Do a Google image search for protest symbols and your first page will show a range of raised fists, Guy Fawkes masks and possibly even a few giant inflatable rats. But by far the single most represented image you’ll see is the peace sign. It is probably the most famous protest symbol in the world and has its origins in the British anti-nuclear movement of the 1950s. The sign represents the semaphore signals for two letters: ‘N’ (the two diagonals pointing down) and ‘D’ (the vertical line that divides the circle), which together represent nuclear disarmament. It has become the symbol of anti-war and social justice movements across the globe.

The aim of a symbol is to communicate as immediately and directly as possible the core of what you represent. It is the shorthand for your values, your aspirations and sometimes your political agenda, if you’ve managed to put one together. Which brings us to an important question: Is it time to consider a new symbol for a new era?

I was at a conference recently with pro-democracy activists from the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. They expressed a strong feeling that their aspirations and values were linked despite working in dramatically different contexts and against ostensibly different adversaries. They felt united in their commitment to nonviolence, to sharing strategies, to building and putting up as much as to removing and pulling down — all in an attempt to construct a different vision of the future. They also emphasized the importance of being connected in order to find strength greater than the sum of their individual powers. Near the end of the conference, someone observed that there really is no political symbol that represents that list of values and goals.

The peace sign has a lot of significance, but its origin is very specifically nuclear disarmament, and even its broader connotation is narrowly that of peace. Another symbol handed down from previous generations is that of the clenched upright fist. It immediately conveys an expression of defiance, resistance and solidarity, but is agnostic in what it might resist. Therefore it has been used by a disparate number of groups and movements including the Black Panthers, white supremacists, the Serbian revolutionaries Otpor, Egypt’s April 6th Movement and the Socialist International, to name but a few. And although some of those groups were strategic, networked and nonviolent, some were not.

A more recent symbol is the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask often seen at Indignado and Occupy protests that alludes to a “vendetta” against the 1 percent. It doesn’t quite fit with what much of these movements seem to be about, at least not in terms of the method intimated.

So I approached a long time collaborator, Carl Le Blond, who has created some of the most powerful visual content on issues from Burma to HIV/AIDS to climate change, to see if he could help. We had some lengthy discussions about what a symbol needed to do and represent, as well as the importance of investing it with meaning — which often comes from who’s using it and how.

The existing symbols seemed to emphasize a particular dimension of struggle: nonviolence, defined by not using violence (though it is much more than that), or resistance, defined by what you are against and often neglecting what you are for. Few gave a sense of building something new. If many in the Arab Spring, Occupy movement and Indignados believe they are all connected, what would their symbol look like?

Despite being in the middle of a number of massive deadlines, Carl eventually put pen to café serviette — an old-school medium for great ideas and images. A few days later he had worked up his initial idea and the people’s cube was born.

Carl’s aim was to emphasize that when people come together in an organized way they can build something much stronger and longer lasting than they could on their own. As he put it:

The people’s cube is on first sight solid and immovable from every way that you look at it. It has the simplicity and latent strength of a perfect molecular structure. Though in this case the molecules bonding together are symbolic of people standing together with their arms locked to form a symbol of strength and unity.

It seemed to represent much of what the activists I met had been talking about: being connected, constructive, strategic and networked. I sent it around to them and was glad that it got an enthusiastic reception. It will be interesting to see if and where it might pop up first. Now it may not do it for you. And that’s cool. But it’s worth thinking about, as these are new times and they are worthy of new symbols. Grab your stencils now!

Protesters in Malaga, Spain, on May 12. By Jon Nazca, via Reuters AlertNet.

Last June, after leaving the encampment in the center of Madrid, people in the 15M movement would say, “We moved from Sol square, but we know the way back.” The day of action on May 12 this year exceeded the expectations of many people who thought the 15M movement was dead, who didn’t recognize that it had only moved to neighborhood assemblies. The one-year anniversary of the movement brought hundreds of thousands people to the streets again in nearly 80 Spanish cities. There were 50,000 in Madrid, 44,000 in Barcelona, 11,000 in Vigo (a northern city with a population of less than 300,000) and many more.

As people from around the country converged on Madrid, various neighborhood assemblies gathered in squares to prepare banners for the demonstration and to share tips for avoiding police repression. At 7 p.m., there were five columns of demonstrators marching toward Sol square, where they planned to arrive at 9 o’clock. But by 8 p.m., the first column had already arrived, filling almost half of the square. Other groups of marchers arrived within minutes, but many people could not enter and had to stay in nearby streets. Sol square was completely full before the meeting time. There, thousands sang “Happy Birthday” to the 15M movement and released balloons.

As Sol square transformed into a party celebrating a year of protest and organizing, the question remained of whether the party could last all night. Some weeks before, the government had announced that it would not allow an encampment in Sol at all, but, last Thursday, it granted the movement a right to stay in the square during “office hours.” When the government’s 10 p.m. curfew came, there were more than 15,000 people in the square, surrounded by about 2,000 police officers.

At 10 p.m., too, the first tent was erected. “Now we have more reason than last year,” said a man named Emilio, the first camper in Sol of the night. “I’m not afraid to be the first one. If the police arrest me, they will have to go through many more people.” A half hour later, above where a dozen police vans were parked, a huge white panel was deployed, on which were projected videos created by the movement.

After midnight, preparations began to hold an assembly. Dozens cleaned the paper and bottles littered across the square, while others placed cardboard on the ground for people to sit on. When the assembly started at 1 a.m., nearly 2,000 participated. “I was worried,” said one of the first people to take the microphone. “This was very much a party, and we have a lot of work to do.” The first question was whether to stay in Sol for the night, and debate continued for more than an hour and a half. Many wanted to remain, but others said that doing so would only be a provocation to the government and that it didn’t make sense.

The assembly ended at 4 a.m., but hundreds of people remained in Sol. An hour later, 30 more police vans arrived, and officers cleared the square. Eighteen people were arrested. Meanwhile, police swept the squares in Valencia, Palma de Mallorca and other cities where activists tried to spend the night. Catalunya square in Barcelona is the only place where the movement has been able to remain, thanks to authorization by the Catalan government.

May 12 was just the first day of mobilization, and the most festive. Leading up to May 15, the movement has planned actions across the country focused on housing rights, employment, economy, democracy and other issues. These are busy days for the movement, and they will certainly be instrumental in shaping its goals and the strategies used to achieve them.

Violeta Parra.

For Mother’s Day, I’ve been thinking about some of the powerful and provocative creative nonviolent activist work that mothers have done through the ages — and there is a lot of it. So much of popular history tells the stories of the men who “led” the charge in struggles, but my thoughts went to South America, and Chile in particular, because of the richness of the cultural methods used, and the leadership of mothers in the face of brutal and patriarchal regimes.

“You can’t have a revolution without songs,” read the banner behind Salvador Allende when he became president of Chile in 1970, highlighting the role of Nueva Canción (New Song) in the emergent resistance movements in South America. This style of musical resistance didn’t just include the voices of women, though one of its early proponents was Violeta Parra, a mother, who wrote the song “Gracias a la Vida.” Nueva Canción was intentionally used to unite and identify concerns of oppressed peoples, as it integrated native and rural musical instrumentation with urban and European styles to speak to ever larger communities. Only three years later, when Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile, his regime outlawed several instruments identified with Nueva Canción, recognizing and attempting to stop the powerful spread of political ideas, courage and resistance through music.

Still, the music lived on. Today, the tradition continues thanks to, among others, the son and daughter of Violeta, who instilled a love of this music in her children. What an amazing gift.

Even as music served functions of education, empowerment, community-building and the putting forward of alternate visions for society, it was not the only cultural work that significantly contributed to the effectiveness of the movement for justice. During the brutal dictatorship of Pinochet, mothers spent hours stitching stories of resistance and suffering in the 1980s into a traditional tapestry form, arpilleras. Disregarded as inconsequential women’s work, it was possible to smuggle and sell these beautiful quilts both into and out of jails, and outside of Chile — moving information to sons and husbands, and spreading news beyond the borders even when a suppressed press corps could not. This galvanized anti-Pinochet sympathizers globally and resulted in both financial and political support for the resistance.

Arpillera, via the Royal Alberta Museum.

As the arpilleraistas gathered, often in church sanctuaries, the threads of their handiwork not only provided income to support their families, but also sewed together a growing consciousness of their own power. The craft provided a very accessible and low-risk entry point to the movement for many, while preserving collective memory and building capacity to go public with their demands, both on the political and home fronts — confronting the dictatorship and later the culture of machismo itself.

Another protest against Pinochet evolved from Chile’s national dance, the cueca. As thousands were “disappeared” by the regime, a symbol of resistance became “la cueca sola.” Originally done with partners, it was now being performed solo by women, clutching photographs of their missing loved ones, to confront the denial of the death squads.

Chilean women’s integration of cultural resistance into movement strategies seems to have contributed greatly to the outreach, education, accessibility, endurance and, therefore, effectiveness of their protracted struggle. The mothers’ motivation to better their children’s lives and future living conditions inspired many to take action, however risky. Day to day concerns of finding food for empty bellies moved mothers to stitch together rags to not only fill wallets but also to make change.

Thank you, arpilleraistas, singers and dancers for giving us more reasons to celebrate mothers today.

"The Scream" on auction at Sotheby's, via The Fiscal Times.

Amidst a crowd of protesters and oversized signs, Pat Walsh shouted, “What’s disgusting? Union busting?”

At a glance, Walsh, a woman with well-kept gray hair and an open smile, didn’t strike one as the usual angry protester. But that night, Walsh was fighting.

“My husband, John, has been locked out from Sotheby’s,” says Walsh. “He’s been a worker for 30 years. I’m here to fight for him.” Currently, the couple lives on the money and benefits from her part-time job at Hunter College.

On July 29 of last year, 42 art handlers at Sotheby’s Auction House were locked out after the expiration of a three-year contract. The art handlers, members of Local 814 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, have been without jobs, paychecks or benefits for almost nine months.

In an effort to bring the board of Sotheby’s back to the negotiating table, the art handlers and members of Local 814 met on May 2 to protest and picket at Sotheby’s in New York City. Allies from Occupy Wall Street and other unions joined them. That night, also, Sotheby’s auctioned off Edvard Munch’s The Scream for a record-setting price of almost $120 million.

Protesters were kept away from Sotheby’s entrance door on 72nd Street and York Avenue. While attendants filed inside, protesters were directed by police officers to the corner on 71st and York Avenue. This location, and the presence of the officers, kept protesters from engaging directly with those entering the doors of the auction house.

Shop steward David Martinez has worked for Sotheby’s for almost 20 years. Art handlers like him are trained to transport art from homes and archaeological sites to the auction house. “We handle everything from major Southeast Asian stone artifacts that just came out of a temple to tribal artifacts from Native Americans,” Martinez says. “We handle fragile, immovable things. That’s something you just can’t get anyone to do.”

“I’m trying to send a simple message — I want to go back to work,” Martinez adds. “There is no other choice. They want to keep us out like that, I say bring it on.”

The idea for the protest emerged from the “99 Pickets” that were organized by OWS as part of its May Day actions. The intention of the pickets was “to connect May Day with the workers’ struggle,” explains Rose Bookbinder, an organizer with OWS and the United Autoworkers Union. “The pickets started on Tax Day, and we kept going. We organized 99 Pickets to make the people of New York aware of the injustice that’s going on in labor.”

The picket at Sotheby’s occurred on May 2 in order to show New Yorkers that the struggle for workers’ rights would not end after May 1, Bookbinder notes.

People from OWS have participated in actions with the Sotheby’s Teamsters since last September as a way of building stronger relationships between the movement and organized labor. According to Harrison Magee, who is part of OWS and the International Workers of the World, actions against Sotheby’s in recent months have “involved a lot of different formations within the organizing community.” Union organizers wanted to broaden the scope of the Occupiers’ struggle. Artists and labor activists within OWS recognized the importance of targeting the influence of corporate wealth in the art world. According to Magee, getting OWS to support the Sotheby’s struggle is a critical way of developing the movement’s capacity for meaningful organizing.

“The fighting mentality and brand of toughness that the Teamsters have is the kind you only learn as an employee — someone who is in direct, physical confrontation with the 1 percent,” says Magee. “Not a lot of OWS has that at its organizing core, which is made up of people who are dedicated to OWS as if it was a full-time job.”

By uniting with the Sotheby’s Teamsters, OWS not only supports workers who have been wronged by the 1 percent, but also strengthens itself for an ongoing role in labor and arts activism. In the process, OWS is “creating a cross-movement that is more coordinated and able to deal with its future as a strong grassroots movement,” Magee says. “Even though the [Sotheby’s] outcome is hugely important, I think we should realize that the lockout itself is really just the red herring for everything to come.”

The sale of The Scream inspired the picketers to do their own “people’s scream,” raising their arms and screaming for two minutes. One Occupier said that the scream was a way for “all of us to bring creative tactics to the pickets to sustain visibility and express our anger.”

It remains uncertain, however, when or if Sotheby’s will start negotiating again. “[Sotheby’s] needs experienced people, and these are the experienced guys,” Pat Walsh said. “So why do [the board members of Sotheby’s] have to be greedy? Give them their jobs back, give them their retirement, give them their benefits, give them something. They put heart into the place.”

An installation art piece that was set up in Speaker's Corner in Singapore on Human Rights Day in 2011 to represent the 170 who have been executed between 1999 and 2010. There was a blank canvas card for each person and a list of names that are known, with a voice in a little speaker reading out the names.

Execution day is always a Friday in Singapore. As the night sky slowly lightens into day, the inmate is taken from his or her cell and escorted to the gallows. At 6 a.m., the trapdoor opens and the inmate falls through. By the afternoon, the family should have collected the body, or the state will deal with it as it sees fit. And that, as far as Singapore’s authorities are concerned, is that.

In the past, very few people spoke against the death penalty. The message most children received in schools was that it is part and parcel of the tough laws that distinguish Singapore from other dangerous, crime-ridden cities. It was not something to be questioned, or even mentioned much at all. Apart from the sense of it being irrelevant to the average law-abiding citizen’s life, the topic of death is considered inauspicious and therefore not often a subject of conversation in Singapore’s Asian communities. In recent years, though, thanks to the growing influence of the Internet and social media, an increasing number of inmates’ stories are being told, and awareness of the death penalty is slowly rising.

A few keystrokes and a click of the button

When the state-owned newspapers, radio stations and TV channels that dominated the Singaporean media landscape and public gatherings were all subject to censorship, getting the word out about the death penalty in Singapore was difficult. To learn about it, people would have to already have made the decision to seek out more information themselves. Attracting new faces to a movement against it was a huge challenge.

But the proliferation of new media has made it much easier. News, photographs, event notifications and even excerpts of Singapore’s penal code are being shared with the click of a button, reaching a larger audience than activists could possibly have hoped for previously.

Organizations such as the Singapore Anti-Death Penalty Campaign (SADPC) and We Believe in Second Chances — a group that I co-founded — quickly set up social media networks to disseminate information as quickly as possible. “Social media got involved to lend us the publicity that the campaign needs, which is a very good thing as the mainstream media usually block such news out,” says Rachel Zeng from SADPC, in an email interview.

Alternative websites such as The Online Citizen have also contributed to the discourse on the death penalty by featuring articles that shed light not only on legal and philosophical arguments, but also stories of individuals on death row. One such individual — arguably the one who has attracted the most attention to the issue in recent years — is a young Sabahan named Yong Vui Kong.

A boy and the campaign

Arrested in 2007 at the age of 19, Vui Kong was convicted of trafficking 42 grams of heroin into Singapore and sentenced to death under the mandatory death penalty as stipulated in the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Vui Kong’s story is a sad tale of poverty and desperation. As a child he grew up on his grandfather’s plantation, going to school early in the morning and coming home to work late into the night. His mother, a single parent, continues to suffer from clinical depression and relies on medication. He left school and made his way to Kuala Lumpur while in his early teens, where he fell in with gangs that led him towards a life as a drug runner.

At the time of his arrest, Vui Kong was illiterate, unaware that his actions would attract such a harsh punishment. But once in remand — and later on death row — he began to turn to Buddhism, rising early in the morning to meditate and study scriptures. He also started to educate himself, learning to read and write in Mandarin and Malay, and making some headway with English. His family and lawyers have all remarked upon his remarkable transformation and reform.

Vui Kong’s case has since sparked off campaigns for his life in both Singapore and his home country of Malaysia, which also has the mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking. Malaysian Chinese media featured his story in newspapers and on the covers of magazines, galvanizing the Malaysian Chinese community into action — especially those in his hometown of Sandakan in Sabah.

Part of the 109,346 signatures delivered to the president of Singapore at Istana in August 2010.

On August 24, 2010, his family, accompanied by Sabah Member of Parliament Datuk Chua Soon Bui, walked to the back gates of Istana (the official residence of the president of the Republic of Singapore) to deliver a petition signed by 109,346 people asking for a second chance for Vui Kong. Images of his family kneeling before the guards at the gate quickly spread through Facebook and Twitter.

Vui Kong’s story of youth, repentance and reform appealed to many, drawing them into the campaign.

“At the age that Vui Kong was caught, I was so much more fortunate than he was. I didn’t have to worry about income, a roof over my head, and I had good education,” says Priscilla Chia, founding member of We Believe in Second Chances. “It made me sympathize with Vui Kong a lot more.”

Vui Kong’s story has also inspired a song written by Singaporean musicians and a play produced by Amnesty International Malaysia.

A boy and the law

While activists appealed to the public to support Vui Kong, his lawyer, M. Ravi — incidentally the only human rights lawyer in Singapore willing to consistently take up death penalty cases, often pro bono, and work with campaigners — took on a series of challenges in court.

“In my opinion, this is a landmark case,” says Rachel Zeng. “In the past, once a convict is sentenced to death and the appeal period was over and clemency denied, the court would never allow anymore challenges or appeals from the defense.”

Singaporean lawyer M. Ravi

In Vui Kong’s case, however, Ravi had managed to win not one, but two stays of execution so as to be able to challenge his client’s sentence on legal grounds. Ravi and Vui Kong returned to court again and again, raising issues such as the constitutionality of the mandatory death penalty, the president’s discretionary powers in granting clemency and prosecutorial discretion.

Every appeal and application made was dismissed by Singapore’s highest court, the Court of Appeal. But with every trip to the Supreme Court, Singaporeans began to learn more about the death penalty and its application. For the first time, many Singaporeans discovered the difference between the death penalty and the mandatory death penalty, which removes discretionary powers from the judges when it comes to sentencing.

We learned that in granting clemency, the president is required to act according to the advice of the very legislators who implemented the mandatory death penalty in the first place. We learned that it is possible to convict and sentence drug mules to death while masterminds have all charges against them dropped.

“People found out from these challenges of the inherent injustices and systemic obstacles stacked against people who are from similar socio-economic background like Vui Kong,” says Ted Tan from ThinkCentre, a local NGO that carries out research on democracy and human rights issues.

Slow progress with a long way to go

Having been involved with the anti-death penalty campaign in Singapore since 2009, Rachel Zeng has seen many changes:

More people are aware of how the mandatory death penalty works. More people have taken an interest in discussing it, whether they are pro or against, on blogs and online forums. People have stepped up to voice out against it, and groups have worked together, and are still working together, on the campaign against the death penalty. Social media has chipped in to help us publicize the campaign.

“[The Vui Kong campaign] has also generated support and awareness of civil society across the causeway [linking Singapore and Malaysia] in a more sustained way than in the past that I can recall,” Ted Tan adds. “But collaboration could be better.”

While Vui Kong’s campaign appears to have made much headway in Malaysia, with the de-facto Law Minister Datuk Seri Nazri Abdul Aziz and the Malaysian Bar Council coming out to voice support for abolition of the death penalty, things are moving along at a slower pace in Singapore.

Even though awareness and discussion has increased over the years, the fact remains that many Singaporeans are still pro-death penalty. After a lifetime of being told by authorities that the death penalty is a necessary “trade-off” for safety and security and the well-being of our children, the task of overturning people’s belief in capital punishment is a thankless uphill battle.

It doesn’t help that different groups are sometimes unable to agree on fundamental stances. Certain groups favor the complete abolition of the death penalty in Singapore, while others are only opposed to the mandatory death penalty. And amidst such discussions, all campaigning is required to be extremely fluid and adaptable as cases sprout up, families approach activists with pleas for help, appeals are dismissed and the clock counts down on inmates’ lives. The demands are heavy on activists who can only volunteer their time, money and energy on top of already-exhausting full-time jobs.

Still, every anti-death penalty campaigner in Singapore understands that things will not change overnight. And so we learn to recognize the little victories, and to stand our ground until the time when Friday mornings bring no more heartbreak.

Poster by Nina Montenegro, via Occuprint.

An Occupy Wall Street organizer I know — one of the original ones, from the planning meetings before the occupation began last September 17 — has a striking banner atop his Facebook Timeline. It’s from the History Channel series Life After People, an artist’s rendition of a cityscape after which all the humans in it somehow disappear. It’s quiet, and still, with trees growing out from the sides of crumbling towers.

To say that this image has anything to do with the movement’s plans for May 1, which the person who posted it is involved in making, might cause both paranoid-style right-wing radio hosts and the most anarcho- of primitivists to froth a bit at the mouth. And so they should. Ever since the idea of working toward May Day started catching on in Occupy Wall Street last January, it has been infused with the impulse of creating the vision of a radically different kind of city.

The visionary impulse, however, has also mixed with things more mundane. Over the course of the May Day planning process in New York, in at least two meetings each week, OWS organizers have been patiently patching together an historic joint rally and march with labor unions, immigrants’ rights groups and community organizations, many of which were invited to participate in the planning process since the beginning.

The members of this tenuous coalition, however, have refused to demand the impossible together — which is to say, a general strike. Instead, the coalition speaks of “a day without the 99%” and the slogan, “Legalize, Unionize, Organize.” But at just about every other opportunity, people from OWS have been echoing the call for a general strike on May Day, which originated from Occupy Los Angeles’ General Assembly in December. During the April 4 press conference announcing the New York coalition’s plans, the OWS representative avoided saying those words, but after his speech he stripped down to an undershirt with “general strike” scrawled on it in red.

Meanwhile, a group called Strike Everywhere, consisting of “anarchists, anti-capitalists and autonomists,” has made a general strike its unapologetic mission, and it is busy covering the city and the Internet with propaganda, both beautiful and obscene, to agitate for revolt. Some of its members have even constituted a tantalizing Central Park Exploratory Committee, which has yet to disclose its intentions to the public.

Such calls for a general strike raise challenging questions about what a strike could even look like in a society with the lowest rates of union membership in generations. Employment is often episodic, inadequate and undemocratic, yet people seem to lack any inkling that things could be otherwise. Unlike more traditional union-based strikes, also, OWS offers no provisions for long-term support for strikers who suffer retaliation from bosses. What, then, could feasible striking mean? What new forms of workplace organizing could there be, besides unions that have their hands tied in contracts and repressive laws?

A strike, if it actually happens on May 1 or thereafter, may not look like one ever has before. Strike Everywhere, for instance, has been holding assemblies for “precarious and service workers” as a way to create new solidarity networks, and numerous social media accounts are trying to do the same online. Tumblrs have appeared  collecting people’s various ideas for how and why they plan to strike. For those who can’t skip work or school, OWS recommends at least a consumer boycott: no housework, no shopping, no banking. And, of course, “TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!” Much like the Adbusters call that resulted in Occupy Wall Street itself, the logic of May Day has been to start with the impossible and figure out the possible from there.

The plan for the day, insofar as there is any single plan, starts at 8 a.m. in Bryant Park, in Midtown. From there, Occupiers and allied organizations will break off into pickets and other kinds of groupings, each targeting one or several of the many corporations with offices in the surrounding skyscrapers. Meanwhile, in the park, there will be a bazaar of “mutual aid,” with food, trainings, medical care, teach-ins, radio transmitters, massages, bike repair, free stores and more. Over the course of the afternoon, the theater of action will shift (likely by way of a ruckus march) down toward Union Square, where the unions and immigrants’ rights groups will by rallying. From there, at around 5:30, there will be a safe, taxi-led, permitted march further down, through Foley Square and into the Financial District. The general consensus seems to be that the bulk of arrests will be saved for after that — for whatever the night will hold.

When the subset of Occupiers preparing for May Day aren’t planning, or wheatpasting posters, or viral-video making, or negotiating, or tweeting, they’re studying history — the Haymarket Massacre, Rosa Luxemburg, and so on — through old films, teach-ins, zines and the movement-made magazine Tidal. They’re also warming up in the streets.

Every Friday, there are “Spring Training” marches to greet the closing bell of the Stock Exchange, and at each Occupiers test out a new creative tactic, like “civilian,” in which they revert to non-protester status so as to evade police blockades, or “melt,” in which they collapse into a disarming die-in or cuddle-puddle. Spring Training culminates in the “people’s gong,” replacing the NYSE’s bell with the voices of Occupiers standing in concentric circles and crying, “Ding!”

On April 17, too, Occupiers will be testing their synergy in the streets for Tax Day actions with many of the institutional allies who will come out in much greater force on May 1. This comes at the end of a nationwide effort called the 99% Spring, in which 100,000 Americans are supposed to be receiving training in nonviolent action, and it will be the first test of a newly-trained populace, just in time for May Day.

After the big day itself, though, nobody knows what will happen. There is a suspicious, almost apocalyptic silence about this among organizers. They call for a general strike on May 1, but is the idea to go back to work on May 2? They talk about building power for the 99 percent, but for what? Some, at least, have been murmuring about the international days of action called for in Europe on May 12 and 15. The 12th, in New York, is also the anniversary of a major march on Wall Street last year. A few Occupiers here are planning to go to Chicago to protest the NATO summit on May 20 and 21. But above all there’s the feeling that if May Day goes well — as, for the movement not to suffer a crushing disappointment, it must — then what follows will unfold organically from there, in a city somehow not quite like the present one and which, from this side of May 1, we cannot really imagine.

Photo by Marcus Demery, all rights reserved.

Eager Occupiers — with flowers, signs, costumes and high spirits — descended into downtown Chicago from all directions of the city and suburbs for the April 7 Chicago Spring kickoff. The Occupy Chicago event marks the re-emergence of the economic and political justice movement that was mostly dormant over the winter. On Saturday, though, Chicagoans came out in droves for speakers, workshops, concerts, teach-ins and community-building events that took place all over the city.

In the morning, 50 or so people from Occupy the Northwest Side held a public auction in Logan Square, selling off the neighborhood’s iconic statues and city streets to the highest bidder to protest the privatization of public goods. Meanwhile, Occupy el Barrio — from Pilsen — marched throughout the barrio in carnivalesque fashion complete with “re-distributive pinatas” to break open and share and, representing capitalism, a gigantic “foam skewered pig.” Occupy the Southside announced the beginning of their Stop the American Genocide Campaign and Occupy Rogers Park hosted a community art project. A total of 11 neighborhood actions were held by neighborhood occupations and community organizations before converging on Lasalle and Jackson — the place where it all started for Occupy Chicago last fall.

Rachael Perrotta, from Occupy Chicago Press Relations, called April 7 a community day to connect the struggles of the 99 percent across the city. Emphasizing how Occupy Chicago has intentionally focused on community organizing as a way to build the broad-based movement needed to confront the concentrations of wealth and power in the 1 percent, Perrotta called Occupy Chicago glue that is trying to unite activists, unions and community groups across various campaigns.

The Twitter hashtag #TakeTheSpring, giving homage to the Arab Spring, suggests the revolutionary fervor that many Chicago activists are feeling and the broadening support for Occupy Chicago.

“This is the most diverse crowd I’ve seen,” said Jared McKinstry, an activist from the suburbs, while holding a sign that read “Money ≠ Power” as tourists waved from the tops of double-decker buses. “I love seeing people united and energized for positive change in the community.”

In a statement released to the media, Occupy Chicago participant Trina McGee said that April 7′s activities are intended to unite the interconnected struggles facing Chicago and begin working together for change.

“[Occupy Chicago] will form a new network of allies, and strengthen existing bonds, to build the broad coalition we need to take power back from the 1%, putting it into the hands of Chicago’s people and communities.”

By 1:30 p.m., close to a thousand people had gathered at Lasalle and Jackson and took to the streets as Occupy Chicago marched to Grant Park’s Butler Field for an afternoon of education, music, activities and the Wishing Tree — Chicago Spring’s public art project whose leaves represent the wishes of the 99 percent. The 10-foot tree, made of wood, paper-mache and wire, was assembled in the afternoon with various branches brought in from different Chicago neighborhoods. The Wishing Tree will be used in upcoming Chicago Spring events — the May Day march, the People’s Summit, and the NATO protests — before being delivered to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his top donors.

Sarah V., over the drums and tambourines of the Chant for Change Mantra Meditation Circle, called the day a powerful kick-off event. “NATO is coming, it’s great to get people connected, get them outside, where we are supposed to be. We are creating good energy and raising consciousness.”

The list of afternoon sessions at any one of the stages promised to be engaging. At the Chicago Spring stage, a panel discussion on “Nonviolent Direct Action Against Oppression” was followed by “Everything You Wanted to Know about NATO but Were Afraid to Ask.” Meanwhile, over at the Solidarity Stage, workshops on urban agriculture, the crisis of capitalism, general strikes and nonviolent direct action were featured prominently.

When asked about the role of nonviolence in Occupy Chicago, Perrotta said that they are committed to the tactic of nonviolent protest as the only way to make real change. Recognizing that there are differences of opinion within the Occupy movement regarding diversity of tactics, Perrotta noted that the violence of a broken window pales in comparison to the violence of state and the upcoming NATO summit of “warmongers.”

The preponderance of signs and events on NATO and nonviolence, though, suggest that Occupy Chicago and other allied groups are taking seriously the upcoming protests in late May as a way to connect war, poverty and matters threatening democracy.

The energy remained elevated late into Saturday afternoon. Food Not Bombs prepared a “Freedom Feast” before the evening General Assembly at the Horse — the same Grant Park site of mass arrests last October during attempts at overnight occupations.  April 7 organizers estimated that several hundred stayed for the evening GA, which included small group breakouts as a way to integrate new people into the movement.

McGee, in an email after the day’s events, thought the day was colorful, joyful and successful. “There was a tremendous feeling of community and solidarity … People were excited to be a part of this, to learn and grow and educate each other and themselves. Everyone made new friends, had new conversations and built a broad community.”

Chilean arpillera. Photo by Colin Peck.

The earliest proponents of the growing field of peace studies were well aware that their work had as much to do with provoking creative nonviolent conflict as with conflict resolution. That spirit of resistance was alive and well at the University of Massachusetts Amherst last month for the traveling international exhibition “Transforming Threads of Resistance,” which brought together the weavings and stories of women from Chile and close to a dozen other countries throughout Latin America, Europe, and Africa.

Exhibition coordinator Leah Wing introduced curator and activist Roberta Bacic by noting that it is not unusual for “conflict resolution scholars and practitioners to view resistance as a barrier to conflict resolution.” This dynamic can be doubly the case after a peace accord has been reached or a dictator overthrown — when resistance “can be seen as contributing to the perpetuation of the conflict rather than to peace.” Wing argues that this narrow approach “contradicts the wisdom and life experience of most people who themselves have suffered from state violence and who have used resistance to survive and attain their freedom.”

Rooted in the traditional textile craft form known as arpilleras, the practice of stitching colorful threads or cloth onto cut squares of burlap bags has long been an inexpensive way for Chilean women to express themselves. They turn the scraps from food packaging and the torn rags of their lives into striking representations of their thoughts and dreams. During the vicious dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet — which was kicked off on September 11, 1973 by a CIA-directed coup d’etat against democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende — the mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters of the so-called “disappeared” people turned their crafts into symbols of resistance. Although the official militaristic desire was for the lives and legacies of the thousands of desaparecidos to be erased, the arpilleras, then and now, graphically bring to life the struggles of the time. In this way and for these families, historical memory becomes an act of resistance and ongoing social change.

Some of the weavings from the Pinochet era — which lasted until an ever-bubbling series of nonviolent organizations and actions spurred an unstoppable wave of anti-dictatorship sentiment in 1990 — depict simple cloth dolls of women standing in a line, holding a banner with the question “Where are the Disappeared?” Some show more intense imagery, of prisoners languishing in hidden-away torture chambers or of the huge water cannons used to target those brave enough to demonstrate under incredibly repressive conditions. The protesters — often women armed with nothing more than pots and pans, clamoring for help in finding their loved ones — were not only hit with highly pressurized water making it impossible to stand or walk, but were also sprayed with colored dye, so they could be identified and rounded up even if they did manage to get away.

The spectacularly dramatic Sebastian Acevedo Movement Against Torture — named after the father who immolated himself when the Pinochet regime seized his son and daughter — gained a reputation for staging “lightening” demonstrations. These progenitors of today’s smart/flash mobs (coordinated decades before cell phones and “tweets”) brought dozens of activists into the public square, in loud calls for democracy and an end to injustice — handing out informational leaflets and giving on-lookers the courage to oppose the regime. By the time any police or military arrived, the organizers were already gone.

In finding new means of voicing protest and staging collective action through the making of political “crafts,” the women of Chile also often utilized scraps of clothing left over from their disappeared loved ones. “Thus the women used not only their material resources, but something deeper than that” noted curator Roberta Bacic — a former staff person of Chile’s Servicio Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ) nonviolence network. “They sewed their lives and their loss into the tapestries.”

Based on her work with families and former prisoners after Pinochet was forced out of office, Bacic recounted how the “apparently innocuous” became “acts of subversion.” Arpillera workshops themselves became training centers for civilian empowerment. Although a critic of the accommodation which was reached between the military and the mainstream Chilean political parties resulting in the end of Pinochet’s presidency, Bacic was appointed to the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission and subsequently became a program officer with War Resisters International. Bacic’s global encounters have led her to collect textiles from other parts of the world, connecting and spreading their messages of resistance to ever-widening audiences.

Zimbabwean weaving of "a day we will never forget.” Photo by by Shari Eppel.

Observation and gallery-gazing, of course, is far from the final goal of exhibits like these. The Amherst gathering brought together weavings from Ecuador and Colombia, as well as from Ireland and Germany, where images of devastation and genocide mixed uneasily with images of hope brought about by solidarity. West Bank weavings showcased the plight of Palestinian refugees and a tapestry from Zimbabwe served as the recorded history of “a day we will never forget,” — when attacks on a village brought untold devastation but failed in its attempt to undo the community.

Survival in bleak times must be about making these transnational solidarity connections. The arpilleras, as Roberta Bacic explains, must “act as a reminder to us of what we have, and startle us into seeing what others have lost. And in their startling simplicity, the arpilleras compel us to do something.”

Click here to read the comic.

The sound rang out at exactly 4 p.m. last Friday: four measured chimes increasing in pitch. Ding, ding, ding, ding! Standing in concentric circles with clasped hands, protesters held the last note, and it echoed against the New York Stock Exchange. Tourists and workers stopped to stare as the people-powered bell chimed again. Inside, another bell was ringing — a mechanical, computerized sound marking the end of the day’s trading. Six months since the Occupy movement began, it was clear that the bell inside was losing its resonance, and the “people’s gong” outside was getting louder.

After last weekend, news of the “police riot” on Saturday night in Liberty Plaza made headlines. Yes, the NYPD beat, kicked and stomped on peaceful people, using the type of violence that the department unleashes daily on communities of color across the boroughs. Officers broke bones, dragged people by the hair and ignored a woman suffering from seizures induced by the attack. They did it again at Union Square early Wednesday morning — throwing medics down to the sidewalk, pepper-spraying dozens of protesters, sending many to the hospital and barricading a 24-hour public park that has stood open and unobstructed for the last 20 years. This week has been one of Occupy Wall Street’s most extreme encounters with the violence and intimidation meant to maintain order in a society characterized by extraordinary inequality.

Yet our actions were not about violence or anger. From Wall Street to Bank of America to the courthouse at 100 Centre Street, we demonstrated a renewed sense of creativity as we confronted sites of injustice with a sense of carnival.

Even after Saturday’s eviction from Liberty Plaza, we gathered outside the courthouse at 100 Centre Street on Sunday and Monday, tired but festive. More than 50 people brought coffee, cigarettes, sandwiches and their bodies to greet the 70 Occupiers who had been arrested and the others who joined our feast.

Last Thursday, hundreds marched to a Bank of America branch in Lower Manhattan. As the crowd gathered, the cargo doors of two U-Hauls flew open, revealing an entire living room set — including multiple couches, a coffee table, an armoire and a flat screen TV — that Occupiers quickly moved onto the sidewalk in front of the bank. The furniture blockade was part of a growing national campaign against Bank of America for foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of families even as it receives a perpetual taxpayer bailout: billions of dollars of low-interest loans lent through the Federal Reserve’s Emergency Lending Program.

“The bank foreclosed on our homes, we figured we’d move in there,” said George Machado, one of the interior designers who helped move a similar living room set inside another Bank of America branch last week in a YouTube video that has gone viral and already inspired similar actions in D.C.

Now that spring has come, the movement is once again using site-based direct action to show concretely how abstract concepts like “systemic inequality” manifest all around us. From Bank of America to Wall Street to the courthouse, Occupy Wall Street celebrated its six-month anniversary by mapping sites of injustice: a bailed-out bank that is robosigning away families’ safety and shelter, a barricaded street that is the epicenter of global economic inequality, a state with laws that are so unrepresentative that it must use violence to maintain its authority. And, after a winter filled with workshops practicing choreographed movements, learning new songs to sing and studying social movements from Chile to South Africa, we have started training ourselves to confront these sites of injustice with a sense of community and a spirit of play that is deeply destabilizing.

With each creative action, we drill a small crack in a system of interconnected power that is all-pervasive, a form of economic radiation that respects neither state boundaries nor human life. Every crack in capitalism that we create with our bodies and our performances helps tear down a system that we all know is unjust but are all afraid that we won’t be able to change. We “Occupy Everywhere” because the effects of this radiation are everywhere. Like the Zapatistas: “Walking, we ask questions.” We ask at each space, “Must it be this way?” Then, like Occupy Wall Street: Dancing, we imagine alternatives.

While making these cracks in capitalism, we are opening up wounds — revealing the millions living without homes, without enough to eat, in fear of state violence, and under constant discrimination based on race, gender and ethnicity. They are wounds because we are using our bodies, blood and voices to map this injustice, replacing fear and isolation with joy and community.

This weekend’s actions are only the beginning. Every Friday afternoon, Occupiers will gather for “spring training” marches on Wall Street to prepare for a spring of mass mobilizations. As Saturday night’s violence showed, there is much to be enraged about. Yet channeling this rage into creative energy at the very sites of injustice can be the most powerful and evocative response. Even after Tuesday’s “speak out” against police brutality — at which African Americans, Muslim Americans and other community activists testified about living under constant violence, about having their loved ones killed by the police — joy and song still won the day. As we marched past the courthouse at 100 Centre Street, calling for Ray Kelly’s resignation, the crowd burst into a version of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”:

You ain’t nothing but a bad cop, lying all the time. 
You ain’t nothing but a bad cop, lying all the time. 
You ain’t never helped the people and you ain’t no friend of mine.

Next weekend, we will gather once again — uniting with unions, churches and community groups for a mass mobilization against police brutality, marching from Liberty Plaza to Union Square on Saturday at noon, and then pitching tents outside the United Nations to protest dirty power and environmental degradation at 5 p.m. This spring, the city will be filled with carnivals of rage and joy. See you in the streets.

Video by Natasha Singh.

El Fondren, © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

In Bob Fitch’s photo of El Fondren, the 106-year-old man who registered to vote for the first time in 1966 in Mississippi has his hand raised triumphantly in the air as the crowd hoists him up. Alongside it one also sees the hands of reporters — holding out microphones, snapping photographs, trying to capture the scene for the evening news, grasping for access to El Fondren — and they are all white.

Like many others who documented the civil rights era, Bob Fitch, now 72, was a white man covering a black people’s movement. But unlike many mainstream-media reporters, in his mind this was not just another job. Fitch was a principal photojournalist for the African-American press. He had been hired by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to provide coverage for outlets across the country who could not risk sending one of their own reporters because the risks for black journalists were too high.

This job meant not only photographing King, the movement’s most prominent leader, but also capturing everyday life among Southern blacks as they built a grassroots movement for freedom. Rather than simply viewing this work as an “assignment,” Fitch — the son of a Christian ethicist — pursued it as a spiritual mission. Documenting the civil rights movement was Fitch’s way of actualizing what he saw as the cornerstone of religion: a commitment to social justice.

Fitch’s career has been propelled by a desire to not simply observe social justice movements from afar, but to be immersed in them, working alongside people who are dedicated to changing society. Some of the most iconic photos of the American civil rights movement, and other movements since, are his. Fitch’s 1966 photo of Dr. King in his Atlanta office, with Gandhi’s portrait nearby, is the basis for the recently-inaugurated King memorial in Washington, D.C. But, perhaps more importantly, Fitch’s work directly contributed to the struggle for racial equality by providing black news agencies with reliable information and images that depicted the progress of their movement.

After King’s death, and after Fitch had photographed his funeral, he continued photographing the foot soldiers of social justice, including the Catholic Worker movement, the United Farmworkers, the anti-Vietnam and draft-resistance movements, and more. As he had with civil rights, Fitch worked for the organizations he was documenting, which kept him close to the people doing the everyday, nitty-gritty work of social change.

Even in his 70s, Fitch is unstoppable. When we spoke recently over the phone, he emphasized that he carries on that work today in Watsonville, California, where he resides and works for Latino immigrants’ rights. His journey as a photojournalist has also been a pilgrimage toward a world in which ordinary working people — whom Fitch sees as the real heroes of social change — receive recognition for their struggles and sacrifices. At the end of our conversation, Fitch seemed keen to discuss today’s Occupy movement. Before we got off the phone, with a sense of hope in younger generations, Fitch told me to continue the work — as King had once said to him in a vision. I hung up thinking of what Fitch had captured, of lives risked and lost so that a 106-year-old black man could vote, and wondering whether Occupy Wall Street’s archives would one day boast an image like this.

What motivated you to begin documenting social movements?

I always worked for the organizations I was documenting. Early on I worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and more recently I photographed an electoral campaign in the emerging Latino community in California. I worked as the photographer of Luis Alejo, who was elected the state assembly member for our district.

While I have been employed occasionally by magazines and newspapers, I am always an ally of the cause in which I believed. The root of that goes back, I would say, ironically, to my conservative Christian upbringing. My father was an oft-quoted conservative professor of Christian ethics. I personally tossed most of his institutionalized and ritualistic beliefs, but I was deeply moved by a few sections in the New Testament, such as the Beatitudes of Jesus: someone’s hungry, duh, feed them. If they need clothing, give them clothing — duh. If they are lonely, they need company, be company — duh. Those very simple words and the words of “treat others the way you want to be treated” had a profound impact on me as a kid and drew me toward issues of injustice.

On top of being raised by a conservative family — which was a very unemotional family, very cold, with no hugging and not a lot of laughter — I spent my high school and junior high school years in Berkeley in the 1950s. At that time, Berkeley was the nesting ground for socially committed people who had bailed out of the autocratic culture of the communist and socialist parties. So, in spite of my parents’ inclinations, I grew up in this community of socialists and communists, who started the co-ops in Berkeley, who started KPFA, the first community-supported radio station in the U.S., with whom I sang in song circles every month at the home of this old lady, Malvina Reynolds, who wrote great songs but had a terrible voice. And once in a while this tall skinny kid with a banjo — Pete Seeger — or this huge black woman with a powerful voice — Odetta Holmes — would come and sing with us.

Unlike my own family, which was cool and cold, the empathy and warmth and acceptance of that community was quite overpowering. My self-created Berkeley family was also receptive to my ideas about social justice. So, it was there that I was nourished in my teen years. I worked at KPFA as a volunteer, and we had very radical and exciting programs; it was a very exciting community. That was my springboard.

How did those experiences in Berkeley end up affecting your outlook?

To give you an idea of how high I jumped — when I was age six, ten years before then, I had been asked by my Presbyterian church to go home and write about things for which I was thankful. And as a very young child I wrote a prayer which said, “Thank you God that I’m a boy, thank you God that I’m white, thank you God that I’m born in America, thank you God I live in Eagle Rock which is near Hollywood.”

So, I had, at a very young age — which I believe is true for most kids — a very clear sense of my entitlement. But by the time I was 16 I’d been exposed to an entirely different environment and had taken some grasp of my own internal beliefs about justice and what fairness is. Throughout my life I have almost always had leaders and bosses who were women and men of color, and they turned out to be my mentors and heroes. Were I to write a prayer today, I would give thanks for those leaders, mentors and communities to which I was introduced by my Berkeley family.

But religion remained important — you went on to become a minister.

After college, I went on and trained to be a clergyman at a liberal theological seminary, Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. I enrolled not really because of the gospel or the theology but because of the fieldwork. I worked in juvenile halls, I worked in rural communities, I was one of the first interns for the brand-new Glide Foundation, which transformed from an old, Evangelical Methodist church to an inner-city organizing center. I lived and worked with gangs in the Mission district of San Francisco. I worked with the gay, lesbian and transsexual empowerment movements in San Francisco. In those seminary years, thanks to their outreach, I was exposed to, embraced and learned from a wide range of life.

Also, for about four or five years, I brought a lot of speakers from the black civil rights movement to the Bay Area, sent workers to the South and developed a series of strong friendships with people working in the movement. My opinion was then, and is now, that the best thing to do was not spend money for personal trips but send the cost-of-travel money to the organization, and let them decide how to spend it.

So work for the cause from wherever you are and send them your travel money?

Well, I’ve gone when I’ve been invited. It’s better to support the people there in the community doing the work than it is to go down and check it out as a stranger; some call this “zoo tripping.” After five years of supporting civil rights work I was invited to be the permanent SCLC staff photographer. I had finished college and graduate school; I’d done everything my parents wanted me to do, so now — what do I want to do?

Two years before graduation I had a strange vision. I had read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time straight through one night and early morning. At the end of that reading I was entranced; I had a vision of myself being engaged with what I had encountered in the book in some sort of aesthetic manner. I didn’t know what that meant. I decided the next morning that the “aesthetic” would not be writing — writing’s too hard — and it wouldn’t be as a painterly artist — I couldn’t draw for shit — but maybe photography, since I had developed those skills as a hobby. A year and a half later, or two, I was invited to be photojournalist for King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was just after the Selma march, and everybody had left just when workers were needed for the first viable electoral voter rights and election campaigns.

When you say “everybody had left,” do you mean the activists, or the media, or both?

Well, not completely everybody. But after Selma, and the new Voting Rights Act, the work that remained was drudgery — knocking on doors, phone-calling, driving, teaching, education. And that big crowd that marched to Montgomery didn’t stay for the drudgery.

Local organizations needed people to do that work of finding candidates, training candidates, supporting candidates, through the whole election process. There were roughly 50 African-American candidates for various offices in Alabama in ’66. That meant a lot of work.

There’s a certain kind of irony — I mentioned the Latino campaigns in Watsonville, where I live now. Watsonville reminds me of some of the work in Alabama because it is an 80-percent Latino community, and we’re transitioning from an agro-business, Anglo, old-guard power structure to a more representative government. We’re knocking on doors, we’re making phone calls, we’re getting people to the polls, we’re training and running empowerment campaigns. By “we,” I mean a progressive coalition of multi-age, multi-ethnic people — and the drudgery work is much the same as the black civil rights campaigns.

How did you come to be the person that the SCLC invited to document them?

I was told, “Bob, we can’t send African-American journalists and photographers into the field ’cause they’ll get beat up and killed, so we’re going to send your little white ass out there. Every week you’ll come back with a news story in print and photos, and you’ll send them to the major black print media around the nation.” There were at that time about 20 major African-American newspapers all the way from Oakland to Harlem to Chicago to Atlanta.

So I took the photos, wrote the notes, typed up an article, mimeographed the article, developed the film, printed the pictures, addressed the envelope, put the story and the photos in the envelope, bought stamps and put them on the envelopes, and sent it off. It was me. I was the Afro wire service! By then, the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) photographers’ group that emerged out of the Mississippi Summer pretty much diminished — so, at that time, I was the only movement photographer in the field.

Sounds like a lot of work — but what did it entail?

SCLC would announce a list of the African-American candidates running for office and declare that a picture of all candidates and their families was needed for leaflets to be distributed in local communities. I would go hunt down farms with no address, people who were in the fields or teaching at schools or an attorney, and take pictures, and get those back to Atlanta and develop those. That was a typical assignment.

We had another campaign where we were identifying contemporary lynching: African-American people who were killed because they had crossed the cultural line, in some manner, by not smiling at whites, or resisting in a march or demonstration. We had 16 of those murders in Alabama in one year, in 1966, and I simply followed through to photograph and write on those as they came up.

A photojournalist knows that three-quarters of the work is waiting, or getting there, and planning or re-planning, double-checking supplies and schedules. My entrée into the situation was very simple. All I had to say was “I’m Dr. King’s photographer,” and it opened doors in the black community — or shut doors in the Anglo community — or evoked a response that generated significant word and photo content.

Martin Luther King, Jr., © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

Berkeley had a powerful impact on you personally. Did working in the South have a different sort of impact?

The experience in the black civil rights movement set up my life. After Dr. King was murdered, and after I went back to Atlanta to photograph the funeral at the invitation of his family, I returned to the Bay Area. I went to a retreat on racism where blacks and whites were meeting to see what programs they could come up with. It got very contentious, and it was fueled by alcohol, and I didn’t like the mood. So I went out and sat on a log in the forest. And there in the wilderness, a very strange thing happened: Dr. King appeared to me! He was as real as the lamp that’s two feet from my eyes right now. I don’t believe in ghosts, nor do I really believe in the afterlife. But he was there, and he spoke to me and said, in his deep voice, “Bob, continue the work!” Then he left.

Wow. What do you think caused you to see him in that way? It sounds like you needed inspiration to keep going after he was gone.

I don’t know where it came from. It may have come from inside me. But the next day I began to think, Okay, the people I most follow and respect are being jailed and killed. It’s important to document their work and their workers. I made a list, which at that time included Chavez, who was emerging with United Farmworkers Union; David Harris who was a leader of the West Coast anti-Vietnam draft resistance movement along with his partner Joan Baez; Daniel and Phil Berrigan, two of the Catonsville Nine who were part of the war resistance movement on the East Coast; Dorothy Day, titular parent of the anarchist nonviolent Catholic Worker movement; Pete Seeger, who has been the life affirming “bishop,” spiritual guide and mentor for all us Anglos for decades; and Ron Dellums in Alameda County who was running for Congress with the endorsement of Coretta King — kind of a first post-King’s-death political connection.

I had this list of figures — some well-known, some not — and I literally mapped out how to connect with them, how to begin the work, how to fund the work. I acted as advised: to “continue the work” right up to today’s community campaigns for social justice.

Has anyone else inspired you the way King did?

I’ll tell you a story. I was in Eutaw, Alabama, photographing a segregated Anglo high school. Stepped out of my car, took the photograph. A cop car pulls up behind me, four cops got out and grabbed me, saying, “You’re going to jail.” I asked, “For what?” They said, “Trespassing — you stepped on the lawn.” So I was in jail four days before they even let me make a phone call, and finally they opened the cell to release me. It was one of these old jails where the bars clang — I hate that sound. And they said, “Bail’s made, you can go.”

I looked at the documents to see who would put up their own property to bail my ass out of jail. Maybe Andrew Young, who was the field organizer — no, his name’s not there. Maybe Hosea Williams, my immediate boss — no, his name was not there. The names that were on that bail document all had the same last name, probably three brothers — Kirksey, a local family in Alabama, farmers whom I had never even met. They put up their precious land to get my white ass outta jail. And I had an immediate flash, a kind of experience I’ve had many times, but at that time a lightening bolt of consciousness.

Whereas King and Stokley Carmichael and Floyd McKisick all appeared to be heroes, they stood on a scaffold of Afro-American property owners, workers and families who maintained their hope and values for roughly 350 years prior to the emergence of the civil rights movement. My heroes were the Kirkseys, and today, my heroes are communities of people like them.

I was loved and inspired by Dr. King. He was a brother and a friend. But the real heroes for me have always been those people who nickel-and-dime for their community organizations, who build that scaffold which promotes and allows the historical justice movements.

So here I am again in Watsonville, a member of a progressive democratic coalition whose members are those people — cooks, parents, lawyers. They run emergency shelters, they’re political officers, they drive trucks, they work in the fields — and they are my heroes. I try to choose heroes who are not people I couldn’t be. King really was a genius, or David Harris, an extraordinary tactician. I’d rather have heroes whose lives I can emulate.

Of all your photos, do you have a favorite? 

The photo I took in 1966 of the 106-year-and-9-month-old man who registered to vote for the first time. It was during the Mississippi Meredith March, named after James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi, where the words “black power” were first used. This was in Batesville. El Fondren, this man, was probably born in slavery, so imagine the courageous fullness of his experience, from that slavery to registering to vote in the same lifetime — he survived it all. When I was photographing — I photographed him registering to vote, and then we came outside, and the crowd threw him on their shoulders — I had a moment I’ve experienced a few times, where the image was such a perfect representation of all I was feeling at the time, I disappeared!

The only way I can describe it is in mystic terms: I became one with all. I photographed automatically for the few moments it took me to get through the roll of film. And whenever I have that experience, the photos always turn out very well. El Fondren was not only a hero, not only engaged in a courageous act of personal empowerment; he did that with his community — those people who threw him on their shoulders. That moment for me was the life and work we must nourish and continue.

In the midst of the excitement that continues to surround the Occupy movement, it can be unfortunately easy to forget that occupations tend to be anything but empowering. Creativity and imagination often fall by the wayside when the struggle of daily life becomes the main focus of thought. Yet it is those very positive traits that lead to liberation.

Last summer, while traveling in Paris, I met a Palestinian playwright named Abdelfattah Abusrour, who has made it his life’s mission to inspire the imaginations of the young people living in refugee camps in the West Bank. He runs a cultural center in Bethlehem’s Aida Camp called Al Rowwad (which is “pioneer” in Arabic), where children are taught, what he calls, “beautiful acts of resistance.”

Shortly after seeing him perform with his adult troupe–several members of which have been with Al Rowwad since they themselves were children–I sat down with Abusrour to get more of his story, which can now be read in the current issue of The Progressive. Here is just a quick excerpt:

Just moments after performing a dramatic final death scene, Palestinian playwright Abdelfattah Abusrour was back on stage delivering an afterword that was no less intense. Speaking softly, Abusrour told the small Parisian audience about his work back home in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp where he grew up and now runs the Al Rowwad Cultural and Theater Training Center.

“We are a beautiful people and we want to show our humanity to others, as well as ourselves,” Abusrour says. “We need to see beautiful acts of resistance. It’s not always linked to blood and martyrs and destruction.”

For Palestinians like Abusrour, who lived the hardships of occupation, resisting isn’t the question. “To exist is to resist,” as Palestinians often say. The question is how to resist.

“I firmly believe that nonviolence as a strategy will win,” he says. “And the way to do it is through building this culture of people who think they can create a world based on nonviolence and the strength of people power.”

To read the rest of the article, visit The Progressive‘s website or, better yet, buy a copy. And if you are interested in hearing more about Abusrour’s work,  you may get the chance to see him in person, as he will be visiting U.S. cities in April and May to raise international support for Al Rowwad—more info on that, to come.

At the General Assembly meeting last night, Occupy Wall Street’s dreamer contingent got a very special valentine: the GA endorsed the Direct Action Working Group’s proposal to call for a general strike on May Day—May 1, 2012. Occupiers celebrated with cheers and Valentine’s Day balloons.

The text approved by the GA is as follows:

May Day 2012 Occupy Wall Street stands in solidarity with the calls for a day without the 99%, a general strike and more!! On May Day, wherever you are, we are calling for: *No Work *No School *No Housework *No Shopping *No Banking TAKE THE STREETS!!!!!

The prospect of an Occupy general strike has been circulating for a while already. One of the several Facebook event pages devoted to it has more than 10,000 attendees. Occupy Los Angeles began calling for a May 1 general strike as early as last November, and Occupy Oakland joined at the end of January. Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action group tried to take a strategic approach to the idea; though many of its members had little hesitation about calling for it, they took steps to ensure there was consultation, and therefore buy-in, among some of those whose participation would be vital. Since the beginning of the year, they’ve been holding twice-weekly meetings—with as many as 150 people crowded into a church or a union-office basement—which included labor organizers, immigrants’ rights groups, artists and anarchists.

Together, these stakeholders debated what a general strike could even mean in 2012, given the poor state of organized labor, and whether making such an ambitious call would turn into anything other than an embarrassment. “It has to happen on a huge enough scale that retaliation is unthinkable,” a person noted at one of the initial meetings on January 11. While one voice that night argued that “you use this tool to gain specific ends”—the tool of a general strike—another preferred to “not issue any demands, but rather take what is ours.” From these discussions, it was agreed that the more open-ended language of “a day without the 99 percent” should stand alongside that of “general strike.”

These meetings have focused at least as much on what to do during a day without the 99 percent as what not to do. In addition to forming committees devoted to shutting the system down, there are others for mutual aid, art, education and more.

Perhaps one of the most promising aspects of a May Day action is the overlap with the May Day Coalition for immigrants’ rights, which has already been planning actions that day, and which has tremendous mobilizing power around the country—as the massive protests of 2006 showed. At the end of the January 11 meeting, an organizer of laundry workers, speaking only in Spanish, told the Occupiers, “Any campaign you have is our campaign.” The Occupiers, in turn, will have to demonstrate that the immigrants’ concerns are theirs as well.

Everything depends on what happens between now and May. “I’m really excited about how much time we have leading up,” someone said at the January 11 meeting. It’s much more time, after all, than Adbusters gave between its initial call for Occupy Wall Street in July and the September 17 start date. Now, the Direct Action Working Group has already made May Day its biggest priority, and all actions it is planning in the meantime are being thought of as creating a narrative of escalation leading to that day—beginning with yesterday’s Times Square kiss-in. The challenge is to show people, in one form or another, that something like a general strike is even possible, and to practice what taking part in it would actually mean. Above all, perhaps, it’s a challenge to the imagination; as art critic and organizer Yates Mckee says, this is a chance to begin “imagining and dreaming what a city of and for the 99 percent would look like.”

After one of the meetings, an original organizer of Occupy Wall Street looked around at her friends and said, “Look at us! We all have crazy eyes!” It was true; no one looked quite sane. But to call for a general strike in New York City in 2012, and to even begin to follow through on it, probably takes a bit of crazy.

After a storm comes the calm. Following eight months of struggling to roll back the privatization of education in Chile, the various organizations representing the Andean country’s student movement are now in a temporary and strategic withdrawal as they plan to impact the political system more directly. This year, they will not solely oppose the lack of public funding for education, but a whole political structure that they view as serving only a few.

The students have made clear that the spirit of civil resistance in Chilean society survives after the popular movement that defeated Augusto Pinochet. The persistence of the movement has already led to a re-distribution of power within President Sebastián Piñera’s cabinet, which students accused of acting like a continuation of the Pinochet regime, intensifying privatization and increasing the socioeconomic gap within the population. The government increased its 2012 budget for education by 10 percent, to $1.2 billion; this includes an increased number of scholarships for high-achieving, low-income students by 24 percent. The government also made the system of credit more flexible for students and cut interest rates on student loans.

Still, President Piñera’s approval ratings suffered a tremendous fall, ending the year at 23 percent, while the student movement’s registered at 89 percent. Piñera tried to gain international sympathy at the General Assembly of the United Nations in September last year by applauding the student movement as a “noble, big and beautiful cause,” but his rhetoric has not been enough to convince many Chileans.

Over the past year, the student movement distinguished itself by refusing to align itself with any political party, especially leftist parties that could tarnish its aims with co-option and compromise. This decision increased the diversity of participants. The Chilean students also distinguished themselves in the creative direct action they’ve used both to excite the public imagination and to distance themselves from the establishment.

Conscious of the state’s repressive potential, organizations like the University of Chile Student Federation raised awareness about the necessity of avoiding violent actions in order to strengthen the effect of their efforts. They knew in advance that media coverage would focus on anything perceived as violent, thus driving national and international attention away from their real objectives. Although there were few violent clashes between riot police and the protesters—in May, August and September—the movement still acted in such a way that the police had to accept responsibility.

When violence did begin to break out, the students kept calling for one another to respond by acting creatively. In July, they gathered in front of La Moneda Presidential Palace for a kiss-in that lasted 1,800 minutes—the same number of millions of pesos that they want to see invested in public education. In June, around 3,000 students danced to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Each carried a gravestone with his or her name, profession and amount of student debt written on top.  After that, it became almost common to see students doing choreographed dances in the streets while wearing superhero costumes. One of the bigger dances happened in July, when the Minister of Education Joaquin Lavin was removed from his position.

By August, the government stepped up its crackdown, and students were shot with guns and chemical spray. Their usual reaction, though, was to organize another protest; at night, they got people all over the country to bang their pots and pans, just like the “call to the streets” that they used to do during the Pinochet regime, a tactic called cacerolada.

Meanwhile, the numbers and diversity of participants progressively increased. What started as a student movement of 15,000 students in May was later joined by miners, labor unions, professors and parents. The headquarters of two main leftist parties—the Democratic Independent Union and the Socialist Party of Chile—were occupied on June 30, bringing in students from the private universities, making the numbers surge closer to 400,000. Later in September 22, and given the tiredness after months, there were 180,000 protesters in the 35th mass meeting. There have been some well-known names in the movement, like Camila Vallejo, Ariel Rusell, Julio Sarmiento and Giorgio Jackson. Despite their frequent public appearances, however, they always remained amongst the other participants as no more than spokespeople, avoiding any official leadership role.

The winter’s temporary withdrawal has given the students a chance to reflect on and evaluate their previous tactics. The challenges in the coming months are clear: the movement has to be stronger at the local level and to win over more current political actors while also producing some of their own. It has to ensure that Chileans come to think of affordable education as a common interest and a public good, rather than something to be bought and sold. When everyone has access to educational opportunity free from crippling debt, the whole society benefits.

Several weeks ago, a 28-year-old Army vet, who had worked with drones during two tours in Iraq and is now a radical art student in New York, came up with a creative act of protest to raise awareness around the growing use of drones domestically by police forces across the country.

According to an article in last week’s New Yorker, over the course of several nights, the veteran (who remains anonymous) and a few friends posted eleven unusual street signs around New York City, which is apparently investigating using drones as a law enforcement tool.

Designed to look exactly like official street signs, the fake NYPD signs had several different messages: “ATTENTION: Drone Activity in Progress,” or “ATTENTION: Local Statutes Enforced by Drones,” or “ATTENTION: Authorized Drone Strike Zone, 8am-8pm, Including Sunday.”

Near each sign, they also stenciled a quote from a Founding Father, such as a warning from Ben Franklin that seems particularly apropos: “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

As Avaaz pledged to do as part of a recent petition, activists now need to buy or build their own drones and fly them over the city to back up these signs and make the reality of drones just a bit more tangible to an American public that often seems completely disconnected from the issue.