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First Large Protest Kicks Off Week of Expected Anti-GOP Rallies •
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Protest in the Park? Showdown Is Tomorrow
By Jim Dwyer
New York Times
Saturday 28 August 2004
After months of legal dickering, the city's elaborate plans to steer antiwar protesters away from Central Park will be tested tomorrow by what is widely expected to be one of the city's largest political demonstrations in decades.
Although the main protest group, United for Peace and Justice, failed to win a city permit to hold a formal rally on the park's Great Lawn, it remains the ultimate destination for many participants in the march, which some organizers believe could draw up to 250,000 people. The city is equally determined to keep mass demonstrations off the park's grass, and the struggle for the moral high ground will set the tone for a week of political theater inside and out of the Republican convention.
The city has created a route, agreed to by the organizers, that involves a giant U-turn for the marchers, who will travel from Union Square to Madison Square Garden and back. The organizers have asked the participants to complete the route, even though the turn downtown will take them about a mile farther from Central Park.
After the march is over, the protesters will eventually be able to make their way uptown to the park, the organizers say. City officials say that there is nothing to stop people who are abiding by the law from going there - once they have moved out of the parade route's frozen zones, which will end around 32nd Street and Fifth Avenue.
The stakes are high for the protesters, for both national political parties, and for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who backs President Bush in a city where such support is a distinctly minority sentiment.
It is a near-certainty that police commanders will have to adjust their crowd-control plans, depending on the movements of large numbers of people, said John Timoney, the chief of police in Miami and a former first deputy police commissioner in New York.
"The city cannot have a pitched battle the day before the convention," Chief Timoney said. "You cannot have cops billy-clubbing protesters on the 6 o'clock news."
Helen McMahon, a retired I.B.M. employee who lives in Greenwich Village, said that she would decide at the march about making the trek to Central Park.
"I will test the crowd," she said. Of her friends, members of her group at the McBurney Y.M.C.A. will be taking part. "Also, half the people in my exercise class for active older adults are going," she said. "I belong to another senior group, but most of them are not able to walk, so they're not coming."
Ms. McMahon was among tens of thousands of people who could not get through to an antiwar rally on the East Side of Manhattan on February 15, 2003, a frigid Saturday. Crowds packed First Avenue from 49th Street to as far north as 76th Street - half a million people, the organizers said, while the police department estimated it was about 100,000.
Many of those arriving for that demonstration, including Ms. McMahon, were sent uptown by police officers along Second and Third Avenues, and many found themselves penned in, unable to move in any direction.
The 2003 rally, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, had drawn a wide spectrum of people from the metropolitan area, including many who had never been to a mass protest, and some believed that the police tactics were intended to keep them from attending the rally.
At the time, a spokesman for the Police Department said that there was no intention to keep people from getting to the rally, but that the organizers had not provided enough marshals, and that the police officers were trying to control the number of people feeding in from the side streets to avoid dangerous overcrowding on First Avenue.
Tomorrow's parade will also involve a long diversion from the ultimate - if unofficial - destination. Conor Clarke, a college student who tried to reach last year's protest, said that the city again seemed to be making matters difficult by denying a permit for Central Park, which he saw as a sensible site for the protest. "I think the city is playing hardball, in sort of a nonrational way," he said.
Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, said that the gates to the park would remain open. After marchers move south on Fifth Avenue and reach 32nd Street, they will be able to leave the route and walk to Madison Avenue, Mr. Browne said. They will not be allowed to walk on the roadways.
"We are not going to permit another en masse march to the park - you can't take over the streets without a permit," he said. "If people are walking on the sidewalk and not otherwise breaking the law, they can walk in any direction they want."
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A protestor identified as Terra Lawson-Remer (upper right) lowers herself to a waiting police officer after she helped unfurl a banner on the facade of the Plaza Hotel in New York on August 26, 2004. The 60-foot banner reads 'Truth' and 'Bush' with arrows pointing in opposite directions. Two members of a protest group called Operation Sibyl rappelled down the facade to unfurl the banner.
Photo by Peter Morgan/Reuters |
First Large Protest Kicks Off Week of Expected Anti-GOP Rallies
By Chaka Ferguson
The Associated Press
Friday 27 August 200
NEW YORK - Kat McIver was so disgusted with the Democratic and Republican parties that she walked 258 miles from Boston to New York to protest at both of their conventions.
McIver, a 22-year-old activist from Orange County, Calif., helped organize DNC2RNC, a march that began at the Democratic Convention in Boston and ended Thursday blocks south of Madison Square Garden, where the Republican National Convention will begin on Monday.
"The two parties are not representative of the people," she said. "They represent corporate greed."
Nearly a thousand people joined McIver and about 50 other fellow travelers from Boston at Central Park, the first large rally before a week expected to draw hundreds of thousands of protesters to the GOP convention. The event runs from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.
"I feel the country needs to be reclaimed and I want to show solidarity with the people who will help us get it back," said Paul Lambermont, 43, of Queens, who joined the marchers.
The DNC2RNC coalition, a mix of environmentalists, labor unionists and community activists, held aloft the red and black standard of the anarchist movement, American flags and a large banner that read "Democracy Uprising" as they wound their way down Broadway, flanked on both sides by hundreds of police officers. The marchers chanted "No Bush, no Kerry, revolution is necessary" and "Drop Bush, not bombs" to cheers from some onlookers.
At a separate demonstration on Thursday, a small group of AIDS activists were arrested after they stripped naked opposite the site of the convention, demanding that President Bush make good on his promise to help HIV-positive people in the world's poorest countries. They were variously charged with public lewdness, disorderly conduct and reckless endangerment.
Earlier Thursday, police arrested four people for allegedly unfurling an anti-Bush banner out of the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue. The sign had the word "truth" on an arrow pointing north toward Central Park - where anti-war protesters want to rally - and another arrow with "Bush" pointing south toward Madison Square Garden.
Police said an officer needed 38 stitches for a leg wound he suffered at the scene, and the four protesters were charged with assault along with reckless endangerment, criminal trespassing and other offenses.
An additional five protesters were arrested Thursday night at Union Square, two for allegedly using a bullhorn without a permit and three on charges of obstructing governmental administration, police said.
Larger protests are still to come
The anti-war group United for Peace and Justice said it would stage a march on the eve of the convention past Madison Square Garden and ending at Union Square. The group also suggested that protesters could still gather in Central Park that day, despite a judge's ruling that it may not stage a rally there.
"To our supporters, we ask that you follow our march to the end and then make your own decision," said Leslie Cagan, the group's national coordinator.
United for Peace and Justice also announced that the Rev. Jesse Jackson, liberal filmmaker Michael Moore and actor Danny Glover were expected to join the march.
A second group, which saw its appeal to stage a rally in Central Park on Saturday rejected in a Federal Court earlier this week, said that it has begun handing out fliers informing protesters of their right to congregate in Central Park.
The flier issued by the ANSWER coalition outlines city regulations, which the group says allow protesters to bring political signs to the park as long as they are no larger than 2 by 3 feet.
"The fact is that people are coming to Central Park," said Brian Becker, national coordinator for the group. "It is their constitutional right to do so."
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Friday that most of the demonstrators "want to voice their opinions in a peaceful way."
"I think there are a small number of people who want to come here and be disruptive, we're aware of that, were prepared to handle that," Kelly said in an interview on CBS's "The Early Show. "But again, the vast majority of people are going to be peaceful."
A poll released Thursday said 81 percent of New Yorkers approve of lawful demonstrations during the convention, and 68 percent approve of nonviolent civil disobedience. Nearly all disapprove of violent protests, the Quinnipiac University Poll found.
Eleven percent said that they would take part in protests this weekend or during the four-day convention.
Lisa Fithian, national co-chair for United for Peace and Justice, said the DNC2RNC march was just the beginning.
"We know Sunday when we march, we are following in the footsteps of people who walked 258 miles," she told the crowd. "It's the power of the people who are going to make a difference in this country."
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