Socialist Action /June 2000
Reclaiming MAYDAY
By GARY BILLS
PORTLAND, Ore.-"Reclaim May Day" was the theme of a rally,
march, and picnic planned here by an ad-hoc coalition of environmentalists,
immigrants' rights advocates, unionists, anarchists, and socialists for
May 1.
The Portland activists were inspired by the success of the anti-WTO demonstrations
that were organized by a similar coalition in Seattle last fall. They decided
that it was time again to grab public attention and to accelerate public
debate about issues such as immigrants' rights, low-cost housing, and clear-cutting
the forests. They also wanted to help the organizing drive for a union contract
at Powell's Books, a world-famous bookstore in Portland.
The event was organized by the May Day Coalition. Many of the core activists
were members of the DAN (Direct Action Network). It was the DAN that played
a major role in civil disobedience actions last fall in Seattle.
In the morning of May 1, about 80 protesters, characterized by the local
media as "anti-capitalist," gathered in Northeast Portland. They
then marched through largely Black and minority neighborhoods, flanked by
an equal number of police dressed in riot gear, to a park in downtown Portland,
where they had a permit for a rally.
By 3 p.m. about 350 demonstrators, mostly young, and 150 cops had assembled.
Again, the May Day demonstrators wanted to march, without a permit, to several
downtown locations. A deal seemed to be struck between the cops and demonstration
organizers that the march could go on if contained to one lane of traffic.
The march began to wind peacefully around downtown to City Hall, where some
street theater was performed.
But at the intersection of 3rd and Salmon, five cops on horseback rode
their horses into the crowd-supposedly because of a dispute with a few protesters.
This provocative assault scared and outraged the crowd. Cops emerged from
squad cars at the rear of the march and began pushing people down the street.
The second stop on the march was the so-called World Trade Center, a
building with an all-glass exterior. This appeared to make the cops especially
nervous. As a series of speakers and a musician addressed the crowd, the
police prepared for the next provocation.
Shortly thereafter, the head cop used a squad car PA system and said
that a state of emergency was being declared. Protesters were given three
minutes to disperse. A numbers of cops began to push the crowd with their
nightsticks toward Waterfront Park, which runs along the Willamette River.
The cops kept telling people to disperse while at the same time penning
them in on all sides. Complicating things was a chain link fence set up
for a Cinco de Mayo celebration that prevented anyone from moving through
the park to the north.
One cop, who was carrying a so-called "less-than-lethal beanbag
gun" that looks like a shotgun, fired on a young man at the rear of
the march for no reason that anyone could identify, hitting him twice in
the leg.
The police evidently made the decision that the best they could do was
to split the demonstration into smaller groups. They began doing this by
using the cops on the horses again. When a couple of marshals for the march
approached these cops to ask what they were trying to do, their answer was
a face full of pepper spray.
Marchers wanted to go back to the park where the original assembly point
had been for a picnic but the cops wouldn't allow it. So, by dozens of different
routes, most of the marchers headed for Powell's Books-which was already
surrounded by a union picket line.
Longshoremen join in
But before the cops could redeploy their forces, reinforcements for the
demonstrators came from an unexpected quarter.
Powell's workers are organizing under the umbrella of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union with their own local, Local 5. It just so
happened that the ILWU was having a weeklong convention at the Hilton Hotel
in downtown Portland at the time of this demonstration. As a new confrontation
with the police was shaping up near Powell's, the ILWU members broke from
their convention and marched to join the rally-500 strong and wearing their
union jackets.
The cops were not happy to see this new development and at first moved
to block the Longshoremen. The street was filled with people chanting "ILWU!
ILWU! ILWU!" and "What do we want? Contract! When do we want it?
Now!" After expedited negotiations with the ILWU, the cops had to pull
back and watch from a distance as the Longshoremen joined the rally at Powell's.
It's one thing to take on young people with little experience who work
at non-union, low-paying jobs or are students, and another thing to take
on organized unionists who can stand up to cops and bosses and are part
of a larger labor movement.
After a short while, demonstrators moved onto a side street and held
a triumphant labor rally for about 30 minutes. Towards the end of the rally,
a spokesperson for the ILWU said the following:
"We're returning to our convention now and you're welcome to march
with us. You will be under our protection. When you march with the ILWU,
there won't be any breaking of windows or property damage. If someone does
this in our march, we'll deal with them. But we are going to take the streets
and we're going to march right up Broadway to our hotel. When we get there,
you can disperse or whatever."
We did take the streets back-almost a thousand strong. We marched right
up Broadway while the cops trailed behind. At the Hilton, the Longshoremen
went inside while a substantial number of demonstrators hung around on the
sidewalks outside the hotel.
After about an hour, the cops got restless and started to maneuver to
scatter these last demonstrators. A representative from the ILWU came out,
however, and talked to the cops, telling them that if they moved on the
demonstrators, the Longshoremen would empty out into the streets again.
The cops backed off.
As night fell, the demonstrators finally went home. Nineteen had been
arrested; 18 were released quickly on trumped-up charges of disorderly conduct
and vandalism. Activists knew of at least eight protesters taken to emergency
rooms for injuries, including the man shot with the "beanbag"
gun.
Debates among social activists
The main city paper, the Oregonian, did its best to apologize for the
cops and falsify the facts. The paper claimed that there had been no injuries
except to a couple of cops, that protesters had caused the clash with police,
and that the "bristling presence" of the police had prevented
potential mayhem. The Oregonian also said that police had prevented "another
Seattle" and they had the support of the public.
The police chief, Mark Kroeker, is newly recruited from the scandal-ridden
L.A. police force, where 30 cops were fired for corruption, mostly involving
the framing up of innocent people on false charges. He proudly claims credit
for the militaristic tactics now used by Portland police and says it is
something "Portlanders must get accustomed to."
In the aftermath of the May Day events, debates are raging about the
conduct of the cops and, among social activists, how to be more effective.
Matching cop violence with demonstrators' violence and property destruction
might be the conclusion of a small minority but that would be playing into
police hands.
The more extreme forms of violence always come from the cops. Their job
is to protect the status quo and the repressive capitalist system that created
them. As powerful as are the corporations and the rich who own them, their
power is meager compared to the potential power of those who labor. The
role of the ILWU in the May Day events demonstrated this clearly. Labor-when
organized, democratic, and aligned with its allies among the oppressed-has
a power second to none.
The May Day protest, characterized by the cops after it was over as "essentially
nonviolent," exposed the soft underbelly of minority rule by capitalists
and landlords-that violence, police, courts, and prisons are the bedrock
upon which the status quo rests.
Proof that the majority is carefully watching was confirmed on May 4
when another rally and march was organized to protest the police actions
of May Day and the cover-up of their actions. By that time, criticism of
the cops and city government was so intense that the march went unmolested.
It appears that a great start has been made towards reclaiming May Day
in Portland. Next, we need to spread the lessons we've learned about how
to neutralize the cops, challenge corporate power, and reclaim our society!
Socialist Action /June 2000 |