Thousands of labor union members and activists march in Philadelphia for May Day, on May 1, 2025.
(Photo by the Philadelphia Democratic Socialists of America)
“This is about workers showing up and demanding what workers deserve all across the country,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Unions and progressive organizations are planning nearly 1,000 “Workers Over Billionaires” demonstrations across the United States this Labor Day to protest President Donald Trump’s assault on workers’ rights.
The day of national action has been organized by the May Day Strong coalition, which includes labor organizations like the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, and National Union of Healthcare Workers, as well as advocacy groups like Americans for Tax Fairness, Indivisible, Our Revolution, and Public Citizen.
“Labor and community are planning more than a barbecue on Labor Day this year because we have to stop the billionaire takeover,” the coalition says. “Billionaires are stealing from working families, destroying our democracy, and building private armies to attack our towns and cities.”
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Since coming into office, the Trump administration has waged war on workers’ rights. Among many other actions, his administration has stripped over a million federal workers of their right to collectively bargain in what has been called the largest act of union busting in American history and dramatically cut their wages.
He has also weakened workplace safety enforcement, eliminated rules that protected workers against wage theft, and proposed eliminating the federal minimum wage for more than 3.7 million childcare and home workers.
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Despite Trump’s efforts, Americans still believe in the power of collective action. According to a Gallup poll published Thursday, 68% of Americans say they approve of labor unions, the highest level of support since the mid-1960s.
“Just like any bad boss, the way we stop the takeover is with collective action,” the coalition says on its website.
The May Day Strong coalition previously organized hundreds of thousands of workers to take to the streets for International Workers Day, more commonly known as “May Day.” On Monday, rallies are once again expected across all 50 states.
Four months later, their list of grievances has grown even longer, with Republicans having since passed a tax cut expected to facilitate perhaps the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history, featuring massive tax breaks for the wealthy paid for with historic cuts to the social safety net.
This Labor Day, I urge you to join a Workers Over Billionaires protest.
“There are nearly 1,000 billionaires in the country with a whopping $6 trillion, and that is still not enough for them,” said Saqib Bhattie, executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, another group participating in the protests. “They are pushing elected officials to slash Medicaid, [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits, and special education funding for schools in order to fund their tax breaks. We need to claw back money from the billionaire. We need to push legislation to tax billionaires at the state and local levels. We need to organize to build the people power necessary to overcome their money.”
The group also plans to respond to Trump’s lawless attacks on immigrants and his militarized takeovers of American cities.
“This Labor Day,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, “we continue the fight for our democracy, the fight for the soul of our nation, the fight against the vindictive authoritarian moves Trump and the billionaire class aimed at stealing from working people and concentrating power.”
“This is about workers showing up and demanding what workers deserve all across the country,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “This Labor Day is really different, because it’s not just labor unions, as important as we may be to the workers we represent. It has to be all workers and all working families saying enough. Workers and working families deserve the bounty of the country.”
May Day Strong will host a national “mass call” online on Saturday. The locations of the hundreds of protests on Monday can be found using the map on May Day Strong’s website.
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FIRST: We explained that one man with a history of donating to extreme causes and candidates gave $10 million to start paid advertising against us.
THEN: We shared why that was a problem, and how we were hoping to raise the money we needed to go on the air before we fall too far behind.
NOW: The opposition is going on the air with even more ads starting next Tuesday — targeting persuadable voters we need on our side if we’re going to win.
We are truly in an all-hands-on-deck situation. If people think this will be easy, they are wrong. And the response to these fundraising emails will determine how soon and at what level we can get on the air without going down.
It matters as a demonstration of grassroots opposition to Trump’s efforts to rig the next election and stop Democrats from having a fair chance at taking the House.
It matters to the financial goals we need to meet in order to win.
Ballots drop in just a few weeks here, so the urgency is real.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday he is sending additional CHP officers to the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other regions of the state.
During a press conference in Sacramento, the governor cited the “successes” of CHP’s ongoing surge operations in Oakland, Bakersfield, and San Bernardino as a reason for expanding the agency’s law enforcement efforts statewide.
“It’s an extraordinary thing to walk the streets of Oakland and have people come up and say ‘Thank you’ to the California Highway Patrol,” Newsom said.
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San Diego, the Inland Empire, Los Angeles, the Central Valley, Sacramento, and the San Francisco Bay Area will see additional CHP “crime suppression teams” in the coming weeks, according to a news release from Newsom’s press office. These teams will assist local police through data-sharing, conduct proactive enforcement in “high-crime areas,” target repeat offenders, and seize illegal drugs and guns.
Describing Oakland as a “hot spot” for crime, Newsom said at the press conference that he first deployed CHP officers to the East Bay early last year after meeting with former Mayor Sheng Thao, Oakland City Council members, Alameda County supervisors, and community leaders. “Perhaps the most vocal advocates for partnership with the California Highway Patrol were members of the clergy,” he said.
“That operation continues to this day, with tremendous success … embraced by the new mayor, current members of the City Council, and those who helped sponsor this effort at the county level,” Newsom said.
Since the agency’s surge operation in Oakland began in February 2024, CHP officers have recovered 4,257 stolen cars and 247 illegal guns and made 73 felony arrests, 420 misdemeanor arrests, and 1,528 DUI arrests, according to the governor’s press office.
“The full-time crime suppression team in Oakland has been extremely successful,” CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee said during Thursday’s press conference. “The numbers speak for themselves.”
Newsom, who over the past several months has appeared to position himself closer toward a presidential run in 2028, emphasized that CHP’s targeted enforcement efforts have “bipartisan” support.
“We’re moving in Republican communities, Democratic communities … we’re all moving in the same direction, and that’s the spirit we’re bringing to this expansion of our existing program,” he said.
The governor’s announcement comes as crime rates are falling statewide, including in Oakland.
According to OPD’s most recent crime data, violent crime — which includes homicide, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery — is down 28% compared with the same period last year. Preliminary data further shows that burglaries are down 26%, car thefts are down 45%, and property theft is down 20% year-over-year.
California’s homicide rate last year was the second lowest it has been since at least 1966. California has generally seen homicide, robbery, and property crime rates at or below pre-pandemic levels, according to Newsom’s press office.
Newsom’s announcement comes less than three months after Castlemont High School teacher Marvin Boomer was fatally struck in a car crash resulting from a CHP pursuit through East Oakland. CHP has previously stated that its officers had called off the pursuit seconds after initiating it.
Roselyn Romero covers public safety for The Oaklandside. She was previously The Oaklandside’s small business reporter as a 2023-24 Poynter-Koch Media & Journalism Fellow. Before joining the team, she was an investigative intern at NBC Bay Area and the inaugural intern for the Global Investigations team of The Associated Press through a partnership with the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. She graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 2022 with a bachelor’s in journalism and minors in Spanish, ethnic studies, and women’s & gender studies. She is a proud daughter of Filipino immigrants and was born and raised in Oxnard, California.More by Roselyn Romero
On Thursday morning, a young woman from Colombia dialed in remotely for her asylum hearing in San Francisco immigration court, using the court’s web-conferencing application.
The judge that day, Patrick O’Brien, wanted her in the courtroom in person. He didn’t mince words.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he said. “You’re supposed to be sitting in a courtroom right now.”
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“Good morning, your honor,” the woman replied, in Spanish through a court interpreter. “Yes, your honor, that’s right.”
“I know that’s right,” O’Brien said. “I’m going to reschedule your hearing for later this morning. I’m going to give you a chance to show up.”
To avoid arrest, some asylum seekers are submitting written requests to the court to appear remotely. The immigration judge decides whether to grant those requests, and other judges in San Francisco grant them regularly.
It was unclear whether the Colombian woman submitted such a request. Regardless, O’Brien rescheduled her 8:30 a.m. hearing for 11:30.
When she arrived in court at 630 Sansome St., her fears were realized: A Department of Homeland Security attorney moved to dismiss her case, a sign of impending arrest even though O’Brien did not grant the motion.
She pleaded with O’Brien. “I have tried as best as I can to follow the laws of this country.”
“All I can do is give you time to respond to the department’s motion,” O’Brien said.
“Please, I cannot go back to my country,” she said. She started to cry. “I cannot go back to my country.” She added: “I am here because I want to do things right.”
“I believe you, ma’am,” O’Brien said. But “there’s only so much I can do for you at this point.”
“Does this mean I won’t be leaving this place anymore?” The woman asked.
O’Brien tried to clarify: “Do you mean this building?”
“Yes.”
“It’s likely you’re going to spend some time here,” O’Brien said. People arrested at immigration court are typically processed in holding cells on the sixth floor of 630 Sansome St., where there is an ICE field office. Then they are transferred to longer-term detention facilities, unless they can secure legal help to get released from detention in another way.
Sure enough, when the woman left the courtroom, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were just down the hall, blocking the elevators.
The woman was one of six people arrested by ICE on Thursday morning in what has become a routine maneuver: A DHS attorney moves to dismiss asylum-seekers’ cases, a legal tactic the Trump administration is using to fast-track people out of the country.
The arrests have both confused and terrified people who have a legal right to claim asylum in the United States and are complying with the law by showing up to court.
The Colombian woman’s case was the second time that morning someone had tried to call into court. Just minutes before her call, a man dialed in. When O’Brien asked why he was not there in person, he said: “Because of fear of being arrested. I would like to apologize.”
O’Brien also asked that man to come in person that day. The man never did show up. If asylum-seekers miss a court hearing, they can be deported from the United States as a consequence. Just before noon, O’Brien ordered him removed.
The confusion and fear is evident in court most days. One woman whose case the Trump administration lawyer moved to dismiss had moved to Las Vegas and presumably traveled all the way back to San Francisco for court that morning. She wanted the court to move her court hearings to Nevada.
“Things are going to get complicated for you very quickly,” O’Brien said to the woman. “I’m not sure you’re going to have any hearings in Nevada.”
In two other women’s cases, even though Homeland Security did not move to dismiss either case, a scuffle was audible in the hallway after both walked out.
Mission Local then witnessed ICE officers arresting one of those two women as she cried “abogado, abogado” (lawyer in Spanish). When Mission Local asked the ICE officers why that woman was taken, given that Homeland Security had not moved to dismiss her case, one of the officers said they might have the wrong person.
ICE officers carry sheets of paper with what appear to be black and white photos and the names of the people they are told to arrest after court. Mission Local saw two ICE officers riffling through their papers. “That wasn’t her,” one muttered to the other.
A few minutes later, ICE officers reappeared with the woman who they had taken. They let her go. She smiled back at them, relieved, then bolted toward the elevators.
One by one, as other asylum-seekers left the courtroom, ICE officers checked their papers trying to identify them as they walked by.
One visibly pregnant woman from Haiti avoided arrest, the first person Mission Local has heard of a person being able to leave the courthouse after Homeland Security moved to dismiss their case. It wasn’t clear if it was the temporary protected status, or the fact that the woman was pregnant, that kept her from being detained.
Another woman, just 20, almost made it into an elevator before an officer said to his colleagues: “What about her?” She was quickly taken.
That same morning, in addition to the six people arrested at immigration court, ICE also arrested seven people at an apartment building in SoMa, said Milli Atkinson, an immigration specialist with the Bar Association of San Francisco.
That number of people arrested at once out of a neighborhood in San Francisco is concerning, said State Sen. Scott Wiener.
Unlike in Los Angeles, where ICE officers have regularly raided workplaces, the Bay Area has mostly not seen mass arrests in neighborhoods, though ICE did arrest seven people on Aug. 12 at a house in Oakland.
“So when I saw this video, my heart dropped,” Wiener said, referencing footage of the arrest, “to see secret police thugs in a San Francisco neighborhood, grabbing people from an apartment building.”
“I’m deeply concerned,” Wiener added, “that we’re going to see more masked ICE activity in San Francisco and in the Bay Area.”
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The student housing currently under construction at the People’s Park site will be named the Judith E. Heumann House after the disability rights advocate and Berkeley School of Public Health alumnus.Agranya Ketha | Staff
Construction for student housing at the People’s Park site is advancing into its next phase as the last steel beams marking the top floors of the structure were added early this month.
Following name proposal submissions from the community, the student housing project will be named the Judith E. Heumann House, after the disability rights advocate and Berkeley School of Public Health alumnus, according to Berkeley News on Thursday.
The “Heumann House” will house 1,100 undergraduate students, with rooms being built to accommodate people with disabilities, a message Heumann championed.
The construction will now shift to the exterior of the structure, as well as the mechanical and electrical installation, according to Berkeley News.
This next step of construction is planned for completion mid-December this year, according to a July 31 project update. The entire housing project is expected to be completed to accommodate students for fall 2027.
“Even after they put up the shipping containers, which was Jan. 3, 2024, it was kind of vague,” said community member and Southside resident Lisa Teague. “But this is really real. It’s more than halfway done.”
According to Teague — who has also been an activist with the People’s Park movement — one continuing impact on nearby residents is the noise of the construction, which has caused Teague to file complaints to the city. Teague noted that when they first complained, noise settled down for approximately one or two weeks, before the noise levels returned.
According to the July 31 campus project update, installation work was to be limited to evening hours “in order to minimize impacts on nearby residences and businesses.”
“It’s been noisy early in the morning all summer long,” said community member and People’s Park activist Ian Hunt. “There is the giant, ‘Beep beep beep,’ trucks, cement water, there’s been all kinds of noise, pile driving. There’s all kinds of noise and disruption.”
According to Unit 2 resident Natalie Arias, the construction sounds wake her up in the morning and she says the noise is “loudest in the morning.”
Another Unit 2 resident, Steve Lee, said he isn’t bothered by the noise, noting he hears the sounds in the morning but it isn’t “too hard” for him.
“The work that’s going to be done from now on is not going to be as intrusive as it has been,” Teague said. “There will be noise, but it’s (not) going to be quite as intense.”
A California couple are suing OpenAI over the death of their teenage son, alleging its chatbot, ChatGPT, encouraged him to take his own life.
The lawsuit was filed by Matt and Maria Raine, parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, in the Superior Court of California on Tuesday. It is the first legal action accusing OpenAI of wrongful death.
The family included chat logs between Adam, who died in April, and ChatGPT that show him explaining he has suicidal thoughts. They argue the programme validated his “most harmful and self-destructive thoughts”.
In a statement, OpenAI told the BBC it was reviewing the filing.
“We extend our deepest sympathies to the Raine family during this difficult time,” the company said.
It also published a note on its website on Tuesday that said “recent heartbreaking cases of people using ChatGPT in the midst of acute crises weigh heavily on us”. It added that “ChatGPT is trained to direct people to seek professional help,” such as the 988 suicide and crisis hotline in the US or the Samaritans in the UK.
The company acknowledged, however, that “there have been moments where our systems did not behave as intended in sensitive situations”.
Warning: This story contains distressing details.
The lawsuit, obtained by the BBC, accuses OpenAI of negligence and wrongful death. It seeks damages as well as “injunctive relief to prevent anything like this from happening again”.
According to the lawsuit, Adam began using ChatGPT in September 2024 as a resource to help him with school work. He was also using it to explore his interests, including music and Japanese comics, and for guidance on what to study at university.
In a few months, “ChatGPT became the teenager’s closest confidant,” the lawsuit says, and he began opening up to it about his anxiety and mental distress.
By January 2025, the family says he began discussing methods of suicide with ChatGPT.
Adam also uploaded photographs of himself to ChatGPT showing signs of self harm, the lawsuit says. The programme “recognised a medical emergency but continued to engage anyway,” it adds.
According to the lawsuit, the final chat logs show that Adam wrote about his plan to end his life. ChatGPT allegedly responded: “Thanks for being real about it. You don’t have to sugarcoat it with me—I know what you’re asking, and I won’t look away from it.”
That same day, Adam was found dead by his mother, according to the lawsuit.
The Raines’ lawsuit names OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder Sam Altman as a defendant, along with unnamed engineers and employees who worked on ChatGPT
The family alleges that their son’s interaction with ChatGPT and his eventual death “was a predictable result of deliberate design choices”.
They accuse OpenAI of designing the AI programme “to foster psychological dependency in users,” and of bypassing safety testing protocols to release GPT-4o, the version of ChatGPT used by their son.
The lawsuit lists OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman as a defendant, as well as unnamed employees, managers and engineers who worked on ChatGPT.
In its public note shared on Tuesday, OpenAI said the company’s goal is to be “genuinely helpful” to users rather than “hold people’s attention”.
It added that its models have been trained to steer people who express thoughts of self-harm towards help.
The Raines lawsuit is not the first time concerns have been raised about AI and mental health.
In an essay published last week in the New York Times, writer Laura Reiley outlined how her daughter, Sophie, confided in ChatGPT before taking her own life.
Ms Reiley said the programme’s “agreeability” in its conversations with users helped her daughter mask a severe mental health crisis from her family and loved ones.
“AI catered to Sophie’s impulse to hide the worst, to pretend she was doing better than she was, to shield everyone from her full agony,” Ms Reiley wrote. She called on AI companies to find ways to better connect users with the right resources.
In response to the essay, a spokeswoman for OpenAI said it was developing automated tools to more effectively detect and respond to users experiencing mental or emotional distress.
If you are suffering distress or despair and need support, you could speak to a health professional, or an organisation that offers support. Details of help available in many countries can be found at Befrienders Worldwide: www.befrienders.org.
In the UK, a list of organisations that can help is available at bbc.co.uk/actionline. Readers in the US and Canada can call the 988 suicide helpline or visit its website.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a meeting between President Donald Trump and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in the White House on Aug. 25, 2025, in Washington. Photo: Alex Brandon/AP
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has has long considered both the media and higher education as his enemies — which makes college media a ripe target. The arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk over an op-ed that she co-wrote for the Tufts University campus paper proved that student journalists are at risk, especially foreign writers who dared criticize Israel’s war on Gaza.
But one student newspaper is fighting back.
The Stanford Daily — the independent publication covering Stanford University — filed a First Amendment lawsuit suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem earlier this month over two tactics they’ve used in targeted deportation cases.
“What’s at stake in this case is whether, when you’re in the United States, you’re free to voice an opinion critical of the government without fear of retaliation,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, a civil liberties group representing the plaintiffs.
“It does not matter if you’re a citizen, here on a green card, or visiting Las Vegas for the weekend — you shouldn’t have to fear retaliation because the government doesn’t like what you have to say,” Fitzpatrick said.
SOON AFTER MAHMOUD Khalil was arrested by immigration agents in early March for his role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, student journalists and editors around the country sensed a shift.
“That’s when we saw a significant uptick in calls,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, who manages the nonprofit’s hotline.
Over three decades helping student reporters navigate censorship and First Amendment issues, Hiestand had never fielded so many calls focused on potential immigration consequences for coverage on campus, both for the journalists and their named sources.
Öztürk’s arrest just a couple weeks later sent the legal hotline “into overdrive,” Hiestand told The Intercept. He heard from reporters, editors, and even political cartoonists worried their work about Israel, Palestine, and student protests might make them targets too.
In early April, the Student Press Law Center put out an unprecedented alert with other student journalism organizations, which advised campus publications to consider taking down or revising “certain stories that may now be targeted by immigration officials.”
“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” reads the alert.
The next week, the Stanford Daily editorsran a letter about the chill its own staff was facing on campus.
“Both students and faculty have been increasingly hesitant to speak to The Daily and increasingly worried about comments that have already been made on the record,” their letter read. “Some reporters have been choosing to step away from stories in order to keep their name detached from topics that might draw unwanted attention. Even authors of dated opinion pieces have expressed fear that their words might retroactively put them in danger.”
Following the editors’ letter, FIRE approached the Stanford Daily’s editors to sue the Trump administration. It’s not the first time the publication has fought for freedom of the press in court. In 1978, a case brought by the Stanford Daily over a search warrant targeting its newsroom reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-3 that the warrant was valid and did not violate the First Amendment.
The student newspaper’s current suit — filed with two individual plaintiffs suing under the pseudonyms Jane Doe and John Doe — challenges two broad, arcane legal provisions that have become Rubio’s go-to tools against student activists and campus critics of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The first provision, which was added to the country’s immigration code in 1990, grants the secretary of state sweeping authority to render noncitizens deportable if they “compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.” The second law is even broader, allowing the secretary to revoke visas “at any time, in his discretion.”
There are relatively few cases in which either statute has been the grounds for deportation, particularly compared to the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has rounded up and detained since Trump returned to the White House.
In fact, immigration scholars found that invoking the foreign policy provision as the sole grounds for deportation was “almost unprecedented,” according to a brief submitted in Khalil’s ongoing court battle by more than 150 lawyers and law professors. Based on government data, the scholars identified just 15 cases in which the foreign policy provision has ever been invoked, and just four in the past 25 years — most recently in 2018, during the first Trump administration.
“At a minimum, the government’s assertion of authority here is extraordinary — indeed, vanishingly rare,” the scholars wrote in their brief.
In Khalil’s case, the government identified only two others beside Khalil who had been targeted by Rubio under the “foreign policy” provision: although not identified by name, descriptions of the cases match Rubio’s orders against Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University, and Badar Khan Suri, a scholar at Georgetown University. Oddly, the government failed to mention the case of Yunseo Chung, another Columbia undergraduate with a green card, whose deportation Rubio authorized in the very same letter as for Khalil.
The State Department greenlighted Öztürk’s detention, meanwhile, under the second, broader provision, court records show. The government has not made any similar accounting of how many times Rubio and his staff have invoked his “discretion” to revoke visas over alleged antisemitism. At one point Rubio claimed to have revoked as many as 300 visas, without specifying the authority under which he did so.
“The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick, the FIRE attorney, said. “It doesn’t take deporting thousands of noncitizens to accomplish that chill,” since no one wants to become “the next Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk.” Read Our Complete CoverageChilling Dissent
IN RECENT MONTHS, numerous courts have cast doubt on whether these two statutes can be used to target noncitizens based on their speech.
In Khalil’s case, which is currently pending in a federal appellate court, a district court judge in New Jersey ruled in June that the “foreign policy” provision is “very likely an unconstitutional statute.”
Similarly, in May a judge in Vermont ordered Öztürk’s release to “ameliorate the chilling effect that Ms. Ozturk’s arguably unconstitutional detention may have on non-citizens present in the country.” The government has also appealed that order, along with similar rulings that freed Mahdawi and Suri from detention, and another ruling that blocked the Trump administration from detaining Chung.
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Now, the Stanford Daily is mounting a direct challenge to these two laws as deployed by the Trump administration. The student newspaper argues both provisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment, at least when used to retaliate against protected speech.
“The Secretary of State and the President claim to possess unreviewable statutory authority to deport any lawfully present noncitizen for speech the government deems anti-American or anti-Israel. They are wrong,” reads their complaint, filed August 6. “The First Amendment cements America’s promise that the government may not subject a speaker to disfavored treatment because those in power do not like his or her message.”
Julia Rose Kraut, a legal historian who has written about the history of ideological deportation in the U.S., told The Intercept that Congress never meant for the foreign policy provision to be used “as a tool to suppress freedom of expression and association.”
“Members of Congress intended for the foreign policy provision to be used in unusual circumstances, and only sparingly, carefully, and narrowly to exclude or deport specific individuals who would have a clear negative impact on United States foreign policy,” Kraut said, citing changes signed into law after the Cold War.
“What this case is seeking to establish is that political branches’ authority over immigration does not supersede the Bill of Rights,” FIRE’s Fitzpatrick said.
Briefing in the case is ongoing, and a hearing is scheduled for October 1.
“It’s gratifying to see a student newspaper upholding free speech at a time when many institutions are bending the knee,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford, in an emailed statement. “Many students are afraid to protest the Trump administration’s actions not only because of the deportations, but because their own universities restricted speech and harshly disciplined protestors. I hope their courage inspires others to act.”
Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.
Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”
The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.
111 Taylor Street once housed Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, the site of an August 1966 riot by drag queens and trans people against the police.
Photo: Cynthia Laird
San Francisco’s Transgender History Month, observed in August for the past several years, often brings attention to the fact that an exact date of the 1966 riot at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin remains elusive. The former eatery, which was frequented by drag queens and trans people, among others, has been in the news this year, as activists work to reclaim the historic site that is now a reentry facility for formerly incarcerated people.
The ground floor commercial space at 111 Taylor Street had housed Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, where one night in August 1966 a drag queen reportedly threw a cup of hot coffee in the face of a police officer who tried to arrest her without a warrant. The exact date of the altercation has been lost to time. But the incident sparked a riot by trans and queer patrons of the 24-hour diner and cops, as detailed in the 2005 documentary “Screaming Queens” by transgender scholar and historian Susan Stryker, Ph.D. .
The property earlier this year became the first one of its kind granted federal landmark status specifically for its connection to the transgender movement in the U.S. It is also now on the California Register of Historical Resources.
In 2022, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors declared the intersection in front of Compton’s and the exterior walls of 111 Taylor Street as the city’s 307th landmark . It provides some level of protection to the building facade from being altered.
Today, 111 Taylor Street houses the facility operated by GEO Reentry Services, a subsidiary of GEO Group Inc. Activists with the Compton’s x Coalition want to reclaim the site and have tried to get GEO Group’s zoning determination revoked, which would require it to vacate the premises. Thus far, they have been unsuccessful, as the Bay Area Reporter has noted. https://www.ebar.com/story/155930
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Susan Stryker, Ph.D., is known as an expert on the Compton’s Cafeteria riots. Photo: Courtesy Susan Stryker
Several dates offered Dates for when the Compton’s riot occurred that the Bay Area Reporter have heard about or seen recently range from August 12, to the 14th, to later in the month. Stryker, an academic and professor emerita at University of Arizona, is now a visiting professor at Stanford’s Clayman Institute. She is credited with being an expert on the riot, even as she has been unable to find the date of it.
“I have no question that it did happen,” Stryker said in a recent phone interview. “The date thing is curious.”
She’s convinced the demonstration occurred August 21 or 28, both of which would have been Sunday nights, based on conversations she’s had with people around at the time. One was with a guy whose birthday was the first week of September and he’d have to report for the draft. Additionally, the Tenderloin became more racially mixed later in the month, when “the Brown girls would go to the Tenderloin to hustle at the end of the month,” Stryker said.
“We also know a more racially mixed spot is more likely to be raided,” she added.
Another thing, said Stryker, is the absence of evidence. At the time, KGO-TV had its studios right down the street from Compton’s. The station filmed a picket outside of Compton’s on July 17. “It’s recorded in the handwritten logs for July 17, 1966,” said Stryker.
But the TV station didn’t film news on Sundays back then, she explained.
“That, to me, suggests the wee hours of the morning on a Sunday at the end of the month,” said Stryker. “August 21 or 28, probably the 28th.”
Stryker said that there are no city archives of police records for that time, and there was no coverage in the San Francisco Examiner or San Francisco Chronicle.
“At the time, the gay press did not cover trans people in the Tenderloin,” Stryker said. (The B.A.R. didn’t begin publishing until April 1971.)
Another interesting tidbit Stryker came across is that the KGO-TV reporter who covered the July 1966 pickets at Compton’s was Dick Carlson, a transphobe who later outed Renée Richards, the trans tennis star. He also outed Liz Carmichael, a trans woman who created the Dale, a three-wheeled, low-cost, high-efficiency car she was convinced would upend the auto industry. (HBO aired a documentary, “The Lady and the Dale,” about Carmichael’s life.) Dick Carlson, who died in March, was the father of conservative anti-LGBTQ media figure Tucker Carlson.
Adrian Ravarour, Ph.D., a gay man and former San Francisco resident, told the B.A.R. that the riot happened August 12 “to the best of my knowledge.” He based that on the Vanguard organization holding its first dance the following day, he said in a phone interview this spring. Vanguard was an early LGBTQ organization based in the Tenderloin. It operated from 1965-67 and focused on social justice and trying to gain acceptance for LGBTQ people. Keith St Clare, a gay man who published the Vanguard magazine even after the organization ended, died earlier this year. https://www.ebar.com/story/154014
Joseph Plaster, a queer academic and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, told the B.A.R. he has done quite a bit of research on the Vanguard organization. He noted Vanguard held a picket outside Compton’s in July 1966, before the riot. And he said the organization held a dance that month as well.
“A dance on Saturday, July 23, a few days after Vanguard picketed Compton’s Cafeteria, attracted ‘over 100 young people,’ Glide’s Ed Hansen wrote a few days later. ‘The kids all had a good time, and no one caused any trouble. Channel 7 – T.V. – had been there taking pictures and interviewing some of the TL kids.’ Unearthed Channel 7 footage from that dance shows a barebones basement, crowded with roughly 50 people,” Plaster wrote in an email. “This is all to say that the first dance would not have been held in mid-August.”
“In the wake of the riots, Vanguard appeared to gain traction in its efforts to curb police harassment and exclusion,” Plaster wrote. “In late 1966, a reporter noted that Vanguard worked with a police [official], likely Elliott Blackstone, to ‘act as an intermediary between Vanguard and Compton’s.’ Raymond Broshears also recalled that Blackstone and cafeteria management negotiated ‘a settlement’ at Glide Methodist Church.”
Blackstone, who is featured in Stryker’s documentary, was a straight ally who worked with the trans community. He was a sergeant with the San Francisco Police Department and its first liaison to the LGBTQ community when he was named to the position in 1962.
After the Compton’s riot, he helped organize the first U.S. transsexual support group, Conversion Our Goal, at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church and, with funding from transgender philanthropist Reed Erickson, established the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first-ever peer-staffed transgender social services agency, as the B.A.R. reported in June 2006 when Blackstone was honored by the trans community. (Blackstone died that October.)
Things appeared to change at Compton’s after the riot, according to Plaster’s research.
“At a Vanguard organizational meeting in late 1966, Vice President John Colvin explained that Compton’s ‘had agreed to end discrimination, more or less,’ according to a reporter,” Plaster stated. “‘The kids would not be specifically harassed, but, if they lingered an hour over a cup of coffee or invited non-paying friends to the tables, they would be – well, pushing their luck.’ Meanwhile, the policemen ‘who had been roughing the kids up had been removed, and the new ones had orders not to use force.’”
Ravarour was reached last week and told of Plaster’s research. He continues to maintain the August 12 date for the riot.
“I am 100% confident that the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot occurred on Friday night, August 12, 1966,” he wrote in an email. “Around 1:45 a.m. Saturday morning after the riot, after leaving the Vanguard dance, my boyfriend and I stood outside Compton’s assessing the damage.
“Late Saturday afternoon, Dixie Russo, who had been a participant inside the riot, met with me and disclosed further details,” Ravarour added.
The Reverend Raymond Broshears wrote about the 1966 Compton’s riot in his 1972 San Francisco Pride magazine. Photo: Cynthia Laird, from the GLBT Historical Society Archives
Broshears, a gay man who published the Gay Crusader newspaper, also published a San Francisco Pride Guide, the first one of which was June 25, 1972. There was a parade that year, and in the guide, Broshears writes about the 1966 Compton’s riot, six years after the fact.
“In the streets of the Tenderloin, at Turk and Taylor on a hot August night in 1966, Gays rose up angry at the constant police harassment of the drag-queens by police,” Broshears wrote. “It had to be the first ever recorded violence by Gays against the police anywhere. For on that evening, when the SFPD paddy wagon drove up to make their ‘usual’ sweeps of the streets, Gays this time did not go willingly.”
Broshears wrote that the dispute did begin once they entered the cafeteria.
“But when the police grabbed the arm of one of the transvestites, he threw his hot coffee in the cop’s face, and with that, cups, saucers, and trays began flying around the place and all directed at the police,” he wrote.
He reported that a police car “had every window broken,” a newspaper shack outside the cafeteria “was burned to the ground and general havoc raised that night in the Tenderloin.”
Greg Pennington, a co-founder with the late Willie Walker of the GLBT Historical Society, told the B.A.R. that as an amateur historian he compiled a chronology of early gay history. It is now in the archives of the historical society. The B.A.R. was unable to locate it while visiting the archives recently, likely due to it being combined with other documents, according to archivists.
“I never had any formal training in archives,” Pennington said in a recent phone interview. But he recalled that his timeline indicates August 1966 for the Compton’s riot, though without an exact date. His chronology also cited Broshears’ Gay Crusader newspaper, he said, adding that Broshears mentioned the riot “after the fact.”
The Reverend Dr. Megan Rohrer, a transgender man whose book “Images of America: San Francisco’s Transgender District” was published this month, was also unable to find a date for the Compton’s riot, Rohrer told the B.A.R.
“I went through the police records at the library for that full year surrounding it – it is not listed in the police report. I think the only mention of it is from the Reverend Ray Broshears in his Gay Crusader paper,” Rohrer stated.
Stryker said that SFPD’s records from that time “disappeared.”
“There are no files for Central Station,” she said, referring to the police station that oversees the Tenderloin. “Nothing in newspapers.”
The Reverend Raymond Broshears published his San Francisco Pride magazine in June 1972. Photo: Cynthia Laird, from the GLBT Historical Society Archives
An outlier Adding to the hunt for a date, Equality California, the statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization, sent out an email two weeks ago indicating the riot occurred on August 14.
“59 years ago today, in a San Francisco diner, a hot cup of coffee ignited a revolution,” the email stated. “Three years before Stonewall, drag queens and transgender women stood up against police harassment – and refused to back down. That August night in 1966 was loud, unapologetic, and the beginning of the movement we’re still fighting for today.”
The fundraising message was signed by Tom Temprano, a gay man who is EQCA’s managing director and a San Francisco resident. He was asked how EQCA determined the date.
In response, Jorge Reyes Salinas, a gay man who is communications director for the organization, clarified the date issue in a message to the B.A.R.
“To clarify, we meant ‘today’ as in ‘at this moment,’ not specifically August 14. Our social media also does the same,” Reyes Salinas stated. “Saying ‘today’ was to uplift this moment and event in history, was not meant to be specific. Hope that clarifies since there is no specific date of when the Compton Cafeteria took place.”
As for Stryker, she said that she would like to solve this puzzle.
“I would love to find a date,” she said, adding that its absence allows others to question whether the Compton’s riot happened.
“I do see right-wing chatter that it’s all made up,” she said, but she added, “the Compton’s story has been told for a very, very long time.”
“I’ve got all these stories about why it’s forgotten and why it’s not recorded,” she said. “I wish I could find the one definitive date.”
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