Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism

DIRECT

ACTION

L.A. Kauffman has spent more than thirty years immersed in radical movements as a participant, strategist, journalist, and observer. She has been called a virtuoso organizer by journalist Scott Sherman for her role in saving community gardens and public libraries in New York City from development. Kauffman coordinated the grassroots mobilizing efforts for the huge protests against the Iraq war in 2003–04. Her writings on American radicalism and social movement history have been published in The Nation, n+1, The Baffler, and many other outlets.

DIRECT

ACTION

Protest and the Reinvention

of American Radicalism

L.A. Kauffman

First published by Verso 2017

© L.A. Kauffman 2017

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

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Verso

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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-409-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-422-9 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-410-2 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Garamond by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall

Printed in the US by Maple Press

To the memories of

Armando Perez (1948–1999)

Ray Davis (1963–1999)

Françoise Cachelin (1923–2003)

Brad Will (1970–2006)

Contents

Introduction

1. Mayday

2. Small Change

3. In Your Face

4. Turned Up

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

What happened to the American left after the sixties? Whole bookshelves groan under the weight of histories of the sixties, and both the Old Left and the New Left have been richly and extensively studied. Yet, while significant waves of activism have punctuated the history of the last forty years, the story of American radicalism in recent decades remains almost untold.

That may be, at least in part, because the story is such a difficult one to tell—not for lack of radical endeavors over this time period, but because of their profusion. It’s not simply that there’s no single organization or political tendency or leader that could plausibly represent the larger left. The most significant dynamic in American radicalism in the period after the sixties has been a proliferation of movements, causes, and political identities. These are so numerous that listing them all would be tedious: the landscape of the contemporary left includes feminisms of many forms and hues; radical movements for racial justice as varied as the communities of color that have given rise to them; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer radicalisms, evolving and complex; radical forms of environmentalism, from deep ecology to the climate justice movement; labor-based radicalisms and multiple strains of anarchism and socialism. At times, it can seem like the number of recent radicalisms stands in inverse proportion to their overall influence, for on the whole, the period since the 1960s has been inhospitable for the left. In the face of this tangled multiplicity of movements and political initiatives, it’s perhaps not surprising that there have been few attempts to survey the post-sixties radical landscape as a whole, to tease out broad historical patterns from the plethora of organizations, mobilizations, and events.

This book represents one telling of the tale, a distillation of more than thirty years of observation, reporting, and organizing on the frontlines of many of these movements. The story of American radicalism is told here through the lens of direct action: the fierce, showy tradition of disruptive protest employed by many of the era’s most distinctive and influential movements. Direct action was far from the only approach used by radical movements throughout this era, and there’s no claim here that it’s always the best or most productive one. It has, though, consistently served as a laboratory for political experimentation and innovation, and as an arena for grappling with many of the big challenges facing progressive movements more generally: how to win meaningful victories and sustain communities of resistance in a rightward-shifting political climate; how to build movements that don’t replicate the very power dynamics they seek to challenge, especially in matters of race and gender; how to create effective political alliances that respect the voice and autonomy of all partners; how to inspire vision, hope, and action in hard times.

Direct action can refer to a huge variety of efforts to create change outside the established mechanisms of government—it’s a slippery and imprecise term, much debated by the movements that use it. Protest marches, boycotts, and strikes all are, or can be, forms of direct action; the same is true of picket lines, sit-ins, and human blockades. The term itself dates back about a century, having first been widely used by the early twentieth-century Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known colloquially as the Wobblies, the liveliest and most fiercely anti-capitalist labor movement in US history. The working class and the employing class have nothing in common, the IWW’s manifesto began, and the organization always considered the complete abolition of capitalism to be its ultimate goal. Toward that end the Wobblies called for industrial action directly by, for, and of the workers themselves, without the treacherous aid of labor misleaders or scheming politicians, action that encompassed everything from work slowdowns and factory occupations to industrial sabotage.

It is the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and the 1960s that serves as the most important touchstone for the direct-action movements of recent decades, however. From the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides and the march over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, the civil rights movement’s acts of resistance to racial segregation and white supremacy have become so emblematic of transformative collective action that every major movement since has referenced them in some way. The mythic status acquired by the civil rights movement over time cemented its role as model and inspiration, even as persistent racial divisions on the left complicated claims to its legacy. But the basic vision of direct action outlined by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from Birmingham jail has shaped its use ever since: Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension, King famously wrote, that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

Direct action is most closely associated with movements of the left, but there is no necessary correlation between a movement’s use of direct action and its politics: disruptive protest can be employed to further all kinds of agendas, some downright reactionary. Most dramatically, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue organized a massive and sustained campaign of blockades outside abortion clinics in the late 1980s, involving more than 20,000 arrests. The guide that many of these blockaders used, anti-abortion activist Joseph M. Scheidler’s 1985 Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, directly echoed the catalog of protest methods found in political scientist Gene Sharp’s 1973 classic The Politics of Nonviolent Action, a foundational text of direct-action organizing. But the relative rarity of right-wing direct action is testament to the democratic and anti-authoritarian values that typically pervade the practice: in theory the tactics of direct action might be politically neutral, but in the actual world of grassroots organizing, they have been anything but.

This book, in any case, doesn’t try to catalog the variety of ways that direct action has been used in recent decades. Instead, it follows the unfolding of a specific, linked, and messy set of political experiments. The movements profiled in this book embraced a particular set of organizing practices, deeply shaped by feminism and queer radicalism, in response to a broad sense of crisis and retrenchment after the 1960s. Of course they wanted to remake American society, but many concluded that they first had to remake the American left, much of which seemed dispirited and directionless as the grand hopes of the sixties receded. The new movements rejected hierarchical organizational structures, traditional leadership models, and rigid ideologies, and they sought forms of activism and political engagement that could preserve rather than subsume difference and multiplicity. Women, especially queer women, played crucial roles in this process of political reinvention, infusing this new radicalism with feminist practices and values through the very process of movement-building.

Some of the movements chronicled in this account have had enormous impact: ACT UP saved millions of lives by hastening the development of key AIDS medications and expanding access to their use. Others, though, only added a modicum of political friction as policies they opposed moved forward: though they had a variety of important political impacts, the global justice movement and Occupy Wall Street no more stopped the forward march of neoliberalism than the antiwar movement stopped the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Protest actions that felt important and empowering to participants sometimes had few repercussions outside the small world of activism, while others that seemed futile at the time had far-reaching effects that weren’t felt for years.

The book begins with an ending and ends with a beginning. It starts with the last major protest against the Vietnam War, which was also the largest and most ambitious direct-action protest in US history: a remarkable yet nearly forgotten attempt by antiwar radicals to shut down the federal government through nonviolent action in May 1971. This protest so badly rattled the Nixon administration that it ordered federal troops to sweep up protesters by the thousands, in the largest mass arrests in US history. This Mayday 1971 protest also pointed the way toward a new style and structure of radical organizing that movement after movement would embrace and adapt in the decades to come. The book concludes with another watershed moment more than forty years later, when protests against the August 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri grew into a nationwide movement for black lives, animated by disruptive direct action and an intersectional politics rooted in the feminism of queer women of color. Along the way, the book traces deep connections between movements usually viewed in isolation, and considers how activists have grappled with a political landscape divided by race and dominated by the right.

To weave together this story, much has been left out: the labor movement, for instance, mostly embattled and declining over this time period but with interesting pockets of promising insurgency, receives only glancing attention. Race is central to this narrative, but it’s largely considered in black and white; important traditions of organizing and resistance in other communities of color, from Native American organizing around land rights, environmental justice, and climate justice to the direct-action immigrant rights movement of recent decades, are only mentioned briefly. All stories are of necessity partial renderings of complex realities, this one especially so.

Those who have taken part in direct action know that it’s a profoundly embodied and often personally transformative experience. Organizer Brad Will, a builder of bridges between radical movements until his 2006 murder by right-wing paramilitaries in Mexico, captured it well in a 2000 interview. Direct action, he said, is like a conduit, like electricity. It moves through you, not just into you. You’re not a battery, you’re a wire. The movements that have sought to harness this kind of energy in recent decades and channel it into sweeping change have never come close to achieving their full aims. But through direct action, these movements have won more victories and catalyzed more social transformation than one might expect given their relatively modest size. Together they have fashioned a new kind of American radicalism along the way. This is a story about dealing with defeat and marginalization, but its ultimate message—for those who share the values of the movements profiled here—is one of hope: no matter how long the odds, with smart organizing, and the right tools, we can win more than we imagine.

1

Mayday

The largest and most audacious direct action in US history is also among the least remembered, a protest that has slipped into deep historical obscurity. It was a protest against the Vietnam War, but it wasn’t part of the storied sixties, having taken place in 1971, a year of nationwide but largely unchronicled ferment. To many, infighting, violence, and police repression had effectively destroyed the movement two years earlier in 1969. That year, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the totemic organization of the white New Left, had disintegrated into dogmatic and squabbling factions; the Black Panther Party, meanwhile, had been so thoroughly infiltrated and targeted by law enforcement that factionalism and paranoia had come to eclipse its expansive program of revolutionary nationalism. But the war had certainly not ended, and neither had the underlying economic and racial injustices that organizers had sought to address across a long decade of protest politics. If anything, the recent flourishing of heterodox new radicalisms—from the women’s and gay liberation movements to radical ecology to militant Native American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian-American movements—had given those who dreamed of a world free of war and oppression a sobering new awareness of the range and scale of the challenges they faced.

On May 3, 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, DC, ranging from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service, Justice Department, and other government agencies, some 25,000 young people set out to do something brash and extraordinary: disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action. They called themselves the Mayday Tribe, and their slogan was as succinct as it was ambitious: If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government. The slogan was of course hyperbolic—even if Washington, DC were completely paralyzed by protest for a day or week or a month, that would not halt the collection of taxes, the delivery of mail, the dropping of bombs, or countless other government functions—but that made it no less electrifying as a rallying cry, and no less alarming to the Nixon administration (Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called it potentially a real threat). An elaborate tactical manual distributed in advance detailed twenty-one key bridges and traffic circles for protesters to block nonviolently, with stalled vehicles, improvised barricades, or their bodies. The immediate goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get to their jobs. The larger objective was to create the spectre of social chaos while maintaining the support or at least toleration of the broad masses of American people.¹

The protest certainly interfered with business as usual in Washington: traffic was snarled, and many government employees stayed home. Others commuted to their offices before dawn, and three members of Congress even resorted to canoeing across the Potomac to get themselves to Capitol Hill. But most of the planned blockades held only briefly, if at all, because most of the protesters were arrested before they even got into position. Thanks to the detailed tactical manual, the authorities knew exactly where protesters would be deployed. To stop them from paralyzing the city, the Nixon Administration had made the unprecedented decision to sweep them all up, using not just police but actual military forces. Under direct presidential orders, Attorney General John Mitchell mobilized the National Guard and thousands of troops from the Army and the Marines to join the Washington, DC police in rounding up everyone suspected of participating in the protest. As one protester noted, Anyone and everyone who looked at all freaky was scooped up off the street. A staggering number of people—more than 7,000—were locked up before the day was over, in what remain the largest mass arrests in US history.²

Many observers, including sympathetic ones, called it a rout for the protesters. It was universally panned as the worst planned, worst executed, most slovenly, strident and obnoxious peace action ever committed, wrote esteemed antiwar journalist Mary McGrory in the Boston Globe afterwards. In the New York Times, reporter Richard Halloran flatly declared, The Tribe members failed to achieve their goal. And they appear to have had no discernible impact on President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam. Even Rennie Davis, the Chicago 7 defendant and New Left leader who had originally conceived of the Mayday action, announced at a press conference that the protest had failed.³

But the government’s victory, if you can call it that, came only as a result of measures that turned the workaday bustle of the district’s streets into what William H. Rehnquist, the assistant attorney general who would later become chief justice of the Supreme Court, called qualified martial law. While the government hadn’t been stopped, there was a very real sense that it had been placed under siege by its own citizens, with the nation’s capital city transformed into a simulated Saigon, as reporter Nicholas von Hoffman put it in the Washington Post. Nixon felt compelled to announce in a press conference, The Congress is not intimidated, the President is not intimidated, this government is going to go forward, statements that only belied his profound unease. White House aide Jeb Magruder later noted that the protest had shaken Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday a very damaging kind of event, noting that it was one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some way to get out of the war.⁴

Mayday, the scruffy and forgotten protest that helped speed US withdrawal from Vietnam, changed the course of activist history as well. It came at a time of crisis for the left—indeed, the distress call embedded in the mobilization’s name could apply equally well to the state of American radical movements in 1971 as to the conduct of the war they opposed. The last major national protest against the Vietnam War, Mayday was also a crucial first experiment with a new kind of radicalism, one rooted as much in its practices as in its ideas or demands. This quixotic attempt to stop the government—so flawed in its execution, yet so unnerving in its effects—was organized in a different manner than any protest before it, in ways that have influenced most American protest movements since.

The history of American radicalism since the sixties, when it’s been considered at all, has typically been misunderstood as a succession of disconnected issue- and identity-based movements, erupting into public view and then disappearing, perhaps making headlines and winning fights along the way but adding up to little more. Mayday 1971 provides the perfect starting point for a very different tale, a story about deep political continuities, hidden connections, and lasting influences. It’s a story rooted less in radicals’ ideas about how the world ought to change than the evolving forms of action they’ve used to actually change it—whether hastening the end of an unpopular war, blocking the construction of nuclear power plants, revolutionizing the treatment of AIDS, stalling toxic trade deals, or reforming brutally racist police practices. Many movements contributed to this long process of political reinvention, but feminism and queer radicalism played special, central roles, profoundly redefining the practice of activism in ways that have too rarely been acknowledged. And because this is an American story, it’s shaped at every level by questions and divisions of race. The story begins with a major racial shift in the practice of disruptive activism, as the direct-action tradition refined by the black civil rights movement in the fifties and sixties to such powerful effect was taken up and transformed by mostly white organizers in the seventies and eighties.

The Mayday direct action took place a year after the Nixon Administration invaded Cambodia, an escalation of the Vietnam War that had provoked angry walk-outs on more than a hundred college and university campuses. At one of these, Ohio’s Kent State University, National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of protesters, killing four and wounding nine; ten days later, police killed two students and wounded twelve more at Jackson State University in Mississippi. The deaths sparked strikes at hundreds more campuses and inspired thousands who had never protested before to take to the streets. By the end of May 1970, it’s estimated that half the country’s student population—perhaps several million youth—took part in antiwar activities, which, in the words of former University of California president Clark Kerr, seemed to exhaust the entire known repertoire of forms of dissent, including the bombing or burning of nearly one hundred campus buildings with military ties.⁵ So many people were radicalized during the spring 1970 uprising that the antiwar movement suddenly swelled with a new wave of organizers spread all throughout the country, many in places that had seen relatively little activism before then.

The tumult of spring 1970 faded by the fall, however, and an air of futility hung over the established antiwar movement. Many of the longtime organizers who had persevered beyond the movement’s crisis year of 1969 were now burning out. As one antiwar publication put it in an unsigned piece, for the previous seven years we have met, discussed, analyzed, lectured, published, lobbied, paraded, sat-in, burned draft cards, stopped troop trains, refused induction, marched, trashed, burned and bombed buildings, destroyed induction centers. Yet the war has gotten steadily worse—for the Vietnamese, and, in a very different way, for us. It seemed that everything had been tried, and nothing had worked. Most everyone I know is tired of demonstrations, wrote New Left leader David Dellinger. No wonder. If you’ve seen one or two, you’ve seen them all … Good, bad, or in between, they have not stopped the war, or put an end to poverty and racism, or freed all political prisoners.⁶

In this climate of grim frustration, the national antiwar movement split, as long-standing tensions about the political value of civil disobedience divided activists who were planning the antiwar mobilization for spring 1971. A new formation named the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) called for a massive legal march and rally on April 24. This coalition boasted a long and impressive list of endorsers, but was centrally controlled by a Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers Party, and its offshoots. NPAC aimed to build a mass mobilization against the war—organizer Fred Halstead called it an authentic united front of the masses—bringing together the widest possible array of forces. Toward that end, NPAC put forth just one lowest-common-denominator demand: Out of Vietnam now!⁷

A united front of the masses (designer unknown; author’s collection)

NPAC also vehemently opposed the use of any tactics that went beyond legally permitted protest. Civil disobedience, the coalition’s leadership believed, accomplished little while alienating many from the cause. In our opinion, small civil disobedience actions—whether in the Gandhi-King tradition or in the vein of violent confrontation—are not effective forms of action, declared the SWP’s newspaper, The Militant. "While we do not question the commitment and courage of those who deploy such tactics, we feel that they are not oriented toward winning and mobilizing a mass movement. The Mayday action came in for special criticism: When people state that they are purposely and illegally attempting to disrupt the government, as the Mayday Tribe has done, they isolate themselves from the masses of American people."⁸

The other major wing of the antiwar movement ultimately renamed itself the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ), and was anchored by pacifist organizations ranging from the Fellowship of Reconciliation to the War Resisters League. PCPJ favored a multi-issue approach to antiwar organizing and worked to build alliances with non-pacifist organizations like the National Welfare Rights Organization, drawing connections between the foreign and domestic policies of the US government. The coalition also felt that stronger tactics than mere marching were called for, and emphatically endorsed civil disobedience. Massive One-Day Demonstrations Aren’t Enough, read the headline of a PCPJ broadsheet issued that spring, More’s Needed to End the War. PCPJ didn’t openly discourage people from attending the April 24 NPAC march, but focused its efforts on a multi-day People’s Lobby, which consisted of planned, coordinated sit-ins outside major government buildings.⁹

Into this fractured political landscape came the Mayday Tribe, a new player with a very different approach. The group was launched by Rennie Davis, a white New Left leader who had become nationally famous after the melees outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, when