THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER -- “High-profile protests like Stonewall don’t come out of nowhere,” said the historian and author Marc Stein, who brought the forgotten Bucks County incident to light with the help of Monica Kuna, director of library services at the college in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
“We have documentation on another two dozen protests [nationwide] that were the context out of which Stonewall and the very successful movement of the 1970s and ’80s grew,” he said. “I am convinced there are a whole bunch of other [forgotten] actions would help us understand the road to Stonewall.”
Stein, a professor of History at San Francisco State University who earned his Ph.D. at Penn, said the protest was among the largest of any pre-Stonewall demonstrations and one of only two known to have taken place at a college campus before 1969.