# Marsha P. Johnson Born Malcolm Michaels Jr. on August 24, 1945 in Elizabeth, New Jersey; died July 6, 1992 in the Hudson River off Christopher Street piers, Manhattan. **One of the most visible Black, gender-nonconforming participants in the 1969 [[Stonewall Riots]]** and a four-decade organizer at the intersection of queer liberation, homeless youth advocacy, sex-worker advocacy, and AIDS activism. ## At Stonewall Johnson — who used she/her pronouns publicly from the 1960s onward and described herself variably as a drag queen, a transvestite, and (in later interviews) "gay" — was at the Stonewall Inn on the night of the June 28, 1969 raid. The historical record of who specifically threw the first object resisting police that night is contested and partly invented in retrospect; Johnson herself denied being among the first wave (she said she arrived "about two o'clock in the morning" when the riots were already underway). The mythologization of Johnson as **"the woman who threw the first brick at Stonewall"** is a later overlay onto a complicated and incompletely documented night. What is uncontested: Johnson was present, participated in the multi-day uprising, and became one of the most prominent post-Stonewall organizers in the years that followed. ## STAR and Post-Stonewall Organizing In 1970, Johnson co-founded **Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR)** with [[Sylvia Rivera]] — an organization dedicated to housing, food, and political organizing for homeless transgender and gender-nonconforming youth, sex workers, and runaways. STAR House, a small shelter the two ran in the East Village from a Mafia-leased building, was the **first known American mutual-aid housing project run by and for trans people**. Johnson remained a fixture of New York LGBTQ organizing for the next two decades — marching in every Pride from 1970 forward, performing with the drag troupe Hot Peaches, and becoming a key ACT UP organizer in the 1980s. She was diagnosed with HIV in 1990. ## Death and Aftermath Johnson's body was found in the Hudson River near the Christopher Street piers on July 6, 1992. The NYPD ruled the death a suicide; activists rejected the ruling. The case was officially reopened in 2012 and reclassified as "undetermined" — homicide remains a possibility but no charges have been filed. ## Legacy Johnson is now widely recognized as one of the **founding figures of the modern transgender-rights movement** and one of the most cited Black queer political figures of the 20th century. Her erasure from much of the post-Stonewall organizational record — and her later re-emergence as a central figure in the 2010s rediscovery of trans-led queer history — is a primary case study in how respectability politics shaped the gay-rights movement at the expense of trans, Black, and street-economy members. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Sylvia Rivera]] - [[Stonewall Riots]]