She Threw More Than a Punch: What Marsha P. Johnson Taught Us About Fighting for Our Lives

Art Credit: Kendrick Daye for The Marsha P Johnson Institute, created from a photo of Marsha taken by Hank O'Neal at the 1977 NYC Pride March. Article Citation: "About Marsha P. Johnson." The Marsha P. Johnson Institute.

In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. It was not their first raid. It would not have been their last, except that night, something shifted. Marsha P. Johnson was there.

A Black transgender woman, an activist, a fixture of the Village who had been unhoused, overlooked, and criminalized for most of her adult life, Marsha did not go quietly. The precise details of that night have been debated by historians. Who threw the first punch, who threw the first bottle, who drew the line in the concrete and said not tonight. What is not debated is this: Marsha P. Johnson was a central figure in the resistance that erupted at Stonewall, and she remained a tireless force for LGBTQ+ liberation until her death in 1992. She co-founded STAR, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, with her beloved Sylvia Rivera, creating housing and community for young queer and trans people of color who had nowhere else to go. She literally gave everything she could and had.

However, Marsha P. Johnson died before she ever had the chance to build a legal foundation. No will. No estate plan. No legal protections designating who could speak for her, who could make decisions about her body, her belongings, her legacy. Her untimely death robbed her of the opportunity to put those protections in place, and the system that had criminalized her in life showed no urgency to protect her in death. When her body was found in the Hudson River in July 1992, her death was initially ruled a suicide, a conclusion her community refused to accept, and one that has since been reopened. The point is not only what happened to her. The point is what happened after her: the silence, the dismissal, the absence of any legal architecture that might have demanded more answers, protected her dignity, or preserved her voice. Marsha P. Johnson fought to be seen in life. And the law still found ways to make her invisible in death.

Ramadan has already begun, and for Black, Muslim LGBTQ+ people observing this sacred season, the themes of reflection, community, and covenant feel especially present right now. This moment, sitting at the intersection of Black history and spiritual intention, feels like exactly the right time to talk about something that the LGBTQ+ community, especially Black and transgender members, has been told, implicitly and explicitly, is not meant for them.

We know what the phrase "Estate Planning" conjures. Wealth. Whiteness. Marble lobbies and leather-bound binders. Families who have had generations to accumulate assets, legal literacy, and the assumption that the law would protect them. For many Black LGBTQ+ people, and particularly for Black transgender individuals, the legal system has not historically been a place of protection. It has been a place of surveillance, of violence, of erasure. Why would you build a plan around institutions that were built to exclude you?

Because Marsha P. Johnson deserved better. And so do you.

Photo Credit: Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, ca. 1989-1990. The Rudy Grillo Collection, Rudy Grillo / LGBT Community Center Archive. Article Citation: Morgan Artyukhina. 13 Oct 2020. "Our armies are rising! - a brief history of Sylvia Rivera & Marsha P. Johnson." PSL Liberation School.

Estate planning, at its core, is not about wealth. It is about voice. It is about ensuring that when you are not in the room, whether because you are ill, incapacitated, or gone, the people and values you love are protected by something more durable than hope.

For Black LGBTQ+ individuals and families, this is not abstract. It is urgent. Without a healthcare directive, a hospital can defer to biological family members who may not affirm your identity, your relationships, or your wishes. Without a durable power of attorney, a partner of twenty years can be legally invisible at the moment they matter most. Without a will, chosen family, the people who showed up for you when blood family did not, may receive nothing. Without legal name and gender marker documents in order, your identity can be misrepresented in death in ways that dishonor everything you lived.

These are not edge cases. These are realities that Black trans people, in particular, face with painful frequency. The legal system defaults to biological family, to binary gender, to documents that may not reflect who you are. Estate planning is how you override those defaults. It is how you write your own story into the legal record before someone else gets to write it for you.

There is something Marsha understood that the law has been slow to learn: that chosen family is real family. That community is a form of kinship. That the people who love you, who fed you, housed you, fought beside you, have a claim on your legacy that should be honored.

STAR House was not a legal entity. It was love in the shape of a building. Marsha and Sylvia could not have predicted the legal battles their communities would still be fighting decades later. But we can honor what they built by doing the work they didn't have access to. By creating the protections they were denied.

This is not about having a lot. This is about protecting what you have, deciding who gets to speak for you, and ensuring that your identity, your full, true, beautiful identity, is the one on record. If you are Black, if you are LGBTQ+, if you are trans, if you are Muslim navigating this sacred season of Ramadan, you are not an afterthought here. You are exactly who this work is for. We are a firm that believes estate planning is a civil rights issue. We believe that legal protection should be accessible to everyone who has fought for their right to exist. We believe Marsha P. Johnson's legacy deserves more than a mural and a documentary. It deserves a legal framework, for every person who carries forward the world she helped create. She fought for your right to live openly. Let's make sure the law protects that life, and honors it long after you are gone.

Ready to start the conversation? Schedule a free, affirming consultation. We see you. We're ready to help. Give us a call at 815-420-8261 or visit www.MertzenichLaw.com

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