Tag: peaceful protests
Is Trump Our New Vietnam?

Is Trump Our New Vietnam?

Reprinted with permission from the Washington Spectator. 

On October 15, 1969, more than two million people in dozens of cities across the United States participated in a day of marches, vigils, and teach-ins against the Vietnam War. The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam was the largest nationwide protest in U.S. history at the time, and it signaled to President Nixon that the anti-war movement had mainstream support and could no longer be considered a marginal movement of a few thousand radicals and hippies.

Forty-eight years later, as 3.3 million women marched last Saturday in 500 locations nation-wide, including unlikely places like Roanoke, Virginia and Omaha, Nebraska, I couldn’t help but compare the 2017 Women’s March on Washington to the 1969 Moratorium. Like the Moratorium, the numbers of Women’s March participants far exceeded expectations, and protests took place in regions of our country that rarely host left-leaning political demonstrations.

The 1969 Moratorium took two months to plan with ol’ fashioned communication tools like telephone trees, mass mailings, and newspaper advertisements. With the help of social media, the Women’s March went viral. The Moratorium’s big turnout in red states and with people of all ages and economic backgrounds suggested to the Nixon administration that it had a growing mass movement to contend with. Nixon spent most of late 1969 and 1970 cowering inside the White House, pretending to watch football on TV, while chanting, sign-waving protesters heckled him from outside the White House fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. By May of 1970, following the Kent State shootings, protests in Washington, D.C., had grown so large and angry that the 82nd Airborne was deployed inside the Executive Office Building, and hundreds of school buses literally barricaded the White House grounds. “If you didn’t experience it back then, you would have no idea how close we were, as a country, to revolution,” Nixon aide Stephen Bull told me.

At the end of last week’s Women’s March, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children wearing knitted pink pussy (cat) hats exited the Mall and poured up 15th Street, next to the Treasury Building and just one block from the East Wing of the White House, chanting at the top of their lungs, “Hey Ho, Hey Ho Donald Trump has got to go!” I wondered, could Trump and the White House staff hear these mocking chants? Could they see the colorful “Free Melania,” “Lock him up,” and “Women’s rights are human rights” signs waving in the distance at the edge of the Ellipse? Only 24 hours after his swearing-in, the 45th president was publicly pilloried in Nixon-era-like protests. As one veteran 60s agitator predicted after spending the day at the march in Washington, “Trump is our new Vietnam.”

I don’t think anyone under 65 could have imagined how moving it would be to be part of a huge crowd of people uniting against a common foe. Born in 1963, I had only read and written about what it felt like to be part of a movement. Not until I was swept up in the jubilant, peaceful, purposeful crowd on the Mall on January 20 did I discover how empowering it is to share political opinions with hundreds of thousands of complete strangers and be a bit player in participatory democracy.

“It was fantastic and inspiring and it made us feel like this is the beginning of the resistance,” veteran activist and organizer Heather Booth told me at the Women’s March. “If people find the way to refocus this energy, it can be the beginning of people rising up.” Sam Brown, one of the four members of the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium Committee, told me that marching in Key West, Florida “was the first moment of uplift I felt since I crawled under the covers and hid my head on November 8.”

All of the former 60s movement leaders whom I spoke to agreed that today’s protesters need to learn from the successes and mistakes of their predecessors. “The New Left forgot power, or we thought that power was going to fall into place somehow automatically,” former SDS and Weather Underground leader Mark Rudd told me. “We thought the liberals would take power and we would be to the left of them. But that’s not what happened. What happened was a far-right reaction took place. . . .”

Rudd acknowledges that the backlash from the Republican right was in part a reaction to how violent and ideologically extreme some parts of the antiwar left, like the Weather Underground, had become. Today Rudd is trying to build movements, not bombs. “We need to build mass movements around specific issues—global warming, income inequality, women’s reproductive rights, etcetera, and use the power of the mass movements to overwhelm and transform the Democratic Party into a party of the people. Here in Albuquerque we’re organizing like little bunnies.”

“This was just one demonstration. But we make progress when we organize when times are the most difficult,” said Booth, who was a young activist during the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. “That’s when you expose what the opposition is really doing. The three things we need to do next is focus on unity and standing with those who have come under the greatest fire, hold Trump accountable to what he has said and expose his lies, and organize deeply for the long haul, both in communities of color as well as the white working-class. Unity, accountability, and organizing.”

The problem with taking the time to organize locally (as the Tea Party did) by electing Democrats to school boards, city councils, state legislatures, governors, is it will take years to put into place. “I think the incrementalism of it is not adequate to the challenge,” Sam Brown told me. “We need a national movement, but one sufficiently rooted in non-urban areas that we can change the tide more quickly. But a sense of urgency is not a substitute for a thoughtful strategy. I am reminded that in 1969 we, people from the anti-war movement, spent months focusing on the most effective way to reach middle America and involve them locally.” Brown is hoping that someone on the front lines of the Trump resistance will discover how to include and engage people in middle America the way he and his Clean for Gene colleagues did in October, 1969. “In the meantime, I will keep focused on the things I can do, and listening for that thoughtful idea that we can all follow.”

Clara Bingham is the author of Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul (Random House, 2016). You can read an excerpt of that book here.

IMAGE: Demonstrators yell slogans during anti-Donald Trump travel ban protests outside Philadelphia International Airport in Philadelphia. REUTERS/Charles Mostoller

What Do We Tell Our Children?

What Do We Tell Our Children?

Twenty-six hours has passed since I led a discussion with about 100 women of the Sisterhood at B’nai Jeshurun Congregation on the east side of Cleveland.

Twenty-six hours later and I am still thinking about the question from a woman whose 10-year-old nephew wanted to know whether his friends could be deported.

He is Jewish, and one of his friends is black. He apparently worries that too many will see him as “the other” — which is true only if one thinks an American must not only be born here but also be white and so-called Christian. I qualify that claim to Christianity because I am bone-weary of people who profess to share my faith, but wield God and their Bibles as weapons of mass destruction. Their intolerance bears no resemblance to the God I know.

This is not the first time I’ve been asked in recent weeks by a stranger what we should tell our children in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

My habit, when I meet someone for the first time, is to shake hands and say, “Tell me about yourself.” In the past, people usually told me what they do. In recent weeks, they are more likely to tell me how they feel. They are worried. They are scared. Women, in particular, voice concern about the children in their lives, for the most obvious of reasons.

Trump has been behaving, in word and deed, in ways that most of us raise our children to understand are unacceptable.

We do not lie.

We do not bully.

We do not hate.

When I wrote about this concern during the presidential campaign, some readers insisted that if we’re worried about the tender souls of our children and grandchildren, the solution is obvious: Don’t let them watch TV.

It’s not that easy to protect children from the world around us. The grown-ups talk. Tabloids fill stands at checkout counters. Televisions blast cable news in waiting rooms and airports across the country.

I wrote a few months ago about walking through the Miami airport with my 8-year-old grandson. I lost sight of him just long enough — seconds, not minutes — for him to stop in front of a television screen broadcasting a series of Trump’s most egregious moments, including his racist comments about Mexicans.

My grandson lives in a U.S. territory. His life is full of children who do not look like him, but are his closest friends. He stared at the screen, his eyes narrowing as he watched. I coaxed him away, but we spent the next hour surrounded by people who did not look like us as we waited for his flight and talked through his questions.

Why, he wanted to know, would that man run for president? Why would he say such awful things about people he doesn’t even know?

At one point, I told him, “This is why it’s so important that this man not become our president.”

Oh well.

Twenty-six hours ago, I answered that woman’s question as best I could. We must assure the children of our country that there’s no such thing as one kind of American — and we have the photos to prove it. Show them pictures of the millions of women and the men who love them who marched in Washington and in cities around the country the day after the inauguration. Show them images of the diverse group of Americans protesting at airports across the U.S. last weekend in support of immigrants and refugees.

Even as I spoke, I could see the woman’s kind face clouding. I needed no explanation for her response. Her expression said it all: How can this be? How can this, all of it — the lies, the bullying, the targeting of innocent people — be happening in the United States of America?

How do we explain this to our children?

Well, we tell them what we’ve always told them.

We do not lie.

We do not bully.

We do not hate.

Because we are Americans, and this is our country to save.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including  “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate.

IMAGE: Kona Burton, age 5, Maile Burton, age 7, and Keilani Burton, 9, (L-R) from Midway, Utah, hold their signs during a protest against new U.S. President Donald Trump during the Sundance Film Festival, in solidarity with the Women’s March protests being held around the world, in Park City, Utah, U.S. January 21, 2017. REUTERS/Piya Sinha-Roy

Ferguson Activists Change Tactics, Targets

Ferguson Activists Change Tactics, Targets

By Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times

FERGUSON, Mo. — Fulfilling a promise he made to hundreds of activists the night before, Cornel West on Monday did exactly what he came to Ferguson to do: got arrested.
The activist and academic was among a crowd of dozens of clergy and other demonstrators who descended on the Ferguson police station Monday to protest the Aug. 9 police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, as well as the deaths of other black men across the U.S.
West, locking arms with several clergy from various denominations, marched toward a line of police in riot gear protecting the police station. They requested a meeting with Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson, and then stepped forward into a line of officers who refused to budge.
After West and the other clergy were arrested, another line of clergy peacefully stepped forward and provoked their own arrests. By Monday afternoon, St. Louis County police said 48 demonstrators had been arrested at the police station and six had been arrested for sitting in a nearby intersection.
The Monday demonstration was among an array of scheduled protests in Ferguson and St. Louis called “Ferguson October,” which drew hundreds of activists from St. Louis and around the country. Other protests were held at a mall and at St. Louis City Hall, where at least one young man with a banner was arrested. Protesters converged on a Wal-Mart to acknowledge the August police shooting of John Crawford III at an Ohio store. And they showed up at a political fundraiser.
Earlier, crowds marched through the streets of St. Louis after midnight and occupied the campus of St. Louis University.
Joining the early-morning protest were the parents of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers, who was shot and killed by an off-duty St. Louis police officer last week in the nearby neighborhood of Shaw. Myers’ family has said he was unarmed; police said they recovered a gun at the scene and three bullets Myers had fired at the officer, prompting 17 rounds of return fire.
No arrests were reported for the SLU protest, which drew some students from out of their dorms.
“The protesters were peaceful and did not cause any injuries or damage,” said university President Fred P. Pestello. “In consultation with St. Louis Police and our Department of Public Safety, it was our decision to not escalate the situation with any confrontation, especially since the protest was nonviolent.”
The protest movement that has emerged since Brown’s death in Ferguson has become more organized and diversified in its tactics and targets. Demonstrators have protested outside St. Louis Cardinals games, sometimes prompting ugly responses from fans; they have also unfurled a banner in a concert hall during a St. Louis Symphony Orchestra performance. Some protesters have angrily cursed officers to their faces, others have prayed before lines of club-bearing police.
“The movement has matured. We are different protesters than in August,” said DeRay McKesson, 29, an activist from Minneapolis who travels to Ferguson for demonstrations.
In August, he said, the protests had emerged organically, fed by anger and a sense of injustice. “Now, it’s all of those, plus strategy,” McKesson said.
A generational fissure between young demonstrators and the older protest establishment broke open Sunday night, when a crowd of hundreds interrupted a rally of older speakers and heckled the president of the NAACP. Young speakers then came to the stage and spoke of a need for people in the streets, rather than platitudes.
From that viewpoint, Monday morning’s clergy protest could be viewed as a nexus between calls for street action and America’s tradition of civil disobedience.
Some pastors’ suits and frocks were drenched with rain as they sang “Wade in the Water,” an old spiritual. Where younger demonstrators had previously been stopped by a wall of riot police, the clergy marched deep into the Ferguson Police Department’s parking lot, sparking a few moments of confusion as some officers failed to stop them.
“We’re standing against the criminalization of young black men … and we believe as people of faith that our faith is supposed to look like something in public,” said Rev. Ben McBride, 37, of Oakland, Calif., after lining up with other clergy to force their own arrests.
Asked about the criticism from the youth the night before, McBride said, “The reality is, our young people are expressing some justified frustration with the faith community, with the world, with the status quo, so we’re here in solidarity. … It is a new movement, it is a new day, and we are not going to hold our young people back.”
Elle Dowd, 26, a youth missionary for the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri, was among those arrested outside the police station, tweeting a “selfie” of her handcuffs.
Over Twitter, she told the Los Angeles Times that she was “here out of a deep love for both Black youth and police officers. We all deserve a better system aschildrenofgod (sic). Black lives matter. We stand (with you) & won’t stop til it’s better. We love you.”
When given the goodbye commonly shared during demonstrations in Ferguson — “stay safe” — Dowd responded, while still under arrest, “God doesn’t always call us to safety. God calls us to faithfulness.”

Photo via Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT

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