ACT UP blocks Wall Street
Twelve days after it was founded, ACT UP blocked Wall Street. An action that changed AIDS policy.
On 24 March 1987, around two hundred and fifty activists brought morning traffic in Lower Manhattan to a standstill. At the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway, right next to Trinity Church, they lay down in the road, held up placards and chanted slogans. It was the very first action of a group founded only twelve days earlier: ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.
The impetus had come from the writer Larry Kramer. In an angry speech at New York's Lesbian and Gay Community Center, he had denounced the indifference of government and society. AIDS had been raging for more than five years, thousands had already died, and hardly anyone seemed to feel responsible. Two days after the speech, ACT UP was born.
The choice of location was no coincidence. The protest was aimed at the pharmaceutical industry, above all at Burroughs Wellcome, the manufacturer of AZT. At the time, the drug was the only approved treatment for AIDS and simply unaffordable for many of those affected. Also in the firing line was the Food and Drug Administration, whose approval procedures dragged on for years. Time that people with HIV did not have. An effigy of the top FDA official dangled from the front of the church.
The police arrested seventeen people. But the pressure worked: shortly afterwards, the FDA announced that it would shorten its approval process by two years.
Exactly one year later, ACT UP returned to Wall Street, this time with more than a thousand people. The group grew rapidly, found imitators in many countries and, with the slogan "Silence = Death", shaped a whole generation. Its principle of non-violent, deliberately spectacular action changed not only AIDS policy but queer activism far beyond the United States.