San Francisco - Alison Bing [36]
1927 After a year of tinkering, 21-year-old Philo Farnsworth captured an image in a machine, and transmitted the first successful TV broadcast of…a straight line. In years since, audiences have been treated to marginally more interesting images.
1934 A West Coast longshoremen’s strike ends with 34 San Francisco strikers and sympathizers shot and 40 beaten by police. A mass funeral procession and citywide strike follow, and longshoremen win historic concessions.
1937 After four years of dangerous labors in the treacherous Pacific tides, San Francisco’s engineering marvel, the Golden Gate Bridge, is complete. The US Navy had proposed a black-and-yellow-striped concrete bridge, which SF ignored.
February 1942 Executive Order 9066 mandates the relocation of 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps. The Japanese American Citizens League takes the case against internment to courts, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1988 presidential apology.
1957 City Lights Bookstore wins a landmark ruling against book banning over the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and free speech and free spirits enjoy a reprieve from McCarthyism.
1959 Mayor George Christopher authorizes crackdowns on cruising areas and gay bars and starts a blacklist of gay citizens. January 21–23, 1966The Trips Festival is organized by techno-futurist Stewart Brand, featuring author and prankster-in-chief Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, plus sundry Native American activists and Hells Angels, and oodles of LSD.
October 1966 In Oakland, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale found the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, a militant black-power group that called Vietnam ‘the white man’s war’ and demanded ‘Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace.’
January 14, 1967 The Summer of Love kicks off with the Human Be-In, with blowing of conch shells and minds, draft cards used as rolling papers, free performances by the Grateful Dead, and Allen Ginsberg naked as usual.
June 5, 1968 Presidential candidate, former US attorney general, civil rights ally and antipoverty campaigner Robert Kennedy is fatally shot after winning the California primary – a turning point for political disillusionment and armed separatist struggle ahead.
1969 The first link is made via computer between Stanford Research Institute and UCLA via ARPANET. Within a few years an unsolicited group message about politics is sent across the network, and spam is born.
November 20, 1969 Native American activists land on the island of Alcatraz, and symbolically claim it as partial reparation for broken treaties. The occupation holds out against authorities for 19 months, until FBI agents oust the activists in 1971.
December 6, 1969 A free concert at Altamont Speedway organized as a West Coast Woodstock goes tragically wrong when Hells Angels on bodyguard duty turn on the performers and audience. Four people die.
April 16–17, 1977 The Apple II is introduced in San Francisco at the first West Coast Computer Faire by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and stuns the crowd with its speed (1MHz) and memory capacity (up to 48KB of RAM).
1977 Harvey Milk becomes the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the US. As San Francisco Supervisor, Milk sponsors a gay-rights bill and trend-setting ‘pooper-scooper’ ordinance before his murder by Dan White.
November 18, 1978 After evading taxes by moving his People’s Temple from San Francisco to Guyana, cult leader Jim Jones has US Congressman Leo Ryan and four journalists killed, then commands 900 heavily sedated followers to commit suicide.
1981 The first cases of AIDS are identified and misnamed GRID, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. The disease has taken 25 million lives, but early intervention in SF instituted prevention measures and established global standards of care and treatment.
1989 Hundreds of sea lions inexplicably haul out on the yacht