Vincent Harding is a professional historian who also made history himself. In 1960 he and his wife Rosemarie Freeney Harding immersed themselves in the Southern Freedom Movement (a phrase Harding prefers to the Civil Rights Movement), working throughout the South in the anti-segregation campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Since then he has tirelessly chronicled the movement in a series of books—including Hope and History and Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero—and was the senior academic advisor to Eyes on the Prize, public television’s definitive documentary history of the movement.

Dr. Harding’s drive to tell the story of this movement was never a simple matter of buttressing its place in American history—though, in itself, this was a vital undertaking in a nation that tends to erase the experience and achievements of people of color.

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Twenty more innocent people were pepper-sprayed last week, although not by police cracking down on protesters this time, but by a woman fighting for a discounted Xbox at Walmart.

This was only one of many violent incidents that marred Black Friday last week, as throngs of crazed consumers hit stores across the country to get the best deals of the year, on what turned out to be the biggest day of shopping ever.

In an effort to push back against the frenzy of consumerism that overtakes our country every year at this time, Adbusters used the 20th annual Buy Nothing Day to kick off their latest campaign: #OCCUPYXMAS.

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Yesterday, Waging Nonviolence launched our first post published in collaboration with Possible Futures, an exciting new website and book series organized by the Social Science Research Council: “Women in Occupy Denver” by Chad Kautzer. In addition to choosing really great collaborators, however, Possible Futures has also gotten a start on launching an important discussion in various academic disciplines about what the Occupy movement represents. Most of all, taking advantage of the SSRC’s international orientation, the project is approaching the movement in global terms—as few are, and as all of us should be.

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Photo: Tanner Spendley.

Occupy Denver (OD) has been a tenacious occupation—and some say the angriest—fighting on despite external pressures and internal strains along the fault lines of oppression and privilege. The following is mostly about the latter, particularly the role and projects of women organizers, but the external pressures are great and not unrelated, so let me first say a few words about them.

The two greatest external threats to OD have no doubt been inclement weather and aggressive policing under the direction of the Democratic political establishment here—the first in the nation to forcibly uproot an Occupy encampment. Three weeks after OD’s emergence, John Hickenlooper, a pro-business Democratic governor, gave a press conference with Democratic Mayor Michael Hancock, declaring the encampment illegal. Days later, riot police carried out a middle-of-the-night raid, arresting dozens and removing some 80 tents from the encampment near the Capitol building. It would be the first of three forcible evictions.

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If you’re in New York this coming Wednesday, we hope you’ll consider joining WNV editor Nathan Schneider and contributor Jeremy Kessler for a panel discussion about the First Amendment issues raised by the Occupy movement. Get in on Facebook here.

A little after 7 last Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters marched from Zuccotti Park, the scene of a massive police eviction two days earlier, into the warren of streets that surround the New York Stock Exchange.  It was the two month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which has introduced a new language of political confrontation—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, Occupy!, “Whose Streets? Our Streets!”—to the national conversation. An entire “Day of Action” was in the works. For the early morning event, marchers hoped to reach Wall Street itself, or as near to Wall Street as they could get given the metal barricades, police vans, motorcycles, and riot police that have effectively privatized that narrow strip of once-public land. It was perhaps the movement’s most carefully-orchestrated action—though you might not have known it by watching the news that day.

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Ray Lewis getting arrested at Occupy Wall Street.

On Monday night, a student protest at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY), began as a peaceful march and demonstration against tuition hikes. But it quickly escalated into a situation where police were pushing students and faculty out of a public forum of CUNY’s Board of Trustees. The incident was terrifying for many of us present, though it fortunately did not result in any serious injuries. The greater damage, perhaps, was emblematic of a pervasive problem in the Occupy movement: the police became a proxy for the “one percent,” and instead of protesters finding ways to directly challenge the powerful elite, they ended up taking their anger out on police officers.

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Last Friday night, in a conversation with a longtime Occupy Wall Street organizer while walking (and skipping) toward an elusive Spokes Council meeting, we got to talking about violence. We’d done so before, always enjoyably; he’s a nimble conversationalist and well-dressed to boot. He’s also one of those in the movement who declares his openness to violent tactics if necessary. To him, the violence of state oppression ultimately justifies whatever means it might take to remove it. Revolutionary violence on the part of the oppressed is not really violence at all. Breaking windows is not violence. Nor, presumably, is a well-placed bomb.

As he sees it, a commitment to nonviolence only constrains a movement, preventing it from doing any meaningful resistance (despite the fact that Occupy Wall Street has effectively made just such a commitment). It was in explaining this that he reminded me of how, at Berkeley, the authorities described protesters locking arms as violent. If they can say that, he concluded, then nonviolence is by definition tantamount to passivity.

True—but only if we’re willing to accept the kind of wordplay that somehow passes muster at Berkeley.

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The heart of Plato’s Republic is a treatise on how humans are to organize themselves into a collective form of governance so as to best steer the ship of state. Five forms of government are posited—aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny—and philosophized about to determine which is most fit to govern the city. Lest we jump to quickly to conclusions, I’ll spoil the surprise for the high school seniors getting set to take on massive college debt to read Plato in freshman seminar: it’s not democracy.

So Plato—one of the most influential philosophers whose mentor (Socrates) was executed by the state—would not be a fan of Occupy Wall Street’s scathing critique of the corporate state? Hardly. He was just intimately aware of the dangers of majority (mob) rule as well as the tendency toward violence, repression, and injustice in timocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. His vote—pun intended—was for an aristocracy where the philosopher-king (sic) ruled. Democracy, for Plato, is dangerous because of the willy-nilly nature of the masses, whose opinions can sway as quickly as the winds blow. It was direct democracy, after all, that sentenced his mentor to death. And as poll after poll shows—from Presidential candidate primaries to Jay Leno’s infamous “Jay-walking”—America may not be ready for direct democracy a la Athenian style.

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Liberty Plaza (or Park or Square) looks an awful lot like Zuccotti Park again—aside from the damaged flower beds and a broken plastic peace sign lying in the gutter. At 1 in the morning, hundreds of police in riot gear stormed the plaza, shining floodlights and tearing down tents. Sanitation workers loaded occupiers’ belongings into garbage trucks, including the books of the occupation’s library. LRAD sound cannons were on the scene, and as many as five police helicopters hovered high overhead, where airspace was closed to media aircraft. On the ground, police cornered reporters out of view from the plaza during the eviction of the protesters, some of whom locked arms around the kitchen area and nonviolently resisted removal. They faced pepper spray and batons for doing so.

When I arrived at around 2:20 a.m., riot police were preventing anyone from getting closer than a block away from the site. By the time I returned there just after sunrise, after hours following marches and spontaneous assemblies and affinity groups meeting in the streets, the place had been completely cleared and washed. It was blocked off with barricades, despite a court order that the occupiers should be allowed to return. Back in Duarte Square on Canal Street, though, where hundreds had temporarily gathered, it was surprising how positive the mood actually was.

So, then, what next? What does the Occupy movement do when its flagship occupation is, at least for now, gone?

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