href="#ulink_b1b28b4b-cb0e-5b91-946c-14515b80d720">54 Gilje, Rioting in America, 151.
55 Bernard Lafayette Jr., videotaped interview by Steve York for the documentary television series A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2002), DVD, Part 1, 20:22. My emphasis.
56 “We Charge Genocide Again!,” Malcolm X Grassroots Project website, accessed May 23, 2016, https://mxgm.org/we-charge-genocide-again-new-curriculum-on -every-28-hours-report.
57 Personal interview (C).
58 How to Survive a Plague, directed by David France (New York: Sundance Selects/MPI Media Group, 2013), DVD.
59 In David Van Deusen and Xavier Massot, The Black Bloc Papers: An Anthology of Primary Texts From The North American Anarchist Black Bloc 1999–2001, The Battle of Seattle Through Quebec City (Shawnee Mission, KS: Breaking Glass Press, 2007), 136. Available online at http://www.infoshop.org/amp/bgp /BlackBlockPapers2.pdf (accessed May 23, 2016).
60 “To the Media,” Outside Agitators 206 website, accessed May 23, 2016, https://outsideagitators206.org/statements/to-the-media.
61 The role of social media has been so exhaustively discussed, to the point of fetishization, without convincing conclusions, that I have chosen to leave it aside in this study. People hear about events because of social media, but dependency on platforms like Facebook make them profoundly vulnerable to authorities in new ways. Tools of communication facilitate new connections, but also introduce new pervasive isolations. This study will focus not on the role of digital platforms but on those using them, and particularly those moments when people come together, physically, and leave their phones in their pockets or at home for the day. For readers interested in social media’s role in contemporary movements, I recommend Todd Wolfson, Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).
62 “Bay Area News Group Poll Finds 94% Support Occupy Oakland,” Occupy Oakland website, accessed May 23, 2016, https://occupyoakland.org/2012/02 /bay-area-news-group-poll-finds-94-support-occupy.
63 Ibid.
64 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 84. My emphasis.
65 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 274. For a recent critical look at some of Arendt’s serious shortcomings, see Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
66 Ibid., 272. My emphasis.
67 Ibid., 268.
68 Ibid.
69 Comrades from Cairo, “Solidarity Statement from Cairo,” Occupy Wall Street website, accessed May 23, 2016, http://occupywallst.org/article/solidarity-statement-cairo.
Chapter 2: The Strange Magic of Nonviolence
I’ve been living my life for twenty years through the word “nonviolence.” After hearing how it was used in Occupy, I think I have to find a new word.
—Nonviolence trainer, Seattle70
I’ve lost track of what “nonviolent” actually means at this point. I am not violent; as a person, my character is deeply not violent. We certainly didn’t do anything that any reasonable person would consider violent inside that bank [lock-down].… In that sense I guess you could say that we were not violent. But I don’t know if I could say that it was nonviolent anymore. At that time I probably would have said it was. We did make a commitment to not actively physically aggress upon either bank employees or customers or the police, and in that sense our tactics were nonviolent ones, but it seems…I don’t know if I would even use that language anymore. In so many conversations, in so many debates over the past few months, I’ve felt this strange magic coming from that word that I don’t know I want to invoke anymore.
—Arrestee in Nov. 2 Occupy Seattle “Chase 5” event71
On November 18, 2011, members of the local Occupy movement at UC Davis were peacefully sitting with linked arms in the Quad, when, before a number of cameras, Lieutenant John Pike casually strolled past them and dispensed a huge quantity of pepper spray into their faces. The incident went globally viral, as commentators compared Pike to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birmingham antagonist Bull Connor, and the nonviolent nature of the protesters’ conduct was widely cited as a victorious moment for nonviolent protest. Susan Thistlethwaite in the Washington Post, for example, characterized the incident as proof of “the power of nonviolent witness.”72 Author Chris Hedges held the incident up as proof of the Occupy movement’s nonviolent orientation:
The first principles, of course, were nonviolence and non-property destruction.… We don’t accept violent language. When you’re violent you undermine everything. If the protesters in [Manhattan’s] Union Square, who were pepper-sprayed, had been throwing something at the police, you would not have had the movement. It was because they were nonviolent and didn’t react when they were being pepper-sprayed that the movement grew. At UC Davis, when those cops just walked down the line and sprayed, the nonviolent reaction by those kids was fantastic.73
Pike was dismissed from the university, the protesters won a compensation lawsuit of over $1 million, and the Occupy movement was given widespread sympathetic coverage in an increasingly hostile national media environment. The incident functioned as indisputable testimony to the enduring power of “nonviolence.” Or did it?
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