they could march.
On Thursday evening, a vigil gathered at Union Square to mourn the execution of Troy Davis, a black man in Georgia, and Occupiers went up there to stir the vigil into a march toward Liberty. Police tried to stop them with barricades and clubs and arrests, but they couldn’t; when the marchers arrived, the numbers in the plaza swelled like they never had before. There were a lot of new faces and new kinds of faces. It paid off to quit the Internet, to go where people actually were and bring them back.
At the GA that night, Ted Actie, a producer for a black-owned TV production company in Brooklyn, called on the protesters to speak more directly to the communities around them. “You do so much social networking,” he said, “you forget how to socialize.”
Overheard at a miscellaneous meeting:
Occupier 1: “I hate and love the Internet.”
Occupier 2: “It’s complicated with the Internet.”
Some people muttered about whether all the outrage about Troy Davis’s death, even if he was falsely convicted, really had anything to do with occupying Wall Street. Did JPMorgan Chase kill Troy Davis? Did Bank of America? One old socialist said they did. Really, though, the crowd that poured into the park from that march was answer enough. Those faces seemed to make clear that if these Occupiers were going to talk about inequality and corruption in the United States of America, and in New York, they couldn’t just talk about high finance. They would have to talk about race and about inequality’s ugliest consequences. The task of occupying Wall Street was starting to reveal itself as more bewildering a project than most people might have thought.
Maybe that’s why, one afternoon, an Occupier with long blond hair and multicolored spandex leggings got up on a table in the middle of the park during a moment of despair, announcing that he was going to drive a nail through his hand “in solidarity with Jesus Christ,” “in solidarity with Troy Davis.” He was, however, dissuaded.
Marking the one-week anniversary of the beginning of the occupation, a large march was planned for noon on Saturday. It was September 24. Several hundred marchers paraded around the plaza to their favorite chant, “All Day! All Week! Occupy Wall Street!” and headed down to the Wall Street area, where police arrested several of them. The march kept going and continued up to Union Square. Upon arriving, there was some debate about what to do next, until finally most people turned south again for the two-and-a-half-mile journey back to Liberty Square. That was when the police attacked.
At around 3 P.M., near Fifth Avenue and Twelfth Street, officers began unrolling plastic orange barriers, isolating a crowd of marchers—along with reporters and onlookers—and began arresting everyone inside for blocking traffic. Caught on cameras were scenes of one protester being dragged by her hair, and others being slammed into the pavement. The most notorious scene of the day, though, was the video of a group of women, already trapped by the net, who were writhing and screaming as Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna doused them in pepper spray.
In total, police arrested eighty people. With not enough room for them in vans, many were taken away in city buses. The march thereafter dispersed, and those who weren’t arrested made their way back to the Financial District.
No one, afterward, felt safe. It seemed certain that a full-on police dispersal would come that night. Contingency plans were being discussed in the General Assembly. Those who would drop by days or weeks later never felt how uncertain everything was the first nights, when the village being built on the plaza seemed so fragile, so liable to be destroyed at any moment in a surprise police sweep, like a thief in the night.
A bit after ten, though, there was a celebration around the media tables. Photocopied facsimiles of Sunday’s New York Daily News were being passed around and photographed. After having held the plaza with hundreds of protesters at any given time for a week and having kept the blocks surrounding the Stock Exchange barricaded by police all the while, the protest had finally caught a major paper’s attention.
“The Daily News!” I heard someone say. “We’ve already won!”
In an article that recounts as many gory details as would fit, the Daily News devoted only two short paragraphs to what the occupation was actually about and what protesters had been doing all this time: “attempting to draw attention to what they believe is a dysfunctional economic system that unfairly benefits corporations and the mega-rich.” The real story, rather, was not this unusual kind of protest, or how it functioned, or exactly what conditions provoked it, but the excuse to have the word busted on the cover next to the cleavage of a woman crying out in pain under a cop’s knee.
The Occupiers didn’t care. The Daily News and the presence of TV vans all around seemed like guardian angels, ensuring that the occupation would survive until morning.
Thanks to the activist habit of ressentiment, acquired by seeing protest after protest fail to make headlines, the Occupiers had planned for creating their own media much more than serving anyone else’s. There was no place in the encampment more seemingly sophisticated and elite than the jumble of glowing laptops and indiscernible wires around the media center; visitors passed by it with awe for this physical manifestation of the age of the hashtag. To Occupiers it was the source of such precious commodities as wifi and outlets, which were available only to those who could appear to be doing official movement-media business. As time passed, the right to be inside its bounds—marked, at first, by a ring of parked bikes—was ever more jealously guarded. This was an important place.
The level of preparation was almost zero, however, for co-opting traditional news outlets. At the outset no official working group had the job of doing the press releases, the hand-holding, and the modicum of homage that the modern reporter expects. It was mainly just Patrick Bruner who was doling out interviews, posting “communiqués” at OccupyWallSt.org, keeping reporters informed, and, unintentionally, spreading false rumors. Many others at Liberty weren’t even aware he was doing it.
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