Cleve Jones, a longtime San Francisco gay rights activist, had helped organize the city's annual candlelight march honoring Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, who were assassinated on November 27, 1978. While planning the November 1985 march, he learned that more than 1,000 San Franciscans had died of AIDS. Marchers carried placards bearing the names of people lost to the disease, and at the end of the march Jones and others stood on ladders and taped them to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. To Jones, the wall of names looked like a patchwork quilt.

A little over a year later, he made the first panel of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, in memory of his friend Marvin Feldman. In June 1987 Jones, Mike Smith and others formally organized the NAMES Project Foundation, and people began sending panels from across the country. On October 11, 1987, during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the Quilt was displayed for…