This Thanksgiving Day, at 10:55 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, it will be 30 years since a bullet exploded in Harvey Milk’s brain, killing him.

It was fired from the gun of Dan White, an ex-cop who’d gone to Milk’s City Hall office after killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, who had refused to re-appoint White to the Board of Supervisors from which he’d recently resigned.

Harvey Milk was San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor, swept into power in the same neighborhood revolution that gave White his victory in 1978. It was Milk’s fourth run for office, and the first successful one, although he was the recognized leader of San Francisco’s large and growing gay population.

Milk was a newcomer to politics. He’d blown into town when he was in his 40s and disrupted the existing gay power structure with his in-your-face grassroots activism and refusal to cower and apologize for being gay.

His watchword was “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” and he used tactics those who recently watched Barack Obama’s campaign would easily recognize: register voters, get out the vote, organize relentlessly, empower your volunteers and supporters, and spread a message of hope. He became an acknowledged power broker, and many observers believed he was on track to being the nation’s first openly gay mayor.

But just as it was violence and police brutality at New York City’s Stonewall Inn a decade before that had given birth to the modern gay rights movement, it was violence and police brutality that marked the end of its first wave. Dan White was convicted of nothing more than second degree manslaughter for the killing of Milk and Moscone. (White later gave himself a harsher sentence, and took his own life after being released from prison.)

The gay community came together in fierce sorrow after Milk was killed, with a miles-long peaceful candlelight vigil stretching from the Castro district to City Hall.

But it erupted in rage at White’s sentence, burning a dozen police cars and the basement of City Hall in what became known as the “White Night Riot.” The police retaliated the next night, hiding their badges while beating patrons during a raid of the Elephant Walk, an upscale gay bar in the Castro.

Next page: “Harvey Milk lives!”