June 28 Illinois History Minute

It’s June 28th. And on this day in 1970, the Chicago Sunday Tribune devoted three paragraphs to the city’s first gay pride parade, held the day before, on the one-year anniversary of the New York Stonewall riots. The newspaper reported that some 150 people kept on marching after the planned route was done, ending up at the downtown Picasso sculpture, where they held a chain dance and chanted “Gay power to gay people”.

Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson was born in Chicago on this day in 1943, and went on to study at the Universities of Illinois and Chicago. In 1974, Johanson led a team that discovered “Lucy”, the partial remains of an Australopithecus afarensis. At the time, the 3-point-2 million-year-old skeleton was the oldest known human ancestor.