Image from "Advice for avoiding Stop and Frisk" blog post at Raid My Words.

On Saturday, May 12, several hundred people rallied in front of the New York City Police Department headquarters to protest the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, considered by many to be a prime example of modern-day, institutional racism. But with approximately 40,000 officers and a nearly $5 billion annual budget, the NYPD is the largest police force in the U.S. and, some say, the most powerful on earth. So how does one try to change an ongoing policy enforced by such an entrenched institution? According to some activists at the rally, the way to begin is twofold: by educating people about their rights during police searches and by mounting a community effort to do surveillance on the NYPD.

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As we evaluate the successes and errors of past organizations in order to shape more effective movements today, it is vital to be careful and precise about what lessons remain relevant. Certain organizations, such as the Black Panthers, have amassed so much interest and subsequent mythology that it is often particularly difficult to sort through the hype. White nonviolent activists, furthermore, have an added burden; if we are to be valued participants in building successful mass movements for social change we must be extremely careful to provide as much principled solidarity as we do criticism.

George Lakey’s recent essay, “The Black Panthers’ ‘Militarist Error,’” spotlights an important fact, delivered by a person with many years of anti-racist experience: Many leading former Panthers recognize a strategic error in their glorification of the gun. Even amongst those Occupy Cleveland supporters who were recently accused of plotting to blow up an Ohio bridge, the message is clear: If a movement is going to be built for the long haul, “those kinds of tactics just don’t cut it.”

There are other vital insights, however, which must be brought to light if peace advocates are to further engage in drawing lessons from the Panther legacy.

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Huey Newton and Bobby Steale, via Wikimedia.

The Black Panther Party was an African-American radical organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Originally it was called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and even though it emerged in the North, it was responding to the same anger and frustration as the Deacons for Defense felt when watching black people get punished for standing up for themselves in the South.

The Panthers’ immediate goal was to protect black neighborhoods from police brutality. The group evolved from black nationalism to a broader revolutionary socialism. It rapidly expanded to many cities, still mainly in the North, and became influential. It differed from the Deacons for Defense in that it didn’t think of itself as a security force for the civil rights movement. Instead, it offered an outright alternative to the civil rights movement, with goals that included “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” Its best-known programs were its armed citizens’ patrols to monitor the police, and Free Breakfast for School Children. Other programs included free medical clinics, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and an experimental school to develop new methods for educating African-American children.

Not nearly enough notice has been taken of the Panthers’ effort, as a revolutionary organization, to include alternative institutions in their program. Many in the Occupy movement have made the same move. Both are in alignment with a framework that emphasizes “prefigurative work,” which builds skills and creates new ways for organizing life in a future society.

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Still from the 2005 Showtime movie "Deacons for Defense," via imfdb.

I didn’t catch up with Bob Moses until 1964, when I joined the training staff for Freedom Summer. Bob led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s entry into Mississippi in 1961, which meant three years of facing a repressive situation that makes the U.S. of 2012 seem like a cakewalk for activists by comparison. In those days, even registering to vote in Mississippi could get you killed in the broad light of day if you were African American. SNCC workers often lived together in houses, sometimes in isolated rural areas. They had no official protection; local police were likely to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. They took precautions of many kinds, but they shunned security culture, believing it would reduce their safety and effectiveness.

I remember asking Bob the question that was on many activists’ minds across the U.S. then: How had SNCC workers survived for three years in the most terrifying situation in the country?

“The only way we’ve stayed alive,” he said, “was that we didn’t keep guns in our Freedom Houses, and everyone knew it.”

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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.

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The news has just come out that, after weeks of agitating, organizing and protesting across the United States, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, has been apprehended and is being charged. To get an update about the efforts that have ultimately forced police in Sanford, Florida, to act, I contacted Occupy Wall Street organizer Nelini Stamp, who is currently down in Sanford.

What have you been doing in Florida?

I came down to Florida when I found out about the push to mobilize students to march for 40 miles from Daytona Beach to Sanford and end in a direct action. With my training experience in NVDA [nonviolent direct action], I decided to fly down and join the march. We marched for 40 miles with 40 students from all over Florida, which ended in a civil disobedience action on Monday.

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• Trayvon Martin protesters on Monday blocked the front doors of the Sanford Police Department in Florida for nearly five hours but walked away peacefully after convincing city officials to hold a community forum.

• In Tunisia, police fired tear gas Monday to disperse a rally of hundreds on a central Tunis avenue where demonstrations are banned.

• Pilots for Spanish airline Iberia, part of International Airlines Group, went on strike on Monday, grounding 150 flights in the first of 30 one-day strikes to protest against the start-up of low-cost carrier Iberia Express.

• Egyptian train drivers staged a sit-in in Cairo’s Ramses Train Station on Monday, bringing rail traffic across the country to a halt for more than seven hours, to demand an additional allowance for working on Saturdays, bonus increases and risk allowances.

• Opposition supporters wearing white ribbons walked in a circle during a Red Square protest against the rule of Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Sunday. At least three activists were arrested after pitching a tent near Lenin’s Mausoleum.

• Thousands of Shiite Muslims from Islamabad and Rawalpindi on Sunday participated in a sit-in outside the parliament to protest the killings of Shiite Muslims in Pakistan and government crackdown against the innocent people of Gilgit City.

• Bahraini security forces fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands of protesters marching Friday in support of a jailed human rights activist whose nearly two-month hunger strike has become a powerful rallying point for the tiny nation’s Shiite-led uprising against the Sunni monarchy.

• On Friday, police in India dispersed protesters who staged a sit-in protest against the gang-rape of a woman.

Albert Florence

Strip. Bend. Spread. Cough. That is what five of nine Supreme Court justices — themselves swathed in so many layers of robes and clothes to be almost indistinguishable from one another — have just told the American people. Watch out. If you’re suspected of any crime, you may be arrested, processed and strip searched — a severe and invasive form of punishment meted out all before being found guilty.

Any crime. Making a left hand turn without your turn signal. Pooping without scooping. Demonstrating without a permit. Walking a leashless dog.

Before making this judgment, the Supreme Court heard an epic tale of justice failing. One minute in 2005, Albert Florence was sitting in the passenger seat of the family BMW, his pregnant wife behind the wheel and his four-year-old son tucked in his car seat in the back. The next minute, he was off on an eight-day odyssey that included two strip searches. All of it was the result of a computer error.

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In 2009, Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives (before being overthrown in a recent coup), held a cabinet meeting underwater. He sat at a table anchored to the ocean floor, wearing a wetsuit and oxygen tank, and signed a law meant to make the country carbon neutral within a decade.

The Maldives is the lowest-lying nation on the planet, with 400 miles of coastline and one of the world’s most densely populated capitals. It is, according to Rob Nixon, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an “invisible nation of no apparent consequence,” and as sea levels rise due to climate change, it may well be the first nation whose entire population becomes climate refugees. President Nasheed’s underwater meeting was a desperate attempt to catch the world’s attention, to add dramatic urgency to a process that, however disastrous, occurs over a period of decades.

The Maldives are far from alone: 43 island states have announced that, without swift global action against climate change, they face “the end of history.” From far away on a bright spring morning, this statement could easily seem hyperbolic — if it were heard at all. But for those at risk, it’s the frightening truth. And therein lies the challenge.

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• Tens of thousands of students protested on Thursday against a 75 percent tuition hike at universities in Canada’s mostly French-speaking Quebec province, bringing downtown Montreal to a standstill. Since mid-February, nearly 300,000 students have boycotted classes, blocked bridges and held smaller protests around the province.

• More than 1,000 indigenous protesters reached Ecuador’s capital Thursday after a two-week march from the Amazon to oppose plans for large-scale mining on their lands. The protesters were joined by thousands of anti-government protesters in Quito.

• Hundreds of farmers gathered in the Vietnamese capital on Thursday to demand the return of rice fields they say were confiscated by heavily armed police just days after receiving an eviction notice.

• More than 1,000 people gathered in a downtown Brattleboro park on Thursday to call for the closure of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. It was the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license. Over 130 protesters were arrested for unlawful trespass as part of a civil disobedience action.

• More than a thousand people rallied in New York City’s Union Square on Wednesday evening with the parents of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed teenager who was shot dead in Florida in late February.

• Portuguese workers halted trains, shut ports and paralyzed most public transport in the capital Lisbon on Thursday to protest austerity measures and labor reforms imposed as a condition of a 78-billion-euro ($103 billion) bailout.

• Three Tibetans who have been on hunger strike outside the UN headquarters for the past month ended their protest Thursday after the UN said investigators would look into events in Tibet.

• Several people were arrested on Tuesday after a rally in a Phoenix intersection to protest immigration policies of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.