"Rush Hour Protest Causes Gridlock," reported the New York Times on April 26, 1995, detailing the ways hundreds blocked two bridges and two tunnels into Manhattan, in a coordinated protest over the Pataki and Guiliani state and city budgets. March and April of 1995 were galvanizing times in New York City activist circles. Suzy Subways and Ester Kaplan, Ron Hayduk and Jed Brandt reflect on struggles against New York's turn toward austerity and the ways regular people used their bodies to help blunt the rough edges of this trend. Veterans from the Young Lords to ACT UP joined the actions. Charles King, of Housing Works, helped coordinate people with disabilities using their bodies, out of wheels chairs, to block the bridges. It was an extraordinary time.
"March 23, 2015 marks 20 years since the CUNY Coalition Against the Cuts’ legendary “Shut the City Down” protest in 1995, which saw an estimated 25,000 young people pack City Hall Park and get attacked by Giuliani’s police force while attempting to march on Wall Street. Sixty people were arrested. In these interviews conducted by Amaka Okechukwu and myself, organizers talk about that day, how they made it happen, what they were up against, what they might have done differently, and what it meant to them. As a participant as well as an interviewer, I’ve decided to step back and share the perspectives of other participants, using their first names, because—well, we go back a long time," writes Subways. For more see her long essay.
Yet, the March 23, 1995 action that Spring. My friend Jed Brand, featured in the article above, recalled the period.
"Fall of 1994, and especially Winter and Spring of 1995 were filled
with mass meetings, mobilizations and actions. Days of rage, days of hope. Many were formed, some existing organizations
came together, many found new friends and comrades.
I was a student at the CUNY Graduate Center but working full time
for the City of New York as the Coordinator of the Voter Assistance Commission.
I was part of the organizing group that helped shut down 4 bridges and tunnels
on 4/25 in 1994, which Ester Kaplan so powerfully documented in From Act Up to
the WTO (see below). In 1994, Richie Perez
articulated a vision of a multiracial series of actions during a gathering of
nearly over 800 activists who came to hear bell hooks and Cornell West talk
about “Breaking Bread,” the title of their co-authored book. Richie’s radical imagination was realized on
that glorious day in April 1995, which came after other magnificent actions in
March, February and before.
What led to these days of rage and mobilizations for hope? Previous years of organizing coupled with
immediate threats in the form of menacing budget cuts wielded by newly elected
right-wing Republicans, who displaced “progressive” (or at least “liberal”
Democrats—Mario Cuomo in state house and David Dinkins in Gracie Mansion).
In early 1994, just after his inauguration as Governor, George Pataki, introduced a
slash and burn budget, aimed at undermining the public sector in general and
NYC in particular. Pataki claimed this had
to be done to fill hidden budget deficits from the Cuomo administration. Pataki imposed a mass cut in state funding,
which especially targeted students a SUNY and CUNY. In 1995, Pataki proposed a massive increase in
student tuition—and New York State enacted—a reduction to the maximum award
financial aid (TAP) for public university students to 90 percent of tuition.
At the same time, Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani had also proposed a cut in city funding to CUNY community
colleges.
CUNY Chancellor
Ann Reynolds declared a financial emergency. CUNY's budget crisis would be
resolved twice by retrenchment and raising tuition.
Double
whammy. A huge hit. In a public university
system where a large percentage of the student body was official poor (something
link 40% came from households making less than $20,000 per year), this meant
denial of this public good and relegation to lower social orders. The escalator to opportunity, the path to the
Promised Land that CUNY offered was to be closed to tens of thousands, and they
and their friends and families knew it. So
did kids in the NYC public high schools who were headed to CUNY, and their
family, friends, and teachers.
Over the next
months, CUNY students (and High school students and faculty) protested,
occupying campuses and demonstrating in Albany and at City Hall, closing the
Brooklyn Bridge. They were joined by a number of civil rights
organizations and activists, ACT UP, progressive unions, and others engaged in
social justice work.
Many meetings at CUNY campuses, offices of CSS, 1199, CAAV…. other
orgs……people’s homes, so many places. Eating,
some drinking, much poster making, strategizing, and especially action
planning. So many new friends were made,
experiences shared, creation, bonding.
Glorious, smart, and effective actions.
Multiracial politics were in the mix and in the air, in some
quarters. We got some good media; some
progressive elected officials joined us to help give us voice. Some got arrested with us.
In the end, the proposed tuition increases were scaled back; some of the
cuts were restored.
But NY State
aid to CUNY declined from $732.8 million for the 1994-95 academic year to
$608.1 million for 1996-97. That’s a
huge hit. We have not recovered fully,
yet.
Then CUNY Chancellor Ann Reynolds
was quoted in the NY Times, saying: “When the City University raised tuition by
$750 in 1995 and New York State cut financial aid, the university saw a sudden
drop in undergraduates: 138,000 students enrolled at its four-year colleges,
4,500 fewer than the previous year and about 6,500 fewer than projected. I am convinced that the reason was simply
financial... Students
needed to have much more cash on the barrel. I am convinced that we are denying
opportunity for poor students to go to college.''
A 1995 lawsuit by the PSC
and the UFS won partial restoration of the Pataki cuts, but the Board of
Trustees declared a financial emergency for the senior colleges and proceeded
with retrenchment. The BOT passed 37 policy resolutions to reorganize CUNY for
fiscal purposes. The PSC and UFS went to court to challenge some of the
proposals, which attempted to change admissions and curriculum.
La lucha
continua……
Many of the
throngs involved in these actions—and touched by them—have gone on to engage in
the myriad other campaigns and actions that have made NYC activism famous and
fun over the years, or have gone on to other places to do similar agitating. And the stories live.
Someone should
tell the stories about students and faculty taking over 11 CUNY campuses in
protest of Cuomo’s proposed budget cuts/tuition increases in 1990. We all walked out without being arrested,
charged with anything, and in some cases, we got an office and phone to continue
to organize. Which of course, contributed to the days of
rage in 1995. "
Today, Haduk, now a professor Queens College, is still involved in the fight for equitable education for all, as a member of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress. On World AIDS Day, December of 1999, Hayduk and this writer starting drafting a call for a collection of papers about the galvanized rounds of protests taking place during the era. One of the first papers Hayduk called for was by Ester Kaplan, recalling the legendary "Bridges and Tunnels" action of April 1995. The following is her report as published in From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest And Community-Building in the Era of Globalization Edited by Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk.
Today, Haduk, now a professor Queens College, is still involved in the fight for equitable education for all, as a member of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress. On World AIDS Day, December of 1999, Hayduk and this writer starting drafting a call for a collection of papers about the galvanized rounds of protests taking place during the era. One of the first papers Hayduk called for was by Ester Kaplan, recalling the legendary "Bridges and Tunnels" action of April 1995. The following is her report as published in From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest And Community-Building in the Era of Globalization Edited by Benjamin Shepard and Ronald Hayduk.
This City Is Ours
At 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 25, 1995, in New York City, a little
over a year into Rudy Giuliani's tenure as mayor and just five months into the
Gingrich Revolution, hundreds of homeless activists marched across the Brooklyn
Bridge for a rally at City Hall. As they neared the Manhattan-side ramp,
twenty-five activists peeled off to block the bridge just as rush hour
commuters headed their way. One of the activists, Lisa Daugaard, gleefully
recalls that when police moved in to cuff them, a message came in over one
officer's scanner. "Battery Tunnel??" she heard him say.
At that very moment, right across
town, sixty City University of New York (CUNY) students had departed from
another rally to block cars as they headed for that exit from Manhattan. A
little farther uptown, twenty-five police-brutality activists dashed from a
Chinatown movie house to seal off the Manhattan Bridge, the final artery to
Brooklyn. And in Midtown, when a traffic light turned, seventy-five AIDS and
disability activists, myself among them, briskly walked and wheeled our way
deep into the entranceway of the Queens Midtown Tunnel for a traffic-stopping
die-in. What The Village Voice dubbed the Rush Hour Revolt ultimately involved more
than 2,000 demonstrators, four rallies and 185 planned arrests.[1]
In fourteen years of activism, I've never been part of anything quite like it.
The action may be a faded chapter
of '90s activist history by now, but what might today be referred to as
"A25" is an early echo of the structure and style of the new direct
action movement--interesting both for its strong parallels and for its distinct
approach to some of the problems that plague the current movement. A25 was a
large, multi-site, multi-issue action almost five years before the Battle in
Seattle. It was a mass civil disobedience action at a time when no one but ACT
UP had used that tactic in years. And it was a brash display of political
unity--with majority participation by people of color--at a time when city
progressives had never felt more divided.
A divided city
We all sensed that a storm was
coming when Giuliani made cracking down on the city's "squeegee men"
a centerpiece of his campaign for mayor. But we didn't realize how quickly. In
his first week in office in January 1994, the former prosecutor, saying that windshield-wiping
entrepreneurs "filled New Yorkers with dread," sent police officers
out to round up and arrest them all. Two weeks later, the city posted signs in
subway cars, urging riders not to give out pocket change to panhandlers, and arrests
of the poor multiplied underground. Brutal sweeps of out-of-the-way homeless
encampments followed, where the unhoused had their shelter and belongings
bulldozed before being treated to three nights in jail. By March, the crackdown
had extended to public urinators and marijuana tokers, and by April to the
city's mostly immigrant squad of food vendors.
The deluge began in mid-February,
when the mayor announced that he would sell off several of the city's public
hospitals to private bidders and that he planned to eliminate the city's
Division of AIDS Services as well. And it simply didn't let up. In early May,
he proposed a city budget splattered with massive cutbacks to the public
schools, public universities, and youth services; in October he pushed a
package of midterm cuts that threatened to eliminate soup kitchens across the
city. By year's end, police brutality complaints had risen by 38 percent.
For activists, it was chaos.
Looking back through my datebook from that year, I notice that in the space of
a few months I appeared in court on disorderly conduct charges for an evening
of staged squeegeeing; offered childcare for a day-long teach-in on the
Division of AIDS Services; pulled a midnight shift as an observer at Penn
Station, where reports of police beatings of the homeless were most severe;
joined a demonstration protesting proposed tuition hikes at CUNY, and, like
every other activist in the city, it seemed, went to meeting after meeting
after meeting. Countless community coalitions sprang up--Youth Agenda to oppose
the youth services cutbacks, the Harlem Coalition to Save Our Health Care to
fight hospital privatization--each one a piecemeal attempt to limit the
destruction.
During the
course of that year, there were a few victories. Faced down by ACT UP and other
AIDS activists, the mayor backed down on his threat to eliminate the city's
AIDS division. The Board of Education and the United Federation of Teachers
staved off a portion of the public school cuts. The health care union, 1199,
along with local community activists, saved Harlem and Bronx public hospitals
from the auction block. But it was a zero-sum game: If you won, someone else
lost, and privately, AIDS activists agonized that their victory came at the
price of youth centers across the city shutting their doors.
Many advocates were struggling
to find a way out of the bind, and some came together to form broad, citywide
umbrella organizations, most notably the Same Boat Coalition, composed heavily
of social service providers under the budget knife, and Breaking Bread,
composed mostly of left-wing academics and community activists, including
myself. But with unions and nonprofits locked in struggles that could mean the
death of institutions, Same Boat could rarely turn out more than one hundred
demonstrators for the rallies they planned--and ended up functioning best as a
pre-email information exchange. And while Breaking Bread did pull out about
eight hundred people for a forum on social change with Bell Hooks and Cornel
West in June 1994, only one hundred showed up four weeks later for a follow-up
strategy session, and that coalition soon closed shop.
The most significant things to
come out of Breaking Bread were a few relationships among members of its
racially and politically diverse steering committee, and a comment made by one
of them, National Congress of Puerto Rican Rights chair Richard Perez, as he
moderated that Hooks-West dialogue. He said, "I can imagine a time when
we'd have a level of unity where we could close down bridges and highways
around the city and stop business as usual! And we could do this without having
to form a single organization." It was an image of intense political
coordination that went way past the dominant, but ineffective, coalition model
of the time.
A week, two
weeks, three months later, and the image was still rattling around in our
heads. Really, when you think about it, why not?
In early November, Daugaard and
I (she a founder of the homeless advocacy group StreetWatch; me a longtime ACT
UPer), nervously called up Perez and asked to meet about something we'd rather
not discuss on the phone. The former Young Lord didn't ask any questions, but
invited us over to his office the next afternoon. "Do you remember what
you said back in July about all those bridges?" we asked. "What do
you think about giving it a try?"
Our first
A25 planning meeting took place two weeks later in a noisy restaurant with
about eight others. The meeting was contentious, even jittery, but almost
everyone left ready to try what was then almost unthinkable.
Total coordination
and total autonomy
William Broberg, a coordinator of
the student arm of A25, now works as an attorney in Seattle--he was the one who
finally got the WTO protesters there out of jail. Our post-Seattle conversations
were my first exposure to the political structure behind these multifocal
protests--the use of "spokescouncil" meetings to link independent
acts of civil disobedience. Though our approach to organizing A25 was quite
different from this Seattle model, the basic premise--balancing unity and
autonomy--felt extremely familiar.
Our goals for A25 were
ambitious--to directly confront the disunity among New York City's activist
communities and escalate the seriousness of the resistance--but our proposal
was elegant in its simplicity: plan a militant, coordinated action that allowed
maximum autonomy for each organization involved.
In the late
'80s and early '90s, with labor in a deep slumber, most active organizations
were community-based (Harlem, Bed-Stuy), identity-based (Haitians, African
Americans, lesbians), or issue-based (abortion, AIDS), and it was common to
hear complaints about the "balkanization" of the left--in fact, by a
few of the same people who are so taken by the current antiglobalization movement.
Those of us who were building A25 were not among the bashers. We respected, and
participated, in organizations like these--they'd been extremely effective at
bringing our communities' issues into the public consciousness, whether AIDS
discrimination or Puerto Rican independence--even as we wanted to push our own
comrades to consider the potential for collective power on a grand scale. We
also knew that part of what limited the effectiveness of coalitions like
Breaking Bread was that none of us could really imagine a single organization
that everyone could trust.
Our
coordinating committee was not composed, as in the standard coalition model, of
organizational representatives who changed from week to week. It was made up of
specific individuals. To pull off our concept, we needed to bring in seasoned
activists who had strong credibility within their community--enough credibility
to bring in their organization without giving out all the information.
"Key to our success was everyone in the room had a constituency,"
says Perez. "We weren't six people who could mobilize twelve people."
And they each had to be people who could work comfortably in an egalitarian,
collective body. "The careful and intentional pace at which we expanded was
very important to me," says Thoai Nguyen, then an organizer with the
Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV). "The importance placed on
tactics and political principles over numbers was key."
Over time,
we made a handful of agreements, each with a specific goal in mind. Each civil
disobedience (CD) site would have an above-board rally to accompany it, to
allow us to create buzz about the day of action without exposing our real
plans. To minimize the risk of an injunction, no one but coordinating committee
members would know any information about the other actions. We'd create a
single common mission statement--subject to review by the planners of each
action--that would be distributed on the flip side of each site's issue-based
statement or fact sheet. We'd design a common press strategy, to guard against
one "hot" action drawing all the attention--a strategy we implemented
by offering the story to reporters on the condition that they cover every site.
(That's why the New York Times had
four photographers and four reporters on the story.) And that was it.
Beyond that, each team planning an
action was on its own: Did they want to define the action by community, such as
the South Bronx, or by issue, such as police brutality? Did they want the
Brooklyn Bridge or Battery Tunnel? Did they want to keep logistics secret from
their recruits, or trust each CDer to keep it on the down low? Their call.
We were
searching for a form of unity that could lay the groundwork for taking control
of the city back from Giuliani and the forces of reaction he represented, but
which would ask communities to sacrifice as little autonomy as possible.
On the
coordinating committee, we asked much more of each other. No faxes, no e-mails,
almost nothing in writing at all: every bit of outreach was one-on-one,
face-to-face, and our meetings were long, intense, and frequent. At each
successive meeting, if there was even one new person, we talked through and
refined the politics and strategy of the action again--and again. "I
thought its simplicity was its best feature," says Nguyen. "We worked
closely and held each other accountable for successes and failures, and we
didn't rely on clumsy structures like the spokescouncil or affinity
groups."
The color question
From the first thrilling news
footage that came out of Seattle, it was evident that, as Elizabeth Martinez
wrote in ColorLines, the great battle
was "overwhelmingly white."[2]
After Martinez opened up the debate within the movement, a handful of activists
began to respond, in small and large ways: the Mobilization for Global Justice
paid for buses for some mostly black ACT UPers from Philadelphia for April 16,
2000, in Washington; CAAAV joined with other activists to form Third Force, a
people of color contingent for A16 and the Republican National Convention in
Philadelphia; Nguyen and others organized trainings and teach-ins for people of
color from Philly and New York City interested in participating in the protest
at Republican National Convention (R2K). But many activists remain fairly cynical
about the rate of change.
In
contrast, race politics was fundamental to building April 25. It was, in part,
our shared frustration with the creeping whiteness of coalitions like Same Boat
that prompted us to explore this new model in the first place. In addition,
"We came out of AIDS, CUNY, police brutality, homelessness, hospitals, all
areas in which people of color were a tremendous component," recalls
Perez, who spoke on a post-R2K panel about people of color and CD. "No one
came out of an all-white milieu. Some of the antiglobalization activists are
coming out of an all-white world."
From the
outset, we talked openly about which communities were being hardest hit by the
Gingrich/Giuliani one-two punch, and which communities were engaged in active
resistance. We needed the Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn; we needed the unions,
the food vendors, the cabbies, and the homeless; we needed African Americans,
Haitians, Asians, and Latinos; we needed students, gay men, and lesbians. And
we strategized carefully about who we could reach out to in each world.
Our vetting
process consumed the first two and half months. Whenever the coordinating
committee met, we'd each suggest a name or two and then have a lengthy debate
about each person's ability to bring out a constituency, their political style,
and who was best suited to make the approach. Sectarians were out; narrow
nationalists, out; white activists without experience in multiracial
organizing, out. If anyone felt that a candidate wasn't trustworthy, she was
out. No one could come in unless everyone felt comfortable about them. I
remember one meeting where the name of a certain respected '60s generation
lawyer came up (we were toying with the idea of having an attorney present at
each meeting to thwart potential conspiracy charges) and I mentioned, almost as
an aside, that I'd noticed he couldn't listen to women. And that was it--his
name was tossed. I was a little stunned.
We had a
few notable failures. Though we successfully recruited several black leaders--Shakoor
Aljuwani of the Harlem Hospital Community Board, Brooklyn activist James
Steele, Harlem priest Father Luis Barrios, Sabine Albert of the Haitian Women's
Program--we never got full buy-in on the CD component from a black organization
(Sharpton's operation was a near miss). Ultimately, says Perez, "we didn't
find any militant organizations in the black community who bought into the
multiracial paradigm." We were equally conscious of trying to bring labor
in, and we approached nearly every prominent labor progressive in the city.
"When you look at where labor was then, it was extremely
underdeveloped," says Perez. "It still is." Still, labor did
join the legal rallies, and there was a strong African American presence at the
homeless and CUNY CD's.
In the end,
at planning meetings, there was a level of ease in the room. No one spoke out
of turn, in a sense: each of us was juggling a longstanding relationship with
our own organization, in my case, ACT UP, with our personal and political
commitment to making this unified action work. Losing credibility on either end
was a bit terrifying. I remember collapsing in tears one afternoon near the
end, when I thought my ACT UP comrades, experiencing a crisis of faith about
whether the other actions would come through, seemed on the verge of pulling
out. Or the painful moment when Aljuwani said he didn't think he could deliver
an action in Harlem—in great part because, late in the process, Harlem Hospital
was saved from privatization. In this kind of intense environment, there was no
room for posturing.
"I
felt a real and visible sense of racial, class, and gender unity with the other
members of the coordinating committee," Nguyen recalls, "whereas the
current movements think of those issues—especially race and class—as secondary,
if they think of them at all."
Discipline and trust
In early March, I was in
Philadelphia covering the trial of an old ACT UP comrade, Kate Sorensen, for POZ, the AIDS magazine where I now work.
She'd been slapped with a $1 million bail after her arrest at R2K, plus ten
felony conspiracy charges. (She ultimately stood trial for four.) Ten other
felony trials came out of that week of action, and Sorensen is convinced that
this is part of a national crackdown on activism. I suspect she's right, since
the evidence of interagency coordination is so strong. But still, I kept
wondering during the trial whether the loose structure of the direct action
movement--undoubtedly a huge part of its size and appeal--had contributed to
Sorensen standing trial for vandalism she'd had nothing to do with.
I asked Nguyen whether he'd had any
fears with A25 that participants would do something to put others at risk, such
as damaging property or physically confronting police. He said no, that he'd handpicked
almost everyone in the police brutality CD, and "held each of them
personally accountable to me, and vice versa. I also felt that the other
coordinating committee members had the same m.o., and I trusted their
confidence in the other participants."
April 25's direct action style came
from two main sources: the tightly controlled, highly planned CDs of ACT UP/New
York, whose members used to brag that the group, through hundreds of arrest
scenarios, had never lost a single person in the system, and the
security-conscious militancy of '70s-era radicals, like Perez, who'd
experienced Cointelpro firsthand in the Young Lords. Our legal team was tight and effective; we
already knew, from our experience with ACT UP, which precincts people would be
taken to, how many lawyers we'd need for this number of arrests, and what kind
of time commitment they'd have to make; how to run a 24/7 legal center until
arrestees were all released; and how to use pressure from local elected
officials--who we'd already lined up--to expedite arraignment.
Many of our recruits--the CUNY
students, young CAAAV members, homeless people--were fairly new to activism,
and had never done CD before, so we committed to training them well and
guaranteeing their safety. We created special segments of our CD trainings for
minors, undocumented immigrants, and people with previous convictions,
outlining clearly what the consequences might be and laying out important
alternative roles they could play in the actions.
One of my favorite entries in our
timeline for the action, adopted in early January was, "Week of action:
Injunctions and restraining orders arrive." As tight as our security was, we had
carefully built infiltration, and the possibility of conspiracy charges, into
the plan. Nguyen had been a student organizer in Indonesia, where breaches in
security could mean jail time or death; Perez's years in the Young Lords
weren't so far off; and Broberg and I had ourselves received an injunction a
few years before, while planning a CD to protest Rust v. Sullivan, a
Supreme Court decision restricting abortion funds (discussed in essay by Tracy
Morgan in Section Two). These experiences set the tone.
We set very narrow restrictions on
what any of us could reveal as we recruited for the coordinating committee. No
unconfirmed CD participant knew where any action would take place; for two of
the CDs, even the participants didn't know the locations until moments before.
"If you handle secrecy right, people don't have to feel disempowered,"
says Broberg. "We had a very democratic process about which pieces of the
tactical decisionmaking and information people were willing to relinquish
knowing."
One of our final agreements was to use jail
solidarity--that we would work together inside to assure everyone's prompt
release. But our approach was different than that of, say, at R2K, where
protesters all used noms de guerre and later fought every charge in court for
nearly a year. We all gave the basic required information--legal name and
permanent address only--and we agreed in court to accept ACDs (a kind of
conditional dismissal that implies guilt), choosing as a group not to stand on
ceremony so that we could be done with court and get back to our activist work.
At a time when police response to activism was at least a bit more predictable,
we made no major miscalculations of risk.
Speaking directly to
activists
With our action on April 25, says
Daugaard, "We targeted powerbrokers as a threat," but even more
importantly, "we targeted activists with a call to action."
This
emphasis is clear as I read back over our deeply moral joint statement,
"This City is Ours": "Every New Yorker is faced today with a
historical choice, because our city is facing a degree of devastation that few
of us have witnessed or expected in our lifetime," it read in part.
"Our political leaders want us to turn on each other: to blame teen
mothers for the budget crisis, to blame Asian, Latino or Caribbean immigrants
for unemployment, to blame homeless people and drug addicts for crime; to blame
people with AIDS and other illnesses and disabilities for the collapse of our
health care system; to blame youth of color for the failure of our educational
system. We are committed to resisting this pressure.... This year, as we take to
the streets together before Mayor Giuliani releases his proposed budget, we
refuse to fight each other for the same scraps from the budget table. Today we
refuse to give divisiveness and cruelty our blessing.... This city is ours, and
we do not want it left in ruins."
As an
effective challenge to the powers that be, our success was equivocal. Seven
years later, Newt Gingrich may be a distant memory, but Giuliani’s legacy,
Still, his legacy has been damaged. His repeated efforts to introduce
privatization into the public schools, whether through vouchers or for-profit
school management, have failed. We now know that he only managed to implement
his workfare program because of an election rigged by a now-disgraced municipal
election leader. And his crown jewel, the drop in crime, has been permanently
tarnished by horrendous incidents of police brutality on his watch, from
Anthony Baez to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo.
As a
challenge to activists, it is possible to see the ripples of the action still.
A25 cemented the relationship between CAAAV and the National Congress of Puerto
Rican Rights, who had never before closely collaborated. The two groups not
only went on to found the Coalition Against Police Brutality (CAPB), a people
of color organization that now includes the black nationalist Malcolm X
Grassroots Collective and the gay and lesbian Audre Lorde Project, but they
formed the basis of Third Force, the people of color contingent that
participated in A16 and R2K. The pressure exerted by the multiracial CAPB on Al
Sharpton's narrow nationalism has slowly had its effect, too. When police shot Amadou Diallo in early 1999,
the Reverend issued a call for two weeks of multiracial CD. A25 was a sort of
coming out party for SLAM!, the Hunter College-based Student Liberation Action
Movement, which filled out the ranks of the CUNY protest that day According to
Nguyen, SLAM! has become one of the few people of color-led organizations to do
more than critique the race politics of the direct action movement; "it has
taken on the responsibility to try to change it--despite a lot of resistance
and denial."
During the thirty or forty hours we all spent together at
Central Booking that spring in 1995, we experienced the kind of bonds that are
by now familiar to veterans of the antiglobalization protests. "For a
minute," Broberg recalls, "people gave themselves over to the vision
of 'we'--a 'we' that was a whole lot bigger than we'd ever felt before."
As Perez said to me recently, "It's important to create a tradition that
speaks to these politics--that it's impossible to fight for your community
without fighting homelessness and drug addiction; that it's impossible to fight
for liberation and not fight homophobia. We were looking for a teaching
experience, to show people what their power was." It wasn't a bad start.
***
This
article was shaped by conversations and email exchanges with Richard Perez,
chairman of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights; Thoai Nguyen, who is
organizing Roma youth in the Balkans; Lisa Daugaard, who is now directing a
project challenging racial bias by Seattle police; and William Broberg, a
Seattle attorney. Thanks to Andrew Hsiao, who covered A25 for The Village Voice, for sharing his tapes
from 1995 interviews.
[1] For coverage of the protest, see for example Andrew
Hsiao with Karen Houppert, "Birth of a Movement?" The Village Voice, 9 May, 1995; Jessie
Mangaliman and Rob Polner, "Budget Protest Traps Thousands," New York Newsday, 26 April, 1995; N. R.
Kleinfield, "Rush Hour Protest Causes Gridlock," New York Times, 26 April, 1995; Elinor Tatum, "New York Police
Break up Protest," Amsterdam News,
27 April, 1995.
[2] Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez, "Where Was the Color
in Seattle," ColorLines, Spring
2000. For another influential article on race in the direct action movement,
see Andrew Hsiao, "Color Blind," The
Village Voice, 25 July, 2000.
The March and April street actions of 1995 would change New York activism forever. New modes of engagment were born as were new social relations and friendships. Suzy Subways and Jennifer Flynn Walker explain:
The March and April street actions of 1995 would change New York activism forever. New modes of engagment were born as were new social relations and friendships. Suzy Subways and Jennifer Flynn Walker explain:
- Jennifer Flynn Walker This was my first civil disobedience. I fainted in the police van and I asked Liz paddock out at some organizing meeting after we got out of jail.
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