish and Muslim people. Referencing recent anti-Semitic attacks and a record number of violent hate crimes, he drew parallels between the different communities and their experiences.
“While the attacks focus on different races, different ethnicities and different religions, at the same time the attacks are all the same. They are motivated by fear and intolerance targeting those who are different,” Cuomo said.
In 2019, the FBI reported a 6 percent increase in violent hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people, with a 42 percent increase against transgender people.
Johnson’s own death at 46 has now been classified as undetermined. Her body was found in the Hudson River, near the Christopher Street piers, and while police initially ruled it suicide, the case has since been reopened.
Since her death, Johnson’s life has been remembered in documentaries and as part of the Stonewall National Monument, the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights and history. Now, it will be remembered again as the first State park named after an LGBTQ+ person.
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