Portside

What First Amendment Rights?

APRIL 16 IS THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY of three days of large demonstrations in Washington, D.C., by more than 10 thousand protesters who intended to disrupt or even prevent the annual ministerial meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. 

The demonstrations in 2000 failed to disrupt the meetings of the world’s finance ministers, but only because the U.S. government was willing to spend at least three million dollars to illegally shut the demonstrations down and then (years later) pay an additional $13.7 million to settle a civil suit for the damage inflicted by brazen, wholesale violations of the demonstrators’ constitutional rights. 

By running roughshod over the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights, the police made it possible for the top leadership of international finance to set its agenda for the next year, but the cost of having done so would have probably bankrupted any law-enforcement operation that could not depend on being bailed out by the U.S. Treasury.

The Clinton Administration was willing to pay dearly to prevent a repeat of the World Trade Organization’s disastrous and failed attempt to meet in Seattle just four months earlier. 

And pay it did, more than a million dollars for special police training, equipment, and overtime, millions more to defray the cost of giving almost the entire Washington, D.C., staffs of the Departments of State, Commerce, Interior and the Treasury a day’s paid leave so the police could establish a no-go zone for many blocks around I.M.F. and W.B. meeting sites. Not to mention the millions to settle the lawsuit that eventually vindicated the demonstrators’ rights, but only after nearly ten years of litigation.

Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of the government’s willingness to violate the demonstrators’ rights occurred the morning before the first demonstration, when a large contingent of police and fire marshalls barged into the converted warehouse that was the demonstrators’ headquarters and evicted everyone on the ground that the building contained fire hazards. As a result, the demonstrators lost all access to their supplies and communications equipment.

After the raid, the protest organizers gamely stated, ''The finance ministers and international bureaucrats who shape the world economy to make the rich richer and the poor poorer know that Seattle was not just a bump on their road to global domination.'' But the police tactics put the demonstrators at a disadvantage from which they could not recover and the fat-cats’ meetings took place with a minimum of disruption. https://web.archive.org/web/20130217141509/http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue29/lemisc29.htm    

“Freedom Now in Vietnam”

APRIL 17 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the first mass demonstration to oppose the U.S. war against Vietnam.

In 1965, twenty thousand people or more, organized by Students for a Democratic Society, marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., under slogans that linked the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement:  “War on Poverty - Not on People,” “Ballots not Bombs in Vietnam” and “Freedom Now in Vietnam." 

One of the event’s main organizers, Paul Booth, explained the event this way to the New York Times: “we’re really not just a peace group. We are working on domestic problems--civil rights, poverty, university reform. We feel passionately and angrily about things in America, and we feel that a war in Asia will destroy what we’re trying to do here.”

The Nation magazine described the demonstrators as “veterans of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, freshmen from small Catholic colleges, clean-shaven intellectuals from Ann Arbor and Cambridge, the fatigued shock troops of SNCC, Iowa farmers, impoverished urban Negroes organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), beautiful high school girls without make-up, and adults, many of them faculty members, who journeyed to Washington for a demonstration conceived and organized by students.”

While the protest was going on, President Johnson was spending the Easter weekend on his ranch in Texas, where he seemed to respond to the demonstration when he told a press conference: “There is no human power capable of forcing us from Vietnam. We will remain as long as necessary, with the might required, whatever the risk, and whatever the cost.” 

Less than three years later, it became clear that the President had underestimated the cost; public support for the Vietnam War had so diminished that Johnson was forced to abandon his re-election campaign. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/nor/sds/650417_sds_vietnam-dc5.pdf 

Saying ‘No’ to Colonialism

APRIL 18 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY of the opening session, in Bandung, Indonesia, of the week-long Asian-African Conference of non-aligned nations. It was the first such meeting, with the aim of promoting Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to opposing colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation.

More than 300 delegates from 30 nations – Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, China, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, both North and South Vietnam and Yemen – attended.

Two attendees – Member of Congress Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and author Richard Wright – were from the U.S. but not as an official delegation. https://web.archive.org/web/20111008014556/http://www.namegypt.org/Relevant%20Documents/00Asian_African_Conference%5B1%5D.pdf  

If War They Want, Here It Is

APRIL 19 IS THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first major military confrontations of the U.S. War for Independence, which took place about 20 miles west of Boston. 

Before the shooting began, Massachusetts militia captain John Parker said, “Stand your ground, don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.” 

When the shooting stopped, 49 members of the militia were dead, as were 73 British troops, and the British had been forced to retreat back to the safety of Boston. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20636/20636-8.txt 

Impunity for Racist Threats

APRIL 20 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of an all-white jury’s acquittal of the arch-segregationist and future Alabama Governor Lester Maddox, who had been charged with illegally threatening two civil rights activists with a pistol. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/apr/20 

McCarthyism Flops on Broadway 

APRIL 21 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY of the Broadway opening of “Inherit the Wind,” a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, which presents the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” as an allegory for McCarthyism.

Starring Paul Muni, Ed Begley and Tony Randall, the 1955 production was a smash-hit that ran for more than 26 months. https://todayinclh.com/?event=inherit-the-wind-opens-on-broadway 

Millions Turn Out for Earth Day’s Premier

APRIL 22 IS THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY of the first Earth Day, when in 1970 an estimated 20 million people gathered in many U.S. locations to celebrate and demand action be taken on a host of environmental issues. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/first-earth-day/

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