National Public Radio helpfully explains Obama's 'Stonewall' reference to its audience

If you read with some bemusement NPR's explanation to its internet audience yesterday of the Stonewall Tavern incident, referred to in President Obama's 2013 inaugural address, you were probably sobered by the realization (after some quick arithmetic) that no one under 44 was even alive on the 28th of June, 1969, when hundreds of gay New Yorkers finally got sick of being pawns in monetary disputes between mafia owners of gay bars and those cops being extravagantly tipped to withold their customary harassment of said establishments and patrons.
     Seven years earlier(!), San Franciscans had already taken steps which avoided the spectacle of parking meters being heaved through plate glass windows at their city's finest by organizing the Tavern Guild to provide a united front against police harassment and wholesale mafia incursions into liquor-by-the-drink retailing.
     A fund was established by participating gay bars to pay for legal representation for any customers arrested on trumped-up charges, provided they were willing to plead not guilty. San Francisco cops soon got the message that the days were over for them of easy arrests, copped pleas and a lack of  unflattering testimony by witnesses about their dubious behavior. Game over.

Martin Duberman, born in 1930, in
a screencap from the documentary
Before Stonewall (1984).

     NPR interviewed gay historian Martin Duberman, now 82:

It wasn't the first time gay men had pushed back, said Duberman, who earned his doctorate at Harvard, taught at Princeton and Yale, and as a distinguished professor at the City University of New York founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.
     Gay men in San Francisco had already been protesting their treatment at the hands of police. But, for whatever reason, he said, "Stonewall somehow became the symbol for all of this."