On April 25th 2012 - ACT UP New York is observing the 25th anniversary of its first groundbreaking action on Wall Street, held March 24, 1987.
For
the anniversary action, ACT UP is returning to Wall Street and joining forces
with the Occupy Wall Street movement to form a UNITED FRONT in demanding
universal healthcare and the END OF AIDS.
These goals are in
reach if the U.S. would just pass the "Financial Speculation Tax"
legislation before Congress right now. TAX WALL ST. END AIDS!
April 25th, the date of the action is also the seventeenth anniversary of the Bridges and Tunnels action organized by Housing Works, ACT UP, CUNY and the National Congress on Puerto Rican Rights. While people often refer to the early ACT UP days during the movent’s first five years, but events such as Bridges and Tunnels, helped change the direction of the AIDS and direct action movement’s in New York City. Housing Works would later win a settlement against the city, successfully claiming the city had retaliated against the organization for taking part in Bridges and Tunnels and actions like it.
In a
2005 interview with me, Jennifer Flynn recalled the days leading up to Bridges
and Tunnels.
In a
2005 interview, Jennifer Flynn recalled the days leading up to Bridges
and Tunnels.
Then in 1994, when [Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani came
into office, it was really interesting... It was the first time that social
services across the board were cut. Straight up every single social service
program was being cut. That led, in 1995, to this kind of unified cry out for
attention to fight back those cuts. And that led to the 1995 Bridges and
Tunnels action. There were also a few high-profile police
brutality cases. And people really thought that was result of the policies of
the Republican mayor, which they were. It was also that he was talking about
cutting welfare in a way that predated federal welfare reform. He talked about
changing welfare. One of the first things he did when he came into office was
try to shut down the city agency that provided welfare, including housing for
PWAs, the Division of AIDS Services. And there was an enormous outpouring of
anger, and he was stopped - because of the publicity. ACT UP had been doing a
lot of organizing against Giuliani around his attempts to dismantle DASIS,
which would have resulted in homeless PWAs going back to the shelters...
So some members of ACT UP made some calls to other
organizers throughout the city. I think that the first call that they made was
to Richie Perez, who was at the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights. He'd
been organizing this coalition of parents whose kids had been killed by the
police and had looked at some changes in policing that were resulting in
increased cases of police brutality in New York City. And also he had a history
of doing sort of ACT UP type of direct action…Then they brought in some other
groups. CUNY students were organizing.
In the months before April 25th, 1995, they had had ten thousand students just
descending on City Hall.
So there was a complete shut down of the East Side
of Manhattan. ACT UP and Housing Works had about 145 people arrested at the
midtown tunnel, the one that goes to Queens. And Community Against Anti-Asian
Violence took Manhattan Bridge. And the National Congress for Puerto Rican
Rights. The CUNY students took the Brooklyn Bridge. Coalition for the Homeless
and Urban Justice Center actually had homeless people getting arrested on the
Williamsburg Bridge. And the entire East Side was tied up for two or three
hours as a result.
In 2001, Bridges and Tunnels
organizers Esther Kaplan wrote an essay called, “This City Is Ours” recalling
the action. It was published in From
ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of
Globalization. In it she recalls
some of the organizing which took place to pull off that action. I have included the essay in its
entirety. Thank you for your advocacy
Esther Kaplan.
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.
