ACT UP's 25th anniversary demonstration on April 25 in New York City. Photo by author.

Long before the red ribbon became an innocuous symbol of AIDS “awareness” and celebrity philanthropy, there was the pink triangle and there was ACT UP and there were thousands of people taking to the streets for their lives. Once a symbol used to mark suspected queers for death in the Holocaust, ACT UP appropriated the pink triangle for themselves, now flipped on its base, pointing upward on a black field, away from the grave, signed with the call to arms, “SILENCE = DEATH.” 

Death didn’t just come in the form of a virus, even and maybe especially in the early days of AIDS, when ACT UP (an acronym for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in New York. Government neglect and corporate greed made AIDS an epidemic, and they also gave birth to a raucous and creative network of direct action activists. For ACT UP, death was the drug maker, and the drug profiteer, and the drug regulatory bodies who refused to release them. When ACT UP’s members first laid down their bodies in protest, therefore, it was against the already-booming business of AIDS, and for their debut action in 1987, they brought their rage and their grief straight to Wall Street.

On the morning of April 25, 2012, ACT UP took back those same streets, alongside activists from the Occupy movement, itself aspiring to be the kind of umbrella that can gather and propel young queers and allies to work together. Hundreds of people carried those trademark ACT UP banners (with some homemade signs for that Occupy touch) in a march down from City Hall to the New York Housing Administration to Trinity Church. A break-out action took the intersection at Park Street, where activists set up house with sofas and chairs, chaining themselves together with the cry, “Housing saves lives!” Another group dressed in Robin Hood green locked down an intersection at Wall Street, demanding a 0.05 percent tax on financial transactions to funnel to AIDS relief. I imagined each person I saw in a fading ACT UP shirt — the seriously garish image of Ronald Reagan in neon branded AIDSGATE, and countless pink triangles now on a field of soft grey — to be a surviving elder, or standing in the garment of a lover or friend who should have lived to walk alongside them.

Reclaiming that story — of greed and neglect, and also of resistance and loss — is what drove Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard to produce their film United In Anger, using footage drawn from their joint archive, The ACT UP Oral History Project. Schulman recalls that the film’s origins were in her visceral response to an NPR story on the 20th anniversary of AIDS that she heard while driving a rental car through Los Angeles:

“At first America had trouble with people with AIDS,” the announcer says in that falsely conversational tone, intended to be reassuring about apocalyptic things. “But then, they came around.”

I almost crashed the car.

She didn’t crash. She did call up Hubbard, though, and their work began. The film premiered this February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of ACT UP.

Now, just a few months after the birth of another direct action protest movement on Wall Street, it is difficult not to connect these familiar images through a quarter-century-long struggle. Here are the throngs of young people linking arms along Broadway, the high sheen of cop uniforms as police push their way into crowds, locked arms being wrenched apart in the grip of twice as many cops as there ever are activists, and the way — as he’s being loaded into a cop wagon — one of the activists turns his head to call back to the others, to the cameras. It’s a performance, and a sincere one, that’s become part of so much protest, and it’s captured here well before the YouTube age.

ACT UP hit the streets just as cheap consumer video did, defining the visual and tactical conventions of activist video. Through the late 1980s, ACT UP spawned several activist video crews, like DIVA TV, or Damned Interfering Video Activists. In addition to serving as witnesses at actions, DIVA produced compilation tapes to educate and inspire ACT UP activists around the country and the world, who then shared them with each other at parties, bars or through the mail.

Captured in all that glorious 80s footage is a raw, life-affirming anger. For all the comparisons drawn between Occupy and ACT UP,  Occupy has yet to fully embody this urgency, or this rage, that transforms pain into action and back again. The most moving sequences of United In Anger are set to a funeral march, a low drumbeat that carries through political funerals in Manhattan and Washington, culminating in a group funeral procession to the White House, where several ACT UP members requested their remains be delivered as a final demand.

As powerful as ACT UP’s tactics are to observe — banner drops at Shea Stadium and Grand Central Station, storming the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration — it’s the testimony of ACT UP members that provides real depth, humor and contradiction to these victories and contentious setbacks.

The most dramatic of these was ACT UP’s legendary Sunday-mass protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which turned even some of their supporters against them. For many in ACT UP, that was no failure. “We said for years in ACT UP that our job was not to be liked,” said Ann Northrop, an early member. “We were not doing what we were doing to get the public to like us. We were doing what we were doing to accomplish something about particular issues, and I think we did that, enormously successfully.”

What cannot be ignored, in this film or in our attempts to make sense of the early years of the epidemic, is the power of people to organize in the face of death, to claim expertise, to lead. As the gatekeepers in medicine and government struggled to catch up with the virus, ACT UP took caring for their communities into their own hands and took their fight to the doors of those in power. Through United In Anger, we meet activists who worked to redefine AIDS, to take account of their lives and what could be done to preserve them, and to hold those who abandoned them to death accountable. “In my view as a witness, people did not die of AIDS,” Shulman said in a recent interview. “They died of government neglect and indifference. These are political deaths.”

The 2011 Freedom to Love celebration called Pink Dot, which is held annually at Speaker's Corner in Singapore.

Singapore, a “sunny island set in the sea,” is known for many things: economic prosperity, air-conditioning, malls and underground malls linking to more malls. What it is not known for, though, is a stellar human rights record or an active citizenry willing to take to the streets.

In October 2011, a Facebook page for Occupy Singapore sprung up, asking Singaporeans to gather at Raffles Place in the heart of Singapore’s Central Business District on October 15 as part of the Global Day of Action. The movement called for more accountability and transparency in the running of government-linked corporations, particularly the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation and Temasek Holdings. In recent years, these two corporations had made huge losses on bad investments made with public money.

It was a demand close to the hearts of many Singaporeans who have been frustrated by the lack of accountability and responsibility taken by the senior management of these corporations. It was also good timing, in a year of watershed elections — when trust and accountability were hot-button issues — which saw the ruling People’s Action Party get its lowest vote share in the nation’s history. People appeared to be more fired up than they had been in years.

But when October 15 rolled around, Raffles Place was left woefully unoccupied. The space thronged with journalists and photographers (and perhaps a number of plainclothes policemen), but no protesters. Although the organizers of Occupy Raffles Place later expressed bitterness and disappointment at the turnout (or lack thereof), it is hard to imagine what they had expected. Protests, public demonstrations and civil disobedience are just not in the average Singaporean’s blood.

‘If I say this, will I get in trouble?’

Thanks to the government and the mainstream media, protests, demonstrations and strikes are often linked in the minds of Singaporeans to violence and unrest. This perception is further supported by the fact that law enforcement authorities often turn down permit applications for events by citing “law and order” concerns that would affect the stability of the country.

Restrictions on freedom of speech and the government’s willingness to make use of defamation suits have also encouraged people to constantly watch what they say. The porous and vague definition of “OB markers” (or “out of bounds markers”) make people unwilling to speak out, just in case what they say gets them into trouble.

The government has also often used Singapore’s multi-racial and multi-religious society as a justification for the curbing of freedom of expression. Singaporeans are often reminded of the race riots of the 1960s, when violent conflict broke out between the different racial groups, and told that everything must be done to ensure that we never return to such violence. People who make comments of a racial or religious nature can be charged under the Sedition Act, if said comments are deemed to have the potential of creating ill will between different racial and religious groups.

In December 2011, Singaporeans for Democracy submitted an application for a permit to hold an anti-racism rally to address a recent spate of racist postings on Facebook. The application was rejected. When a formal appeal was made, the authorities again cited “law and order considerations.”

Add to all this the belief held by many Singaporeans that we have it good — we have roofs over our heads, food on the table, there aren’t any wars or natural disasters, we have our shopping and our streets are clean. What more do you want? For most people, life is too comfortable to risk the repercussions of speaking out.

Laws, laws, laws

In 2008, around 20 people — children included — gathered outside Parliament House to protest against the rising cost of living in Singapore. The protesters, mostly associated with the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), carried placards and wore T-shirts that read Tak Boleh Tahan, meaning “Cannot Take It” in Malay. (The phrase is also commonly used in Singlish, an English-based creole spoken by most Singaporeans.)

Eighteen protesters, including SDP’s Secretary-General Chee Soon Juan, were arrested and charged under the Public and Nuisance Act on two counts: for participating in an assembly, and for participating in a procession without a permit. Fines of up to S$2,000 (approx. US$1,588) or jail terms of up to two weeks were meted out.

In 2009 the new Public Order Act stated that “cause-related activities will be regulated by permit regardless of the number of persons involved or the format they are conducted in.”

This effectively means that even a single person could constitute an illegal assembly and be subject to intervention from law enforcement if they have not obtained a police permit for their activity. It is also up to the authorities to define the term “cause-related activity.”

The only areas in which police permits do not need to be obtained before an activity are in indoor venues, and at Speaker’s Corner in Hong Lim Park — a small green space not too far from Singapore’s Central Business District. However, organizers are required to register their names, identification card numbers and contact details with the National Parks prior to an event at Speaker’s Corner.

Non-Singaporeans are prohibited from participating in events and activities related to domestic affairs, even in indoor spaces and at Speaker’s Corner. At the annual Pink Dot (a day to celebrate acceptance of the LGBTQ community), Permanent Residents and non-citizens are not allowed to be part of the giant pink dot formed by all participants at the end of the day and are required to stand behind a cordon.

What do activists do, then?

Despite restrictions, activists often find other ways and means to carry out their activities and push their causes. As the sole outdoor space in Singapore where activities can be held without a permit, activists and campaigners often turn to Speaker’s Corner as an option for public events. Although the turnout will likely be limited to those who have actively made a point of showing up at Hong Lim Park, the benefit of having an event in the park is that there is a certain amount of visibility.

Another popular move is to hold private indoor events where attendance is “by invite only.” Although this greatly restricts the turnout to the number of invitations, and to some extent restricts the potential of new people attending, making an event private means that it will be easier for non-Singaporean citizens to participate.

That said, during investigations over a private forum organized by Singaporeans for Democracy, the police said that having a foreigner speak at a forum without clearance was tantamount to an offense. Otherwise, most activism and campaigning are done online, which makes sense in a country with about 72.4 percent internet penetration and a mainstream media that’s largely owned by the state.

Changing mindsets

Although anyone unafraid of arrest could still stage demonstrations and protests in Singapore, it’s not a move often contemplated, as civil disobedience is unlikely to gain a movement much sympathy in a society bred to consider law and order as sacred.

Many Singaporeans are quick to equate public demonstrations with violence, and are more likely to view an arrested activist as a troublemaker than as a victim of oppression. Stories of strikes in other countries are also often viewed with scorn: What a mess! We should be grateful that this would never happen in Singapore.

And that mindset is the first major hurdle for any activist in Singapore — to convince people committed to not rocking the boat that speaking out is not a form of violence but a right due to every citizen, every day of their lives.

The "Raging Bull" in New York's Financial District being barricaded on the first day of Occupy Wall Street. By David Shankbone, via Flickr.

On March 24, after yet another wave of violence against the Occupy movement, Occupy Wall Street and allies staged a march through Lower Manhattan, targeting both New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly specifically and the police in general. We demanded the resignation of Ray Kelly because of his involvement with a sustained campaign of violence against Occupy, surveillance of Muslim communities and widespread corruption. But it is our belief that any coherent analysis of poverty in this country must also critique the institution of the police as a whole. Regardless of your position on police officers as individuals, the existence of an armed paramilitary organization at the disposal of the state — and therefore the corporations and wealthy elites the state is beholden to — should be incompatible with any work related to economic or social justice. The often-stated idea that “the police are the 99 percent too” is an erasure of the open war that the state has waged against the poor and people of color in this country for hundreds of years.

The police as an institution upholds the status quo through brutal violence, including all the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia that the status quo entails. The police will always side with power. The wave of repression against the Occupy movement, in the context of resistance movements in this country, is neither surprising nor exceptional. The American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and Earth First! — among many, many others — have been targeted for repression if not outright obliteration by the state with the police as its front-line protector.

We live on occupied, colonized land and the police are the occupying army. This is not just in the historical sense that they represent the state that murdered and displaced the indigenous people on this land, which continues today, but also in the sense that they keep the poor and people of color colonized. Colonial forces use fear, intimidation and forced separation to keep populations in a state of disorder and under control. Which explains the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy, anti-Muslim surveillance, and raids against undocumented immigrants. More black men are currently incarcerated than were ever enslaved during the North Atlantic slave trade in this country; one in three black men will be incarcerated during his lifetime, making a young person of color more likely to go to prison than college; 30 percent of the trans population of the United States is incarcerated.

These facts all shed light on our real relationship to the police. By randomly searching, intimidating and arresting people of color, by incarcerating them more often and for longer, by patrolling poor communities constantly, by dangling the threat of deportation over people’s heads, whole segments of the population are kept in a constant state of disruption. Because violence from the police is constant, it is unremarkable; it is also one of the central organizing experiences of our lives. Their authority is constantly leveraged against us, even in their absence. The police ride the subways with us, walk up and down our blocks; they can at any moment stop us and sort through our belongings.

For all the many being targeted by police violence, meanwhile, some are being protected. There are few better signs of this than JPMorgan Chase’s gift of $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, which constitutes the single largest contribution in the foundation’s history. Colonialism, after all, is always about resources. The resource in question has changed over time — from bananas, to gold, to beets, to sugar, to cotton, to oil, to real estate, to ill-gotten capital. But the colonizer’s method remains the same: disruption, systemic violence, forced labor, fractured families, scattered communities and militarization. This is true whether the colony is external or internal. Which brings us, inevitably, to the prison-industrial complex (PIC), of which the police are an essential part.

The PIC is a system of privately owned corporations — the Corrections Corporation of America, for example — and other entrenched interests that house incarcerated people for profit. While incarcerated, people are subjected to forced labor, isolation, torture, sexual abuse and overcrowding. Both public and private prisons are often built in rural and poor communities, where they quickly become the only industry in the area. That phenomenon creates an economic and cultural buy-in for communities that might otherwise resist them. Because these institutions depend on mass incarceration, rather than fostering strong communities or healing, the communities that depend on them will tend to oppose liberation movements or even more humane reforms. The role of the police in that system is, of course, to continually supply people to keep those beds full.

All of this takes form in the violence visited upon people of color, the homeless, trans and queer people, and immigrant communities at the hands of the police every day. Ramarley Graham. CeCe McDonald. Oscar Grant. Sean Bell. Tawana Brawley. Duanna Johnson. Those are just some of the names we know, people who’ve had their stories picked up by the media. As victims of police violence, they are exceptional only in that we know their names. Constantly, nationwide, police forces systematically brutalize, murder and rape. The existence of the police is incompatible with an agenda of justice. This is why Ray Kelly must resign, and why his resignation is not nearly enough.

One hundred years after the birth of human rights icon Bayard Rustin, his complicated legacy pushes us to analyze our own complicated times. Vilified in the 1950s for his open homosexuality and again in the 1960s for “selling out” the radical black liberation movement, Rustin’s own history has been recently rescued by the books and movie correctly extolling his incredible gifts as a grassroots organizer, a charismatic orator and a visionary thinker. As preparations proceed for the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (of which Rustin was the chief architect), and the dreams and nightmares of a new generation are being forged against a backdrop of pepper spray and tear gas, it is time to take a deeper look at the relationship between the movements for peace and for justice — movements which are no more “integrated” now than they were 50 years ago.

It is important first to note that, just as the foundations for much of the 1950s tumult around civil rights were laid by the Tuskegee Airmen and other members of the U.S. Armed Forces of African descent, Rustin was a part of another grouping of World War II veterans. When the black vets who helped liberate Europe from fascism and open the doors of the concentration camps came home to find that democracy and equality was not forthcoming despite their heroic efforts, Rustin and his World War II conscientious objector colleagues had spent their war years behind bars. Many of them, including Rustin, Dave Dellinger, Ralph DiGia, George Houser and Bill Sutherland, were active in efforts to desegregate the federal prisons they were held in, a daring effort 10 years before the widespread lunch counter sit-in and bus boycott campaigns.

It must be understood as no coincidence that this generation, whose skills were honed and tested at a time when mass sentiment was neither anti-war nor particularly progressive, produced activists whose life-long commitments to fundamental social change led them to become long-term advocates for radical alternatives. Many of the most respected and serious leaders of the civil rights, Pan-Africanist, solidarity, anti-Vietnam War, anarchist, socialist and disarmament movements of the following five decades came out of the small cadre of World War II conscientious objectors who put organization before ego and linking struggles before leftist turf wars. These same activists, coming out of the religious as well as the secular pacifist movements, were amongst the first to label their brand of nonviolent action as explicitly revolutionary — and worked to take over and increase the militancy within the existing groups of their time.

Setting the Record “Straight”

The 1947 Journey of Reconciliation.

The classic Journey of Reconciliation photo of nine smiling men, black and white, suitcases in hand, has been used repeatedly to educate the generations since that corner-turning 1947 moment about the “first freedom ride.” When, in 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court (twelve years before Brown vs. Board of Education) ruled that state segregation laws did not apply to interstate bus travel, the stirrings for a campaign began. The precocious James Farmer, who by age 21 had earned two college degrees and had developed a friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, appealed to the religious pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) to help him set up a group focusing on racial justice. Though the FOR did not agree to directly sponsor the new organization, their Executive Secretary — A.J. Muste, himself a minister and a former labor leader — helped provide the basic support to birth the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Farmer had been FOR secretary for race relations; when he left FOR staff to create CORE, fellow FOR staff members Bayard Rustin and George Houser played a major support role.

The 1947 journey, then, an integrated trip through the upper South directly challenging the new rulings on bus travel, was formally sponsored by CORE, largely organized by FOR staffers Rustin and Houser and made up of a total of 16 men. Of the nine in the well-known photo, Rustin and four others—Igal Roodenko, Jim Peck, Wally Nelson and Ernest Bromley—ended up playing key roles in the leadership of the secular pacifist War Resisters League (WRL) in the decades to follow; Houser and Rustin co-authored the FOR-CORE report on the journey, We Challenged Jim Crow! For defying southern custom, the bus riders were arrested several times, with Rustin eventually authoring “22 Days on a Chain Gang,” a much-read pamphlet on his experiences.

Having served as an organizer of various Free India activities in support of Gandhi and the independence movement, Rustin traveled to India in 1948 for a long-planned conference that ended up taking place shortly after Gandhi’s assassination. Rustin and Sutherland also made regular contact with the burgeoning anti-colonial movements in Africa, with special emphasis on contacts in Nigeria and South Africa. In 1951, the two of them joined Houser in setting up the Committee to Support South African Resistance, which evolved into the American Committee on Africa, for four decades the key U.S. African solidarity network. Working with a small group of existing contacts within the War Resisters International, Sutherland was able to travel to the Gold Coast in 1953 — the British colony that would soon achieve independence through nonviolent civil resistance, and change its name back to the historic kingdom long developed in that West African territory: Ghana. Sutherland remained in Africa for 50 years, an unofficial ambassador of revolutionary nonviolence working closely with the ideologically and tactically diverse liberation movements. But Rustin’s life in 1953 was to take another turn: though never secretive about his sexuality, he was arrested in a car with two other men during a Quaker conference in Pasadena (in California, in part, to raise money for a planned trip to Nigeria). Charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct, he pled guilty to the single, lesser charge of “sex perversion,” as consensual homosexual activity was referred to in California at that time.

Back in New York, the officers of FOR were worried about the reputation of the organization given the new attention which Rustin’s arrest brought up regarding matters of sexual orientation. FOR policy regarding Rustin had been that he remain both quiet and abstinent — refraining from discussing or engaging in any sexual activity whatsoever, publicly or privately. With the California “incident” suggesting an inability to comply with this policy, the FOR asked Rustin to resign from staff; Muste threatened Rustin with firing if he did not comply. His resignation was also marked by a letter of resignation from the Executive Committee of the War Resisters League, but the WRL refused to accept Rustin’s stepping down. In a short period of time, in fact — by August of 1953 — the officers of the WRL (in many ways a sister organization to FOR) decided to offer Rustin a position on their staff, recognizing in him the talents that would later dazzle the young Martin Luther King, Jr. and a new generation of southern blacks looking to intensify the battle against segregation. WRL’s process of hiring Rustin, however, was not without its own controversies.

Though WRL Chair Roy Finch and WRL Executive Secretary Sid Aberman came to a joint agreement that hiring Rustin would provide “a unique opportunity” for the organization, and a proposal was put into place to hire both Rustin and Quaker leader Arlo Tatum as co-executive secretaries, there was much internal debate within the WRL Executive Committee and Advisory Board. Muste and Houser held roles as WRL executive members as well as their staff positions in FOR, but their individual feelings were split about the proposal. Arlo’s own brother Lyle Tatum, executive director of the Central Committee on Conscientious Objection at the time, wrote that Rustin had greater abilities to lead the work of the nonviolent movement “than any other person with even a remote possibility of availability.” Despite this, Tatum called to question whether WRL would be open to public attack if Rustin were to be hired, and whether future American Friends Service Committee and FOR cooperation with WRL could continue with Rustin on staff; he objected to the proposal “solely because of Bayard’s public record of homosexual practices.” Frances Witherspoon echoed the common refrain that “the psychological and physical trouble from which he suffers is not a recent one, but of fairly long standing, and I do not feel that the recent regrettable episode is far enough in the past.” And WRL Advisory Committee member George W. Hartmann, the university psychologist for Columbia University and professor of psychology at Roosevelt College voiced the prevailing “professional” opinion of the time. “Bayard’s ‘malady,’” Hartmann noted, “is a peculiarly obdurate one (according to most clinical experience) and I should be violating my psychological insights did I not enter a plea at this time for persistent vigilance, so that organizationally we do not suffer from any possible ‘relapse.’ I confess I know no easy way to make such ‘preventive hygiene’ effective, but it seems only fair to Bayard that we be as intelligent and humane in helping him—and the Peace Movement—as we possibly can.”

The proposal to hire Rustin prevailed, with some interesting insights expressed amongst the majority. Within the field of psychology was an advisor offering a more forward-looking view in the person of Herbert Kellman, at the time a post-doctoral research fellow of the U.S. Public Health Service at the Psychological Clinic at John Hopkins University. Kellman, now a long-standing professor at Harvard and innovator in the field of mediation, wrote to WRL Chair Finch that “it would be a shame for the pacifist movement to waste the talents, skills, and experience that Bayard has … there is little question that Bayard will be able to handle the job successfully despite his so-called ‘emotional problems.’” Fellow World War II conscientious objector Dave Dellinger, not yet himself an iconic anti-war figure, offered four pages of prophetic support for Rustin, stating that though Rustin’s sexual orientation might be going against the “dominant sexual mores,” there could be “no sense in trying to force on Bayard a Puritanical abstinence from the form of sex which apparently is natural to him.” Suggesting that the WRL and the movement as a whole should be wiser than to continue the position of “rigid abstinence,” Dellinger also noted that “the power of nonviolence works … through dedicated people” and those so dedicated should be educated about the importance of what Rustin had to offer. Comparing the nonviolent positions of groups such as the WRL and FOR with mass-based electoral campaigns, Dellinger wrote: “I would rather take a chance of losing a thousand votes and winning a hundred pacifists, by having Bayard work for us.” Concerned that an irrelevant nonviolent movement could suffer “the unity of the grave,” Dellinger concluded that what Rustin’s “exceptional talents and dedication” brought to the WRL, and what FOR was now lacking, was “a grass-roots, dynamic pacifism.”

So it was, in the fall of 1953, that Bayard Rustin became executive secretary of the War Resisters League.

For Jobs and Freedom

Bayard Rustin’s first years on the staff of the War Resisters League marked a period which historian Scott Bennett has called “the rebirth of the peace movement.” Undoubtedly a good portion of that energy came from the work of Rustin. In addition to directing the League’s general disarmament and anti-war work, youth and student outreach, and general organizational maintenance, Rustin helped the WRL found Liberation magazine in 1956 and pushed for further engagement with the growing civil rights campaigns. Some saw Rustin’s public profile as too controversial to handle, as evidenced by the absence of his name on the influential 1955 American Friends Service Committee booklet he helped to author — Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence — a primer on nonviolent solutions to the Cold War. February 1956 saw the publishing of the first of a series of WRL reports written by Rustin about the movements in the south, called “Report from Montgomery, Alabama.” In case there was to be any doubt about Rustin’s effectiveness, a preface to the pamphlet quoted Unitarian minister Homer Jack that Rustin’s counseling and trainings were especially crucial in the weeks following the mass arrests, and that “his contribution to interpreting the Gandhian approach to leadership cannot be overestimated.” A year later, Rustin authored and WRL published a new report, “Non-Violence in the South,” which outlined the deepening work being done against Jim Crow.

A 1959 WRL fundraising letter penned by Rustin spoke of the “vast changes” which were taking place in the years of the bus boycott and beyond. Speaking about a nationally-publicized North Carolina incident which raised the question of armed self-defense, Rustin wrote: “When the NAACP dismissed Robert Williams as its President in North Carolina because he advocated that ‘Negroes should return violence with violence,’ the Negro community was gravely split and much of the education on nonviolence was undone. Immediately our staff … helped arrange for articles on the subject by both Mr. Williams and Rev. Martin Luther King in the pages of Liberation. We are also bringing Mr. Williams to New York to debate with pacifists on October 1. This will be the first public discussion of the question at which the War Resisters League point of view will be presented in the middle of one of the hottest issues of today.” The “WRL position” was framed and articulated by Rustin — whose commitment to nonviolent direct action was matched by his willingness to dialogue and debate with those who disagreed.

By the end of 1959, however, the anti-segregation and southern empowerment work was too pressing to have Rustin remain based at WRL headquarters in New York. With the intervention and assistance of labor leader A. Philip Randolph, whose Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was amongst the first unions to successfully organize black workers and challenge the racial divides within the American Federation of Labor, Rustin was asked to work directly as a full-time advisor to Rev. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SCLC actually emerged as an organization to support King’s work with other clergy and lay people throughout the South, growing out of an idea developed by Rustin and implemented by Rustin and legendary organizer Ella Baker (who went on to help found and mentor the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, the “youth division” of the civil rights movement). A 1960 letter from Randolph (who had become close to Muste during Muste’s years as a socialist union organizer) to WRL Chair Eddie Gottlieb thanked the WRL for enabling Rustin to fulfill the “supremely important assignment … in the interest of civil rights.” A letter to Gottlieb from Rev. King reiterated his gratitude to WRL, and that “we are thoroughly committed to the method of nonviolence in our struggle and we are convinced that Bayard’s expertness and commitment in this area will be of inestimable value in our future efforts.” An “inner strategy committee” of King, Randolph, Muste, Gottlieb, Stanley Levison (a NY-based businessman who was a friend and advisor to King) and Rustin was set up to review the work as it related to “its contribution to the cause of nonviolence.”

By 1963, Rustin was immersed in the work for a March on Washington, a dream of A. Philip Randolph’s since the 1940s. When then-President Franklin Roosevelt established the federal Committee on Fair Employment Practice in 1941, effectively banning discriminatory hiring in the U.S. defense industry, Randolph called off the mass demonstration intended to pressure the White House. But the late 1950s, however, marked a time when federal action on behalf of disenfranchised blacks was far from a given, and the growing grassroots initiatives throughout the South could well be mobilized into a massive show of political force. Rustin was acknowledged as the best coordinator for such a unifying task, and the March for Jobs and Freedom, or Great March, was set for August on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Writing as the on-leave WRL executive secretary, Rustin noted that the nation was “in deep crisis in civil rights, North and South.” With the growing popularity of Malcolm X and the black Muslims, the validity and relevance of nonviolence was being called into question. “Fortunately,” Rustin suggested, “the heroic nonviolent resistance in Birmingham has temporarily restored the faith of many black people.” Rustin’s reporting on The Meaning of Birmingham, published in Liberation and reprinted by WRL in pamphlet form as a mobilizing tool for the March, explained that “the mood is one of anger and confidence of total victory … One can only hope that the white community will realize that the black community means what it says: freedom now.”

With 250,000 people assembled on the Great Lawn from every corner of the country, and its apparent direct effects on the halls of power, interest in mass civil resistance increased. As word spread throughout the U.S. of the mighty “I Have a Dream” oratory of Dr. King, and The New York Times focused attention on the radical testimonial in the speech of SNCC representative John Lewis the morning after the March, the full color photo on the cover of LIFE magazine was that of Randolph and Rustin, standing proudly in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Mixing Politics and Resistance, Peace and Freedom

The months and years that followed must have been a blur for most people working full-time on anti-war and anti-racist issues. On the one hand, the March and the movement seemed singularly responsible for forcing the politicians of the time to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Less than six months after the March, Rustin was responsible for an even more massive display of direct action, as hundreds of thousands of parents, students and ant-segregation activists took part in a one-day citywide boycott of the New York City public school system. On February 3, 1964, an estimated 450,000, mainly-black and Puerto Rican students stayed away from their assigned schools (many attending ad-hoc Freedom Schools at local churches and community centers for the day), calling on the city to set a clear timetable for an integrated system that would end the de facto separate and unequal school districts. Peace groups largely supported the effort (Eddie Gottlieb himself was not only WRL’s chair but a principal in the Department of Education), and though short-term goals were not immediately met, the long-term ramifications of such a broad and activist coalition were daunting to the powers that be.

At the same time, however, with an apparent military incident in the Southeast Asian Gulf of Tonkin, the U.S. “police action” in Vietnam was growing more war-like with every passing day. As some leaders suggested that the time had come for the protest movement to escalate its tactics of resistance, Rustin authored an influential paper, “From Protest to Politics,” which outlined a strategic need for the black-led freedom movement to shift away from militancy and resistance in the cause of equal rights towards forging greater social, electoral and economic alliances with the predominantly white trade union movement, liberal churches and politicians for the development of a movement that would probe and correct the contradictions of President Johnson’s proposed “Great Society” for all working Americans.

In this context, Rustin hoped that his colleagues in the WRL and other peace groups would be able to join in the grand coalition which would work at the very center of the U.S. power structure. “One of the most urgent problems in the peace movement today,” Rustin wrote in April 1964, “is how to ‘relate’ the issue of peace to the other great social issues of our day — Civil Rights, unemployment, automation.” While acknowledging that the WRL, because of its commitment to nonviolence, “has at times been termed dogmatic or inflexible in its consistently radical position,” Rustin commented that, based on its early and creative support of African resistance and its flexibility in aligning with the civil rights movement, he knew “of no other organization — in or out of the peace movement — which has more consistently and effectively done this job of relating.” The problem was, there was no agreement as to where the emphasis on such a series of relationships should be put. For Rustin, the choice was clear; when an institute was set up following the passage of the Voting Rights Act — named after and presided over by his mentor A. Philip Randolph — Rustin accepted the challenge of becoming its executive director working to strengthen the civil rights-labor connection. For the WRL and most other peace groups, the choice was to focus on the war in Vietnam, a decision which brought them into further opposition with the U.S. government.

In the early years of anti-war resistance, these differences in emphasis did not cause significant problems. Still writing as WRL executive secretary in July 1964, Rustin asserted that Vietnam was the U.S.’ “dirty war,” like the bloody war for Algerian independence was for France a decade prior. One of the first major anti-war rallies was held in New York’s Madison Square Garden, and featured both Rustin and Coretta Scott King. In a speech (to be published for the first time in the forthcoming PM Press/WRL book We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America), Rustin exclaimed:

Though Congress refuses to admit it, we are at war. It is a useless, destructive, disgusting war …We must be on the side of revolutionary democracy. And, in addition to all the other arguments for a negotiated peace in Vietnam, there is this one: that it is immoral, impractical, un-political, and unrealistic for this nation to identify itself with a regime which does not have the confidence of its people … I say to the President: American cannot be the policeman of this globe!

Though critics of Rustin claim that his opposition to the war was unclear at best, and that the alliances he made with the AFL-CIO neutralized his nonviolent politics, at the crucial early stages of anti-war movement-building in 1965, the links he made were more than clear: “The actor Ossie Davis,” Rustin recalled, “recently pointed out that we must say to the President: ‘If you want us to be nonviolent in Selma, why can’t you be nonviolent in Saigon?’” There was no restrained militancy in Rustin’s reminder that “the civil rights movement begged and begged for change, but finally learned this lesson — going into the streets. The time is so late, the danger so great, that I call upon all the forces which believe in peace to take a lesson from the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement and stop staying indoors. Go into these streets until we get peace!”

Nonetheless, the strategic and tactical differences in direction proved to be too great. On November 16, 1965, Bayard Rustin formally resigned from his executive position within the War Resisters League, in part because of his “distress and concern” over WRL policies regarding Vietnam. Rustin’s resignation was set in the context of the “great affection” which he felt for the organization, and he agreed less than two months later to serve on the WRL Advisory Council; seven years later, when many contentious splits in the left had occurred during the long course of the extended war, both Rustin and Randolph nevertheless agreed to serve on the League’s 50th Anniversary Commemoration Committee. But the close and consistent contact which had marked over two decades of communication between Rustin and his radical pacifist comrades was, for a time, now broken.

Rapprochement and Renewed Resistance

The late 1960s were at best a trying time for the coalition which had brought together moderate civil rights groups from the South, northern liberals (including the mainstream trade union movement), and radicals who saw the importance of working against the most overt and dramatic instances of racism in U.S. society. With the assassination of Muslim minister Malcolm X, and the ever-escalating war in Southeast Asia, the idea that fundamental change and equality could come about through nonviolent means seemed incredulous to many. Even the greatest symbol of nonviolence (and perhaps its most strategic practitioner) — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., now a Nobel Peace prize recipient — was, by 1968, sounding a bit more open than usual to supporting the national liberation movement of the Vietnamese.

The inroads that Rustin had made with the massive 1964 schools boycott put him closer to the activities of Al Shanker and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), which had just won the right to collective bargaining a few years earlier. In 1967, when rumblings about community control of the schools in black neighborhoods began spreading throughout the New York City, Rustin made the fateful choice to side with his labor allies — a move that in many ways defined his split with parts of the black movement. The local autonomy of black-led schools was contrary to the UFT notion of inter-racial worker’s rights and the need for united fronts against the always-recalcitrant Board of Education. In Rustin’s words, Black Power in general and community control in particular were impediments to “authentic revolution,” and a “giant hoax” which “would bring about the opposite of self-determination, because it can only lead to continued subjugation.” Neither fighting against the war, nor working to empower the black community was as important as working with the UFT to ensure the gains of the “integrated” working class. At Rustin’s suggestion, King sent words of support and a donation to Shanker’s bail fund when Shanker was jailed for leading a strike for smaller class size.

Many of the young activists of the SNCC were already harshly critical of Rustin, as the 1964 conflicts at the Democratic National Convention with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) caused many to lose faith in “the system” altogether — and Rustin’s tepid support of the MFDP and collusion with President Johnson caused a similar loss of faith in him. As historian Clayborne Carson described in a recent presentation, his own more balanced analysis of Rustin took years to develop, after his initial negative feelings as a young person in SNCC. Stokley Carmichael’s moving of SNCC away from nonviolence and towards Black Power intensified these divisions, which were to be solidified in short order. The demoralization which swept the peace and civil rights movements following the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King further set the tone for the disunity and confusion which were to follow. In a note from Rustin to Bill Sutherland in Tanzania shortly after the murder, he confessed to being “too discombobulated to write a coherent letter … Martin’s death leaves a fantastic vacuum that nobody — not me and ten others combined — could fill.”

When a fall 1968 UFT strike took place against the abridgement of due process rights of several white teachers by the black-led Ocean Hill-Brownsville community-controlled school district, the historically positive and mutually supportive relationship between New York City’s progressive Black and Jewish communities was torn asunder. A few short months earlier, Rustin accepted the UFT’s prestigious John Dewey Award with a speech on “integration without decentralization.” Rustin was alone amongst black leaders in standing with the union and supporting the strike.

Seventeen years later, this writer — a newly hired social studies teacher whose father was a UFT Chapter Leader throughout the tumultuous 1960s strikes (but whose years as a young activist had led me to significant criticism of the racism in the UFT and elsewhere) — understood the irony and significance of heading towards the main headquarters of the now-powerful teacher’s union, to the offices of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) and its director, Bayard Rustin. Throughout the 1970s, Rustin’s connection to the mainstream labor bureaucracy was solidified through a number of positions and actions. As public spokesperson of the Social Democrats, he helped lead the push for increasing AFL-CIO work on overall economic justice issues — while simultaneously taking strong anti-communist positions and criticizing some liberal positions as well. As a vice chairman of the International Rescue Committee, Rustin traveled around the world on behalf of the rights of refugees, including five trips to Thailand between 1978 and 1987 to spotlight the plight of Vietnam’s “boat people.” As Executive Committee chairman of Freedom House, he was an election observer in Zimbabwe, El Salvador and Grenada; Rustin was central to organizing the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee. Now, my own work in the anti-apartheid movement and interest in the Gandhian legacy in India was dovetailing with a renewed interest on Rustin’s part in reaching back to his radical pacifist roots.

At the end of 1985, the War Resisters International held its triennial conference in the province of Gujarat, India — home to Gandhi, his ashram, and so many of the institutions set up by the nonviolent movements of the last half century. A special guest, attending not as a speaker or presenter or honoree, was Bayard Rustin, interested in checking out the organization he had been so integral to. As a public non-registrant who had just become the youngest national chairperson of the WRL, I was in attendance as convener of the theme group on conscientious objection and resistance to conscription. I had also recently developed a special relationship with the newly-formed End Conscription Campaign (ECC) of South Africa, the coalition which was bringing together unprecedented numbers of whites into nonviolent confrontation with the racist regime. ECC’s national director, Laurie Nathan, was with us as part of the theme group, as was ECC activist Peter Hawthorne, South African Council of Churches representative Rev. John Lamola, and a representative of the women’s organization Black Sash. Laurie, Peter and I had traversed northern Europe, England, and India to spread the word of the connections between resisting racism and militarism, but were especially interested in meeting that man who had such a rich but controversial history in making those same links. The interest was unmistakably mutual, as Rustin took a keen notice of the work of ECC and the developments on the ground in South Africa.

In the months that followed, Rustin became a key fiscal and political supporter of the ECC, helping to funnel funds from the Quaker New York Friends Group with whom he had maintained a close connection. The meeting at the APRI offices in the UFT headquarters was one of a growing number of discussions and reunions I took part in, with Bayard’s old colleagues Ralph DiGia and David McReynolds in attendance. At one such get-together, we learned of the forthcoming 75th birthday celebration, planned to fete Bayard at New York’s famed Hilton Hotel. The invitation showcased the sometimes unlikely partners in commemorating the achievements of this complicated man. Germany’s socialist Willy Brandt joined with the AFL-CIO’s arch anti-communist president Lane Kirkland; Indian pacifists Narayan Desai and Devi Presad served as international sponsors alongside Israeli militarists Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres, Norwegian actress Liv Ullman, and many others. For us, a rag-tag group of nonviolent campaigners made up a dinner table at the event, including DiGia, McReynolds and I, along with Igal Roodenko and Laurie Nathan — who happened to be in town for a U.S. speaking tour. UFTers Albert Shanker and Sandy Feldman were happily part of the festivities, as we listened to tribute after tribute, including from former SNCC militant turned-U.S. Congressman John Lewis, former Urban League president Vernon Jordan, and recently awarded Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel; U.S. Presidents Ford and Carter each sent greetings. The diversity of attendees and supporters spoke volumes about the ways in which Rustin’s rich life had impacted positively on a wide spectrum of peoples.

One aspect of Rustin’s interest in rapprochement and the grassroots may have been due to the renewed attention he was receiving from the activist community since appearing on the July 1986 cover of Gay Community News. As the LGBT movement was growing by leaps and bounds, Rustin provided a special kind of solidarity by suggesting that the campaign for gay right was akin to the civil rights movement of its time. Rustin cautioned, however, the wise idea that solidarity must always be a two-way endeavor. “If we want some civil rights advocates to help us,” he proclaimed in the Gay Community News interview, “that means we’ll have to be looked upon by civil rights groups as a group that is going to help them.”

And then he was gone. This high-spirited, flamboyant, funny, brilliant, challenging soul force — this strong and courageous spirit who seemed always filled with energy and passion — passed away less than six months after his birthday dinner. The strain of an emergency operation for a perforated appendix caused a heart attack that his body could not endure. But his legacy, like his entire life, was a beacon of the power of positive action. The typically diverse group of people who packed Community Church for Bayard Rustin’s funeral were treated to the same words pledged by March participants in front of the Lincoln Memorial that fateful August day in 1963. An organizer till the very end, his life partner Walter Naegle made sure that each memorial program spotlighted the words which summarized Rustin’s undying outlook:

I pledge that I will join and support all actions undertaken in good faith and in accord with time-honored democratic traditions of nonviolent protest or peaceful assembly and petition … I will pledge my heart and my mind and my body, unequivocally and without regard to personal sacrifice to the achievement of social peace through social justice.

University of Notre Dame students, faculty, and staff supportive of full inclusion for the LGBTQ community have demanded action from the university’s administration in a newly-released video, “It Needs to Get Better.”

The 4 to 5 Movement, the coalition that produced the video, was launched in October 2011 to demand changes to institutional policies that foster the marginalization of the LGBTQ community.  The name of the movement stems from the fact that 4 out of 5 college students or college-educated individuals support full civil rights for gays and lesbians.  The 4 to 5 Movement seeks to raise awareness that supporting LGBTQ rights places you squarely in the majority, despite the position of the university or the Catholic Church.

Members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning community and their allies at Notre Dame are explicitly calling for two specific institutional changes: the approval of a gay-straight alliance student club (GSA) and the adoption of “sexual orientation” into the university’s non-discrimination clause.

Since the 1980s, LGBTQ students and their allies at Notre Dame have sought recognition through an official student club and have been denied somewhere near 15 times.  The university, through minor institutional reforms, has provided a degree of voice to the LGBTQ community and its allies, but the composition of the group is wholly different than that provided other student groups.  The council created by the university to address the needs of the LGBTQ community is not an independent student group, but serves in an advisory capacity to the Vice President of Student Affairs.

The university has also refused the adoption of “sexual orientation” into the non-discrimination clause citing that “adding the clause may not allow us to distinguish between sexual orientation and behavior.”

In the days surrounding the release of “It Needs to Get Better” the Notre Dame Student Senate and Faculty Senate each passed two resolutions, one calling for the University to officially recognize a gay-straight alliance and another calling on the University to add “sexual orientation” to the nondiscrimination clause.  While these pronouncements, in and of themselves, do not mandate institutional reform, they come at an opportune time as the newly-released video has spotlighted LGBTQ issues on campus.  The 4 to 5 Movement and its supporters will wait to see if the administration responds to the latest efforts to push for full inclusion and protection for LGBTQ students, faculty, and staff.  If the administration fails to respond, the 4 to 5 Movement plans to increase media attention on the issue as well as mobilize public displays of support on the Notre Dame campus.

Along with the release of “It Needs to Get Better,” the 4 to 5 Movement presented an open letter to the university president, Father Jenkins, making a plea for full inclusion:

It is the firm affirmation of all those working tirelessly for an inclusive environment that it needs to get better. It needs to get better because how we currently define our Notre Dame family excludes those who identify as GLBTQ. It needs to get better because our Catholic identity suffers until it does. […] It needs to get better because it is our moral obligation to make it so.

Banners all around the Notre Dame campus proudly display part of the vision statement of the university, taken from a 2005 address by President Jenkins: “heal, unify, enlighten.”  Healing, unifying, and enlightening are noble pursuits for an institution of higher learning, but the refusal to grant full inclusion to LGBTQ students, faculty, and staff sharply diverges from the goal of healing, unifying, and enlightening.

The 4 to 5 Movement can be found on Twitter and Facebook.  See the 4 to 5 Movement’s website for up-to-date news and response videos.

Photo from Occupy Auckland, New Zealand, by Simon Oosterman.

If you ask most people who’ve been watching from the sidelines what the Occupy movement has accomplished, they’ll probably say something about “changing the national conversation.” But if you ask someone who has been more closely involved, having spent weeks or months in tents and meetings, they’re more likely to talk about a conversation that changed them—a case in which a painful disagreement, perhaps, was forced by the proximity of the occupation to turn into a useful dialogue.

In the days before Chris Hedges’ polemic against “The Cancer in Occupy” created a firestorm in the movement by stoking fears of “Black Bloc anarchists” hijacking it from the outside, we lit a bit of kindling here on this site with a post of mine about rising tensions around the diversity-of-tactics framework. My report spread through Occupy Wall Street email lists, resulting in an extended exchange in the comments that included several of the people I’d written about. Like most exchanges in online comments, it wasn’t especially constructive.

A few weeks later, as nerves calmed, three of us who’d been involved in that exchange decided to sit down together in person, on a bench in New York’s Washington Square Park. Suzahn Ebrahimian and Sparrow Ingersoll have been among the most vocal and respected advocates of anarchist ideas in Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action Working Group. For this, they have increasingly been isolated and accused of advocating violence, even while training others in nonviolent tactics. They believe that, in the whole recent debate, worries of mostly-imaginary violence are turning people’s attention away from the real violence that has persisted in the movement.

Nathan: I’m curious to know, to start, why you wanted to meet with me together rather than separately. It seemed like there was some consensing going on in the background.

Sparrow: Because this is part of a larger relationship, slash event, slash conversation, and we feel really strongly against speaking on behalf of each other.

Suzahn: Yeah, that makes sense.

Nathan: Have you known one another for a long time?

Suzahn: I was around since the first day of the occupation at Liberty Square, and then Sparrow showed up—

Sparrow: The second week.

Suzahn: So not for very long. That’s like five months.

Nathan: Sparrow, you weren’t around for the first week of the occupation?

Sparrow: I wasn’t really involved, but I was around. I was observing, because I was super skeptical of it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to put any energy into that situation. When Suzahn says that I showed up, what they mean is that I came to a Direct Action meeting and immediately volunteered to do a training about hard-locks.

Suzahn: That’s right! Once Sparrow came into my life—

Sparrow: I came into existence. I acquired physicality on that day!

Nathan: When you showed up and offered to do a training on hard-locks, what kind of experience were you drawing from in years past?

Sparrow: My mom was an anti-racist and anti-KKK organizer in the Midwest when I was growing up. She also did a lot of stuff around poverty and mutual aid. I have been doing organizing of various kinds since I was about 13. The work I did for farm-worker rights was really important to me, personally. So were some of the things that I did when I was younger, like the harm-reduction network that my sister and I started at our high school.

Nathan: Where did you learn hard-locks?

Sparrow: Oh, you know—hangin’ out. Stuff comes up.

Nathan: How about you Suzahn?

Suzahn: Where did I learn hard-locks? Greenpeace—a totally nonviolent organization, which was my first official foray into radicalism. It’s definitely not where I stopped. At this point, I’ve moved beyond NGOs completely, and I’ve felt that their perception of nonviolence was in order to protect their corporate image, which turned me off a lot. But as far as life experiences, my father is an immigrant from Iran, so that has played a huge part in my awareness of and interactions with the state. I’ve encountered definite roadblocks in front of things that I need as a human being. For example, going to my grandmother’s funeral in Iran was something that my father couldn’t do, and that I couldn’t do, because of the Patriot Act and sanctions and certain really, really oppressive legislation in our society. I’ve spent a lot of time organizing in other capacities, but I would say experiences like that have pushed me very far in the past ten years or so.

Nathan: And you identify as an anarchist?

Suzahn: I guess so. That’s really complicated for me, though. My personal assessment is that I have to identify as an anarchist. Based on my existence in society as is, if I don’t want to identify with anything that’s presented to me, I have to call myself the “anti,” which isn’t necessarily the position that I want to be in. I would like to say that I am just a human being, and that I require the same things every other human being requires. But I guess that because of the world we live in, I have to say “anarchist.”

Sparrow: I’m also sort of uncomfortable with the label “anarchist”—but not because I think it’s stigmatizing in any way, which I think is asinine, but because I don’t feel like it accurately represents my political analysis. In particular, I don’t believe in a positive program.

Nathan: Can you explain what you mean when you say that you don’t believe in a positive program?

Sparrow: I don’t believe that we’re in a position to say, if we’re able to overturn capitalism or the state, what would come next, because we’ve been diseased by those power systems. I have the disease of capitalism. So I am in no position to tell anyone else what that world without it would look like or how it should work because I don’t know. I don’t think we’re actually in any position to say that. We can imagine forward and hope and think creatively about what that might look like, but I think to reify it in any sort of program is a really terrible idea.

Suzahn: The nature of resistance, anyway, means that you’re constantly changing your surroundings and the political landscape around you, so having a really set, dogmatic vision of the future that you’re working towards will become obsolete, and then you’re just imposing your worldview onto those around you, which is exactly the same situation that we were in before.

Nathan: Often, words like “positive program” are used to describe what you do in the meantime—direct action in the sense of mutual aid and alternative institutions. What do you think can be done now in order to move toward a less oppressive society? Are there certain things that you’re doing or that excite you particularly?

Sparrow: I’m working on the childcare collective for Occupy. That was named as a very concrete need and a very obvious barrier to lots of people doing the sorts of organizing that they want to do, or to being as involved as they’d want to be, or to participating in actions and events. I like mutual aid because any distance between ourselves and the state is good. One of the reasons that the park was so dangerous was that, by feeding 1,500 people per day and providing health care to anyone who wanted it, we were also posing an unanswerable question to the state: “Hey, state, why can’t you do this? You, with all of your resources and millions and millions of dollars, why can’t you feed everyone?” Whereas we, a group of poor people, who were actually fairly disorganized and kind of had our heads up our asses, can pull it together and feed 1,500 people three meals a day. That’s a really dangerous question to ask the state, because it invalidates it. But as far as creating a new world through mutual aid programs, or being an echo of a world we would like to see, that idea is a little bit complicated. It’s always a direct response to the world we live in right now, and not a thing unto itself. It therefore contains the world we live in right now and doesn’t make any sense outside of that context. Anyway, it’s good. I think we should do it, and we’ll continue to do it. But I don’t think that it constitutes a program for a new world. Necessarily.

Suzahn: I would say that even in the park we didn’t achieve mutual aid, because we were going off of what I’ve been thinking of as the gift-giver economy—which is closer to welfare than anything else, rather than people taking it upon themselves or feeling empowered to get those things themselves. That’s a problem primarily because we’re all poor, because we’re living in a capitalist system, so we depended upon donations.

Nathan: On to recent events. Can you narrate for me what the debates of the past few weeks have felt like for you, especially since the January 28 action in Oakland and the Chris Hedges article?

Suzahn: Actually, it has been since the beginning. I was part of Direct Action when it was first forming, and on day three of the occupation we consensed that we would work on the diversity-of-tactics framework. And it was fine. It made sense to people, but it was a relatively small occupation at that point, and the General Assembly was actually functional. But it has always been a constant struggle after that—before actions, reminding people that we work on this diversity-of-tactics framework. It really came out just before N17, for instance. Before major days of action, we’d have to be prepared to have this discussion. At every single nonviolence training we’d have to be prepared to have this discussion. It was almost something we had to arm ourselves for—no pun intended, I guess, of militancy—to talk about what it means to use nonviolent direct action, as opposed to nonviolence as a framework for everything we do. As more people came into Occupy, we were working with a lot of people who were not activists and brought a very pop-historical understanding of social justice movements into spaces of real organizing and resistance. It was difficult to work with. And then Oakland came about. What day was that?

Nathan: I think it was January 28.

Sparrow: Yeah. Oakland has been sparking a number of debates. One is about solidarity: What is solidarity? Are we in solidarity with militant actions that we would not do ourselves? And I guess it just reached a head. This was also in direct response to the manipulative strategies of Oakland’s Mayor Jean Quan and other state organizations—

Suzahn: Asking us to disown Oakland.

Sparrow: Quite frankly, I view every article that has come out—Chris Hedges, and Rebecca Solnit to a slightly lesser degree, but in other ways more insidiously in my opinion—as playing into that strategy of divide-and-conquer, where we are pitted against each other and put in the position of having to reaffirm the solidarity that we have taken for granted. We’re made to be accountable for the actions of people that we don’t even know because we support their overall struggle. Also, we’re wasting our time on constantly bickering about whether or not Oakland should have brought shields while they were being shot with flash bang grenades.

Suzahn: As if we’ve never used shields before.

Sparrow: Yes, on several occasions.

Suzahn: And nobody had a problem with it.

Sparrow: That narrative, first of all, is incredibly statist. It reaffirms state power. It is allowing the state to set our agenda for us. It is allowing the state to manipulate us and tell us who our friends are and are not. Let me tell you, I don’t give a fuck who Jean Quan thinks my friends are, because Jean Quan is not my friend. It also in many ways erases the real conversation that we should be having, which is that the police are brutalizing people. Every single day. Not just in the context of Occupy, the police brutalize people constantly. And, by talking about whether or not Oakland should have brought shields to this march is absurd in the extreme. We should be talking about the fact that they were being shot at in the first place.

Suzahn: Is violence what you’re seeing right in front of your face, that you can identify as a violent action—like throwing something back at a cop? Or is it the fact that cops exist in the first place? I feel like we haven’t had space to have that conversation here, other than the ones we’ve tried to create, and we’ve been attacked and subverted over and over again, however many times we have that conversation.

Sparrow: Or attempt to.

Suzahn: You know that scene in Jurassic Park—I’m sorry, I’m going to use this as an analogy.

Sparrow: Go for it.

Suzahn: You know that scene in Jurassic Park where they’re in the lab or something—I don’t know what they’re doing—and one of the scientists stops and is like, “People are dying! People are dying! Get it together!” That’s how I feel when I’m dragged repeatedly into this debate. Really? We really have to talk about this right now? There are more important things that we could be having meaningful discussions about.

Sparrow: There is a really horrible, toxic, bullshit thing that’s happening, but it’s not throwing a tear gas canister back at the cops. It’s Chris Hedges and Rebecca Solnit and others writing about people that they don’t know who use tactics that they don’t approve of and calling those people a cancer and demanding that they leave the movement. And the anarchist witch hunt that is constant at Occupy at this point. That is the cancer in this movement.

Suzahn: To me it really indicates a shallow lack of history of social justice movements, or movements in general. This is a really common tactic: bash the anarchists, or blame outsiders. After the 1960s race riots, for example, one of the main ways that the government tried to say that these riots were irrelevant—that they weren’t historical, that they weren’t justified expressions of rage—was blaming outside agitators. It just takes a very cursory look at the history of social justice movements that have been totally cleaved apart by the state to understand what’s happening now. And it’s really upsetting. That’s why I resist having the conversation as it is being presented to us, because it forces me to be on a side of a debate that I think is divisive.

Nathan: How has the online debate played out, for you, in meetings and among people that you’re encountering face to face? It seems that a lot of people were hurt in a personal way, were having personal interactions poisoned by this.

Suzahn: It’s incredible to me that when I have this conversation with people who have not read the Hedges article and are not aware of the debate, they are very open and receptive to just having a conversation. And frequently the conversation would end with, “I don’t think I would do x, y and z, but I could see why someone might do it. I don’t think I would tell them one way or another that it was wrong.” That’s how most of the conversations ended. But if I do have a conversation with someone who has read the Chris Hedges article, or even David Graeber’s article—though most of the things in there I supported—it’s really difficult because all of a sudden you’re in a predetermined framework that forces people to choose sides, and that’s inherently antagonistic. Even if you’re on the same side (quote-unquote “same side”—I’m even talking about it like that, using that framework now!) it’s still unhealthy and antagonistic to think about this very complex issue that way. I know for a fact that people don’t like me who might have liked me before, because of this. And half of it is because I just refuse to talk about it in the way that’s presented to me, because I just name it as what it is: it’s oppressive to try to fit me into that framework. I think people are confused by that and don’t want to pursue the conversation further.

Sparrow: I have definitely had interactions get f-ed up by this. I’ve been harassed. I’ve had people confront me, and been physically accosted, and been told to leave the movement on multiple occasions by multiple people. They say I’m ruining their movement, which is bizarre, because I’ve been involved in every major action that has been planned by Occupy Wall Street in some capacity, and I helped to create one of the most functional decision-making bodies that the movement in New York has. I’ve worked really hard. While I don’t think that entitles me to anything in terms of what the movement does next any more than anyone else, to be told that this work not only is invisible but is unwelcome is really hurtful. And then, if you look at who is saying what, I think what’s happening here should be very apparent. One group of people is saying, “Hey, I think that we can work together and respect that we might be making different choices at different points, and that’s okay because we can still work together on some stuff,” and other people are saying, “Get the fuck out of my movement, you’re worthless.” Who’s saying what? I think that, again, it’s an entirely false question. It is a false, manipulative question designed to divide the movement and stop us from working on what we need to be working on. Because nonviolent strategies are encapsulated in a diversity-of-tactics framework. Entirely.

Suzahn: And they’re totally legitimate and necessary in a lot of situations.

Sparrow: A diversity-of-tactics framework just says, “Let’s have a conversation that’s critical about what we’re doing, and also respect that other people in other places need to make different choices.” That’s it. It’s a position of compromise. It’s not demanding a totalizing strategy, or demanding that everyone have the same opinion about anything—but it’s treated as a full-frontal attack against liberals. It’s absurd. This was actually designed so that we can work together. That’s what this framework was created to do: to enable liberals and reformists and radicals to work together.

Suzahn: Last night, for example, during the Spokes Council, we consensed upon a community agreement—five months into it! Part of it was included a pledge to be “nonviolent,” but we asked that it be changed to “nonviolent towards each other.” The fear was that it could be used as a way to police people who might not fit in into somebody’s conception of a framework of nonviolence—because that’s ambiguous enough as it is—to give some people the platform to stand upon and wield the sword of nonviolence. That was terrifying to some people, especially in the Direct Action Working Group, which gets blamed for anything anybody does at any action, no matter who they are, and whether we planned it or not. We felt that agreeing to this could make us totally alienated and exiled, regardless of how we feel about nonviolence. That’s not even what we’re talking about. But then somebody blocked that amendment, saying, “Well, does that mean that, for example, the anarchists and Direct Action folks are going to be totally violent when not in an OWS space?” What?

Sparrow: As if that’s a thing that the movement can consense on. What I do on my own time is my own business.

Suzahn: Not only that—the dichotomy just isn’t there! It’s not where we’re at. Nobody is talking about going out and being violent.

Nathan: Have you been tempted to leave the movement because of this stuff?

Suzahn & Sparrow: Yes.

Suzahn: I’ve been seriously considering it every day for the past—I don’t know—three weeks, four weeks.

Sparrow: I am definitely, at the very least, dramatically changing the way that I interact with the movement.

Nathan: In the last few months, how much of your time has been going into Occupy Wall Street?

Sparrow: Ungodly amounts. Like, all of my time, essentially. Even when I’m at work.

Suzahn: Yeah, I’m so burned out.

Sparrow: I’m not interested in being constantly attacked for working my ass off. I’m not sure what that means or what I’ll be doing.

Suzahn: It’s shitty to feel so alienated. I woke up the morning of September 18 and felt so invested and got right to work. I literally changed my entire life—like almost everybody else who was there that day. To feel pushed out like this is so crappy. But that’s what I feel when I’m at meetings. I actually feel like I can’t sit through most meetings now, because this issue will be guaranteed to come up. I don’t want to be constantly feeling antagonized. Now, people expect me to be antagonistic, and I don’t want to be that way.

Sparrow: It’s just exhausting and stupid and a waste of my time. It’s a waste of my time to sit there and be constantly, constantly having the same fight with the same people, over and over and over again, when it’s so clear that what’s happening is that I’m just not being listened to.

Nathan: At the same time, I’ve been hearing a frustration among lots of organizers that the people who are being pushed out are the people whose voices are really shaping the movement and keeping it honest, who are sticking to positions that are at the heart of a lot of the structures and institutions that make the movement what it is. There’s a lot gratitude that maybe you’re not hearing enough of for the witness you’ve borne.

Suzahn: That’s good to hear.

Sparrow: That’s… good. It’d be nice to not be accused of, like, advocating for murder during the Spokes Council. As has happened.

Suzahn: I know that people in Direct Action who have experience and are anarchists feel pretty much the same way as we feel now. They’re the ones with knowledge of nonviolent direct action, and they’ve put it into practice over and over again—

Sparrow: And who have trained everyone else in the movement how to use it, thank you very much.

Suzahn: Yeah. We’ve been running trainings, and—I mean, I just want to keep doing that work. I don’t need any credit. I just want to keep doing it, but not compromise my beliefs and who I am and what I feel and the reason that I’m there. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. Unfortunately a lot of the people who feel appreciative, I find, are those who agree with me, which is really great, but I’d really like it if people could start agreeing to disagree. That’s one of the principles of nonviolence and direct action; sometimes you have to agree to disagree. I don’t like disliking people, you know. It doesn’t make me feel good.

Nathan: What do you think is a more constructive way to go forward and get out of this mud?

Suzahn: I feel really nostalgic for the park lately. That was where we had no choice but to work together, and I think the most growth happened there. I hope for a situation like May Day, or perhaps a reoccupation. Or—maybe this is crazy—perhaps the movement needs to fracture a bit. Maybe that needs to happen for a time. I actually don’t see that as an issue, if we keep talking to each other and keep in touch, understanding that people have different issues to work on and need different spaces in which to do so.

Sparrow: I’m actually fine with the idea that we might need to fracture in some fashion. I actually prefer the language of “divergence” rather than “fracture.”

Suzahn: Yeah.

Sparrow: Which has kind of happened anyway. Like, I have no idea what the Sustainability Working Group is doing right now. It’s not because I don’t care, it’s just that they’re a different community of people working on different sorts of things, and that’s totally fine. I also think that we need to stop imagining, first of all, that Occupy Wall Street is the Occupy movement, and gets to speak on behalf of the movement as a whole, which is not true at all. Also, the GA should not be taking positions on much of anything. That’s not what it’s for.

Suzahn: It’s a way for us to organize ourselves.

Sparrow: It’s a way to have a conversation. But the GA should not be used to didactically tell people what they think about things.

Nathan: And it’s not a legislative body.

Sparrow: Which is why it’s stupid and so hard to navigate and not particularly functional right now, because people try to use it as this legislative body that hands-down dictates, rather than as a conversational tool. But I don’t know how likely that is, because there’s so much animosity right now. I know that I’m beefing pretty hard. I’m really angry at some people, and I’ll own that.

Suzahn: Me too.

Sparrow: It’s hard for me to not feel disrespected and attacked and want not to have anything to do with those people. Because I do feel so disrespected. I have been so disrespected. And that’s hard.

Suzahn: You know what I’d like to see that would be constructive? Some actual internal anti-oppression work, rather than this false conversation about violence within the movement. Because, when you think about it, we have never had an action that was more militant than taking the streets.

Sparrow: No.

Suzahn: Anything that people perceive as violent has been an individual’s actions, and we don’t all have to take responsibility for anything individuals do, ever. It has been so rare. On the other hand, I spent the first three months of the occupation talking to other female-assigned people who have been so hurt and have left the movement because of patriarchy and—and racism, I might add, and national privilege. All of those three things, especially in combination. People have left the movement because of that, and their voices are not being heard, and that is violence. For me, it would be constructive if we actually talked about the violence that does exist, and is happening and has happened and has actually hurt people and disenfranchised people, and hurt the movement because we lose those voices. That might be a constructive thing to start doing. I’d be willing to have that debate.

Sparrow: It’s not even a debate. It’s like—

Suzahn: It is for a lot of people.

Nathan: To confront that violence might be harder than confronting imaginary violence.

Suzahn: Yeah. It’s hard to hear people talk about violence when I and others have been reduced to tears because of how patriarchal OWS spaces have been. I mean, nobody made a big deal when the minutes for the Speak Easy Caucus were thrown on the ground in the rain because it wasn’t actually considered a valid group and its minutes were hand-written, and so the person who was supposed to upload the minutes said, “This is stupid” and threw them on the ground and destroyed the minutes—of a women’s and queer caucus. No one made a big deal about that.

Sparrow: Or when the woman who was taking minutes at the Spokes Council we were both at got called a bitch from across the room? Nothing came of that.

Suzahn: There was no Chris Hedges article.

Sparrow: There was no reaction from the room. The only reaction came from Direct Action, and then she got up and left, and didn’t come back.

• Dozens of Bahraini Shiite employees fired over pro-democracy protests rallied on Wednesday demanding a return to work, a day after authorities said 181 would be reinstated.

• Thousands of angry Egyptian women joined a fifth day of protests in downtown Cairo to voice outrage over what they said was the military’s abuse and mistreatment of female demonstrators.

• The leaders of the rebellious Wukon village in southern China have reached a tentative resolution with senior provincial officials after a tense 10-day stand-off, which saw the villagers erect blockades around all of its entrances–effectively living outside government control–to protest their lack of basic needs.

• As many as 30,000 people protested plans for a coal-fired power plant in Guangong province, China’s most affluent and open-minded region. Residents stormed local government offices and blocked a busy highway that runs from the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen to the city of Shantou.

• A group of women from the Ukrainian topless-protest group Femen recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where on Monday they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials for a protest in Minsk in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

• After six days of protest, armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

• Demonstrators from Argentina’s UATRE farm hands union, blocked access to the Pan-American highway along some of Buenos Aires City’s main access routes to protest the passage of the controversial Farm Worker Statute, which was debated and approved today at the Senate today.

• For the second time in two weeks, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was temporarily drowned out by Occupy protesters as he made his final push to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. “Mic Check,” they announced, continuing, “Put people first!”

Leymah Gbowee, Liberian activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

One of the most extraordinary nonviolent, transnational movements of the modern age was the women’s suffrage movement of the first two decades of the 20th century. New Zealand first extended the franchise in the late 19th century—after two decades of organizing efforts. As the new century began, women’s suffrage movements gained strength in China, Iran, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and Vietnam. Another 20 years and women were enfranchised in countries around the world, from Uruguay to Austria, the Netherlands to Turkey, and Germany to the United States. Few if any of those leading the campaigns for the ballot for women would have identified their approach as one of nonviolent action, nor would they have known its philosophical underpinnings or strategic wisdom. Like most who have turned to civil resistance, they did so because it was a direct method not reliant on representatives or agencies and a practical way to oppose an intolerable situation.

What exactly is the link between the rights of women, gender, nonviolent action, and building peace?

The word gender originates with Old French and until recently pertained mainly to linguistic and grammatical practices of classifying words as either masculine, feminine or (in some languages) neuter. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest English usage in 1384. Chaucer used the French spelling gendre in 1398. UNESCO’s Guidelines on Gender-Neutral Language note that a person’s sex is a matter of chromosomes, whereas a person’s gender is a social and historical construction—the result of conditioning. I would further define the “feminist” project as the struggle for women’s emancipation, the insistence that women should be free as human beings to make fundamental choices in their lives.

Gender is not women’s lib by another name. Nor is it to say, with respect to nonviolent action, that women exude maternal attributes or possess a reflexive interest in peacemaking. Notions that women have a “natural” inclination toward conciliation and peace delegitimize the voices of women in policy and international relations. Rather, as Susan Moller Okin shows, the “social institutionalization of sexual differences” goes to the heart of politics, and therefore, peace.

At the University for Peace (UPEACE), where I teach, the gender and peace building department has persistently recognized the importance for young peace builders of studying nonviolent action. This recognition is partly related to an insight explained by Pam McAllister, who argues that “most of what we commonly call ‘women’s history’ is actually the history of women’s role in the development of nonviolent action.”

Programs and procedures for the empowerment of women have increasingly been recognized as fundamental to achieving durable peace. Data gathered over the past three decades show that improvements in the education and status of women stabilize and elevate the whole of societies. The uplift of women and their participation in public policy is now widely understood to be essential to economic growth, health status, reducing poverty, sustaining the environment, and consolidating democracy in all societies, including those long bent by authoritarianism and despotism.

Essential to the building of peace is an understanding that the ideologies and structures of patriarchy are among the most resilient systems of domination in human history, and are explicitly related to the socialization of men as warriors and exclusion of women from policy. The longevity and entrenchment of this social system has benefited from justifications of itself as “natural” and divinely sanctioned. Patriarchy has permeated structures and assumptions of power and economics, including forms of labor, presumptions of representative parliamentary bodies, religious dogma and the orthodoxies of faith traditions and leadership, military services, and concepts of the meanings of security.

In Africa, the exclusion of women is now being inferentially linked to the root causes of acute violent conflicts. For example, their customary invisibility in Rwanda is part of the background to 100 days in 1994 in which nearly one million unarmed persons were slaughtered. Crimes went unhalted. The international powers remained silent. (It should be noted that women participated in the genocide as well, killing other women or inciting men to rape and kill Tutsi women—as in the case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, now on trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania.) In 2002, Rwanda’s secretary general for the ministry of gender, M. Claire Mukasine, now an elected senator, told a visiting UPEACE delegation of which I was part that Rwandan governance had traditionally excluded women from public affairs. “Rwanda had no tradition whatsoever of women being able to speak in public,” she said of the colonial period and onward.

It was assumed that the father, brother, or husband speaks for the women; in the past, women never took a stand in public. They were not permitted to speak out at community meetings or the elders’ sessions. We think the exclusion of women is connected to the sad events in Rwanda.

The results of this recognition are striking. Today, Rwanda has more women on an absolute and proportional basis of its parliamentarians than any other such legislative body worldwide.

The awarding of a 2011 joint Nobel Peace Prize to a Liberian woman, Leymah Gbowee, embodies the links between gender, war, peace, and nonviolent struggle. Miriam O’Reilly’s interview of her for the BBC World Service illustrates the connection. In the midst of civil war led by the warlord Charles Taylor, Gbowee’s Women and Peace Network in 2000 brought together thousands of Christian and Muslim women to sit-in in a football stadium, exerting their popular defiance against “all the violence around us.” They had to protest, she maintains, because “there were no other possibilities. We had no option of being invited to the peace talks. We put ourselves out there as a symbol.” The women called for an immediate ceasefire. When it was violated, the network turned to another nonviolent method: Lysistratic nonaction, refusing sex with their husbands.

This method is named for Aristophanes’ farce of 411 B.C.E., first performed in an Athens exhausted by the Peloponnesian War. His hit play, Lysistrata, featured a sex strike by the war-weary women of both sides to end hostilities. Gbowee told the BBC that the idea of a sex strike came from frustration, as a means of pushing Liberian men, who had been silent and thus complicit with the war and violence. Maintaining that they would be fasting as an act of denial, the Liberian women held that as long as they were protesting and fasting, they could not be intimate with their men.

“We said let’s place our already battered bodies into the streets,” Gbowee remembers. “Let’s show the world that with our broken selves we can heal the nation.”

In 2006, the newly elected President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, another of the 2011 Nobel Peace laureates, formally requested Taylor’s extradition. Upon arrival in Monrovia, he was transferred to the custody of the United Nations. He is still held in the U.N. Detention Unit in The Hague, where he is on trial for his role in the civil war.

Taking gender seriously in the process of building peace, finally, is the job of everyone, not just of women. A former student of mine is the gender officer for the Nigerian parliament, and he, along with several other male, West African former students of mine, are doing important and strategic work. A Pakistani woman student, having completed her doctorate in gender at the London School of Economics, soon returns home to teach with these multiple areas of strength. An Israeli former student completed her doctoral studies, works for a civil-society organization, and is active in the peace movement. Each in different ways recognizes that building lasting peace must include taking questions of gender seriously.

• In spite of the crackdown that has killed at least 110 people in Homs over the last five days, protesters in Hama, Damascus, Deraa as well as several other towns in Idlib and Deir Ez-Zor have taken to the streets in support of those in the beseiged city.

• On Friday, students at Essex High School in Vermont staged a sit-in and protest to support freshman Cole Peterson after he reported being assaulted in anti-gay attack.

• In Chicago, more than 1,000 senior citizens joined forces with Occupy Chicago on Monday to protest cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid. After a large march about 50 people were arrested for blocking traffic on the street.

• About a dozen people occupied a historic building in the Romanian city of Cluj on Monday to protest a plan to mine gold using the controversial cyanide process in a nearby heritage area.

• A four-hour general strike took effect across Israel on Monday to demand the government improve working conditions of contract workers.

• Nine Greenpeace activists were arrested after they chained themselves to a gate and climbed a crane Monday at a South African coal-fired power station to protest dependence on coal, weeks before the country hosts a global conference on climate change.

• Thousands of residents of the Northeastern Chinese port city Dalian took to the streets on Sunday to demand the relocation of a petrochemical plant that threatened to spill toxins into the city last week when a typhoon breached a nearby dike. Chinese authorities have complied and ordered the closure of the plant.

• Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis poured into the streets of major cities and towns across the country on Friday, keeping the pressure on the nation’s embattled president to step down.

• About 100 people participated in a two-mile march in Santa Cruz, California on Sunday to demand a halt to construction of 32 homes on what is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Native American burial site.

• More than 1,000 people led by the poet turned activist Javier Sicilia have joined a march in Mexico City to protest the government’s strategy in the fight against drug gangs.

• Tunisian security forces used tear gas and truncheons Monday to disperse several hundred protesters in the capital demanding that the government step down for failing to prosecute supporters of the ousted president.

• Thousands of people turned out at rallies across Australia on Sunday to call on federal MPs to support a ban on live animal exports.

• Thousands of people took to the streets of Dublin yesterday to demand civil marriage equality.

• Tens of thousands of people gathered across Israel on Saturday to call for lower living costs in an effort to show the government their protest movement has countrywide support.

• More than 300,000 people took part in demonstrations across Israel on Saturday night calling for “social justice,” a blanket term covering demands for reforms in housing, taxes, healthcare, childcare, and education.

• Forty-five thousand Verizon Communications Inc. workers from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., went on strike Sunday after negotiations fizzled over a new labor contract for more than a fifth of the company’s work force.

• Tens of thousands of opponents of embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh held rallies across the country following prayers on Friday.

• Thousands of protestors largely drawn from Pakistan Justice Party staged a sit-in protest in front of country’s Parliament in Islamabad on Saturday evening to protest corruption, unemployment and US drone strikes.

• Israeli forces targeted three separate rallies across the West Bank on Friday, firing tear gas at participants and lightly injuring dozens.

• In Jordan, dozens of activists staged a sit-in following Ramadan evening prayers on Friday night in front of Salt city’s cultural center, protesting what they concidered government stalling in impementing nesessery political and economic reforms.

• Thousands of demonstrators angry about the government’s austerity program briefly reoccupied a central Madrid plaza on Saturday after police withdrew following widespread outrage at officers’ handling of a protest two days earlier.

• The pro-LGBT activists from GetEqual Texas braved the Houston sun on Saturday to protest outside Reliant Stadium, where Governor Rick Perry and thousands of  Evangelicals were holding an unabashedly political “day of prayer,” “The Response.”

• Nepalese riot police arrested teachers affiliated with temporary teacher struggle committee during a sit-in protest in front of the education ministry in Kathmandu on Thursday.

Tina Rosenberg, whose recent book Join the Club is a must read for activists, had a piece on the New York Times’ Opinionator blog yesterday criticizing the importance of social media in social movements. In keeping with the thesis of her book—that peer pressure is the driving force behind social change—Rosenberg argues, much like Malcolm Gladwell, that “the idea of Facebook Revolution has been a great example of wishful thinking by the digerati.” She does cite, however, one recent event that gave her some second thoughts.

On Friday, I wrote about Friendfactor, an organizing tool used in the successful battle for gay marriage in New York State.  Friendfactor combines social media and real-world friendship to motivate people to get active.  Instead of getting an e-mail from a group asking you to support a political goal, you get one from a close friend or family member asking you to “help me get my full rights.”    Friendfactor is particularly interesting because it seems to offer a solution to one of the biggest obstacles in using social media for political change:  people need close personal connections in order to get them to take action — especially if that action is risky and difficult.

The Friendfactor story is an interesting one in its own right and worth a read. But despite the promise it offers for strong-tie building, Rosenberg still concludes that social media are nothing without “careful strategy, meticulous planning, strict nonviolence, unity.”

David Faris took exception to this belittling of digital activism in a blog post for the Meta-Activism Project:

What I would love is for Tina Rosenberg to find someone who studies digital media and thinks that street tactics were unimportant in the Egyptian revolution. My own interviews with activists and planners suggest that at least 10 days of careful on-the-ground planning – including timing how long it would take to march down certain streets as well as producing tactics to produce the illusion of greater numbers – went into the Tahrir protests. I don’t think any rational person would argue that the “digerati” put out the call on Facebook and then magically there were a million people in the streets.  Why must these two things be mutually exclusive? Egyptian organizers also learned a great deal about protest tactics from their Tunisian counterparts – and much of this learning took place with online exchanges, including back-and-forth exchanges on, yes, Facebook. This rigid demarcation between “on-the-ground” and “digital” simply does not square with the reality of today’s organizers.

While Rosenberg doesn’t see the two areas as totally exclusive, she does think the digital realm is more purely informational. Citing CANVAS executive director Srdja Popovic, she says social media has three uses:

It is an efficient and cheap way to give members information — much better than putting up posters.  It also conveys to members the highly motivating realization that they have big numbers — people who know their pro-democracy Facebook group has 70,000 members will be much more excited and less fearful than people unaware they are part of a very big group.  And it is an efficient way to transfer skills and information; for example a CANVAS manual for nonviolent struggle has been downloaded 15,000 times in Arabic since February.

As far as the potential for social media, exhibited in platforms like Friendfactor, Rosenberg says the best they can likely do is “reach deep or reach wide” but probably not both. Faris, however, begs to differ:

But of course social media do both of these things – they bind you to your close friends while also giving you massive amounts of free and easy information about acquaintances. We don’t just protest because our three best friends are doing it – we also do it when our 450 acquaintances all sign up for it too, or when we see 100,000 people committed to do something we believe in. And even if you buy the argument that we only care what our close friends do, chains of information dissemination can pass through circles of close-knit friends and still reach hundreds of thousands of people. That kind of strength in numbers makes individuals much more likely to take the considerable risks associated with protest in authoritarian regimes.

This is an interesting debate but it should be noted that the Meta-Activism Project is providing cutting edge research on this quickly developing field. Perhaps it is not getting the respect it deserves because it is not yet as advanced or as deeply embedded as our understanding of on-the-ground activism. But as Egypt clearly shows, no modern understanding of activism will be complete without continued research and experimentation in the field of digial activism.

For an even more in-depth argument explaining the success of social media in Egypt be sure to read the rest of Faris’s post.

• Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Yemen on Sunday, demanding that a transitional presidential council be created to replace embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh and that his sons and relatives leave the country.

• Thousands of Greek demonstrators have begun gathering in front of the parliament in Athens at the start of a 48-hour general strike to protest against deep budget cuts demanded by international lenders as the price for more financial aid.

• Spain’s “indignant” activists began their last and longest protest march on Saturday, leaving from the northeastern city of Barcelona to cover 650 kilometres on their way to a major Madrid rally on July 24.

• Tens of thousands of people demonstrated around Morocco both for and against a proposed new constitution on Sunday, just a week before it is to be voted on in a referendum.

• About 3,000 people marched through downtown Montreal on Saturday to call for an end in Quebec to shale gas exploitation and a technique known as “fracking” that has triggered strong opposition from environmental groups.

• Thousands of people joined hands on Saturday across beaches from Florida to California to form a human chain to protest offshore oil drilling and promote clean energy.

• Police arrested 12 D.C. voting rights activists in front of the White House Saturday afternoon.

• Hamas prisoners being held in Israeli jails on Monday began a hunger strike after seven of their number were put in solitary confinement.

• Seoul National University student council members ended their 28-day sit-in against the university’s privatization plan on Sunday after 40 of 61 students voted to accept a tentative agreement between the council and the university.

• Russian police have arrested and charged up to 14 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) activists who were attempting to hold a demonstration in St Petersburg.

• Last Wednesday, Zimbabwe’s public workers began an indefinite strike to press the cash-strapped coalition government of President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai to more than double wages.

• Over 80,000 people took to the streets of Athens late Sunday on the 12th consecutive day of protests against the government’s draconian austerity measures. Some 3,000 people also gathered in Greece’s second largest city, Thessaloniki, according to the police.

• Syrians poured into the streets on Friday in some of the largest antigovernment protests yet despite the shutdown of much of Syria’s Internet network. At least 96 people have died over the past three days in the continued crackdown on protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

• In Israel, thousands of people rallied in Tel Aviv to denounce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. It was one of the largest pro-peace rallies Israel has seen in years.

• Up to 23 people were killed and over 350 wounded on Sunday when Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinian demonstrators stormed the border area from Syria.

• The March on Blair Mountain, with more than six hundred people setting out from Marmet, West Virginia on a fifty-mile, five-day journey began today to protest mountaintop removal, strengthen workers’ rights, and support investment in sustainable jobs for Appalachia.

• A two-day sit-in staged to protest against drone attacks concluded on Sunday with a warning to the relevant authorities that supplies to Nato forces in Afghanistan would be blocked if drone attacks continued.

• At least 30 people were injured when Indian police used teargas and batons to break up a mass anti-corruption protest led by India’s most famous yoga guru on Sunday.

• Approximately 250 supporters —including many veterans—converged on Saturday at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to rally for the release of alleged whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning.

• Sri Lanka’s powerful Buddhist clergy demonstrated Friday urging the president to restore rights of workers and students days after a violent police crackdown on a labour protest killed one factory worker.

• Three gay rights activists, including a former Democratic Senate candidate, were arrested last Thursday for their protest on the floor of the North Carolina House of Representatives.

• Fourteen students were arrested at the University of Washington on Wednesday evening on charges of criminal trespass after they refused to leave a building that was closed, as part of the ongoing protests over the UW’s contract with food-services provider Sodexo.

• About 20,000 people assembled in the Greek capital’s central Syntagma Square on Sunday, responding to calls on social networking sites for gatherings across Europe to demand “real democracy”.

• Tens of thousands of mostly liberal protesters again filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday to call on the military council to end the practice of sending civilians to military trials, to expedite legal action against former President Hosni Mubarak and his associates, and to start governing with some civilian presidential council.

• Five protesters were arrested by U.S. Park Police at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC on Saturday after taking part in a flash mob to protest a recent court decision that upheld a ban on dancing within the memorial. A second protest is being planned for this weekend—and over 2,300 people say they’ll attend.

• Russian police detained more than 60 activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Tuesday at demonstrations against restrictions on freedom of assembly.

• Several people were arrested for participating in a banned gay-pride event in Moscow on Saturday.

• Up to 100 protesters blocked the driveway to the Brisbane, Australia hotel where mining bosses from the coal seam gas industry were holding an annual summit yesterday.

• Several dozen opponents of shale gas marched through Quebec, Canada on Monday to warn of its possible environmental impact. Training sessions on how to organize sit-ins and occupy exploration sites are also being planned.

• 15,000 people gathered in the Sbata district of Casablanca on Sunday to demand more democratic freedoms, jobs and better social conditions. But security forces intensified their hardline crackdown.

• Dozens of supporters of hunger-striking retail cleaning workers, joined by U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, rallied Sunday in south Minneapolis to demand higher wages for supermarket floor cleaners.