Harvey Milk, One of the World’s First Openly Gay Politicians, Was Assassinated on This Day in 1978

With tears in her eyes on the morning of November 27, 1978, Dianne Feinstein stepped in front of a gathering of San Francisco city employees and reporters at City Hall. stepped in front of a gathering of San Francisco city employees and reporters at City Hall.

“It is my duty to inform you that both Mayor [George] Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed,” said Feinstein, then president of the city’s Board of Supervisors.

Shockingly, the man charged with the killings “was not some wild-eyed lunatic,” as Time magazine later wrote, but former City Supervisor Daniel James White.

Earlier that month, White, a former police officer and firefighter, resigned his post on the Board of Supervisors, citing his inability to support his family on the position’s salary of $9,600 (the equivalent of about $46,000 today).

Five days later, White changed his mind. He wanted his job back and asked to rescind his resignation.

Though Moscone, a popular progressive mayor, was already thumbing through replacement candidates to serve out the remainder of White’s term, he initially agreed. “I never wanted to see a young man forced out,” Moscone told the San Francisco Examiner. “District 8 is well off with White.” “District 8 is well off with White.”

But the city attorney soon advised the mayor that White’s resignation was final and could not be simply rescinded. Moscone would have to reappoint White or find someone else to serve in his place.

Days later, the Jonestown mass murder-suicide of 913 people—many San Franciscans—drew the city’s attention away from the battle for White’s seat for a while. In the meantime, progressive members of the Board of Supervisors—including Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California—lobbied against giving White, a conservative, his seat back. On November 27, Moscone was slated to announce he was instead appointing a Milk-backed moderate liberal, Don Horanzy, to White’s old seat.

White, who had assumed he would regain his seat, was tipped off to the plan by a local radio reporter.

He arrived at City Hall the next morning with a .38-caliber revolver to confront the mayor. To avoid metal detectors, he snuck in through a basement window and barged into the mayor’s office. The two men briefly talked before three shots rang out.

Moscone’s aides assumed it was a car backfiring or shots on the street, so no one intervened as White breezed out the mayor’s office en route to Milk’s.

“Harvey, may I see you for a minute?” White reportedly asked. After another brief chat, the former board member shot and killed Milk.fter another brief chat, the former board member shot and killed Milk.

Within the hour, White turned himself in at his old police station a few blocks from City Hall. Horanzy, who had planned to meet with the mayor before the press conference announcing his appointment, never even got inside the building. even got inside the building.

Though White openly confessed to the murders, his real motivations for the killings were obscure. At his trial, his lawyers claimed their client was in the midst of a downward, depressive spiral—apparently evidenced by his consumption of junk food like Twinkies—and unable to premeditate the murders.

“He went through a few months of very hard work, financial problems and a new baby,” said Feinstein, who rose to acting mayor and went on to become one of the country’s most prominent politicians. “It had triggered a sense of hopelessness.”

In the end, White was only convicted on two counts of voluntary manslaughter, and his mild, seven-year sentence spurred San Franciscans to riot in May 1979. White served five years, one month and nine days in prison before being paroled in 1984. He killed himself in 1985.

As for Milk, his legacy as a proud pioneer in LGBTQ politics and public life soared. “I’m showing people here that gays are involved with taxes, and dog [poop], and … everything else,” Milk said in an interview with the Examiner a few months before the assassination, in which he spoke frankly about threats to his life. “So that people say, ‘Hey, you know it doesn’t matter if a person is green with six heads. That person is good.’”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.