SW Harvey Milk Street

Recently, while driving to work through downtown Portland, I noticed that one of the streets I crossed every day was "SW Harvey Milk Street".  I used to come downtown pretty often and I didn't remember ever seeing a street named for Harvey Milk before, so it aroused my curiosity.

It turns out that the city council voted for the change less than six months ago, renaming what had been SW Stark Street, a 13-block stretch extending west from the Willamette river to Burnside Street.  The new street signs went up even more recently.  Harvey Milk had no actual connection with the area, nor with Portland in general, but SW Stark Street was a center of gay culture in earlier days, and for some time a local citizens' group had been pushing for the change.  There was no real opposition; the only criticism came from those who would have preferred to honor a more local gay activist.

As it happens, the 40th anniversary of Milk's assassination was just two days ago.  Milk was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the first openly-gay elected official in California, at a time when the position of gay people even in San Francisco was precarious at best -- this was the time of Anita Bryant, the Briggs initiative, and the rise of the Moral Majority.  Though a latecomer to political activism and sometimes at odds with the city's more established gay political figures, Milk made use of his office to pass a gay civil rights ordinance and to rally and organize people for the long struggle against bigotry that lay ahead.

He was assassinated by Dan White, a former fellow Supervisor who was (by San Francisco standards) relatively religious and conservative, and had clashed with Milk several times.  After a failed business venture, White entered City Hall with a gun and begged Mayor George Moscone to reinstate him as a Supervisor.  When Moscone refused, White shot him, then went to his old adversary's office and murdered him as well.

I was living in the Bay Area at the time and I still remember the announcement of these shocking events by a visibly-shaken Supervisor Dianne Feinstein (who succeeded Moscone as Mayor and went on to become the national figure she is today).  The assassination brought the deep cultural divides of the time to the surface, with police officers openly wearing "Free Dan White" shirts and gays later rioting over White's relatively light sentence.

I wonder if Milk, living at the time he did, could have anticipated the success of the movement he helped foster, with gay marriage now a reality in most of North and South America and western Europe, and boycotts forcing entire states to back down from efforts to restore discrimination.  Perhaps he did.  To devote so much effort to the struggle, he must have been an optimist on some level.

The street's previous name honors Benjamin Stark, a local landowner who briefly served Oregon as a Senator during the Civil War era; like many people at the time, he was pro-slavery.  Milk is a far more worthy figure.  SE Stark Street, the much longer section of the street east of the river, still keeps the old name.  For it, too, perhaps the city council should eventually choose a better one.