Tactical map for Mayday 1971 (designer unknown; author’s collection)
“Small battles raged all over the city as demonstrators would build crude barricades, disperse when the police came and then regroup to rebuild the dismantled obstructions,” one underground paper reported. The protesters’ nonviolence pledge did not preclude building barricades; nobody felt “that because we will be nonviolent that we could not also be militant and creative.” The barricades were indeed inventive: “We threw everything available into the streets,” one participant wrote afterwards in the Berkeley Tribe, “garbage cans, parked cars, broken glass, nails, large rocks, and ourselves. To add to the confusion, we lifted hoods of cars stopped for lights and let air out of tires.” Some of these obstacles—like the one in Georgetown that was constructed by overturning a tractor trailer—were even effective in stopping traffic for relatively long periods of time.44
But ultimately, the government had the upper hand on the streets, thanks to a military operation that, in Newsweek’s words, “seemed more appropriate to Saigon in wartime than Washington in the spring.” Waves of helicopters landed alongside the Washington Monument, ferrying Marines into the city, and federal troops lined the Key Bridge. A Marine battalion was stationed at Dupont Circle; Ann Northrop, who was working as a journalist at the time and went on to play a major role in ACT UP, recalled “tanks around the rim pointing out toward the street with their big guns.” The city was effectively under military occupation. “The scene was midway between that of a sham battle and a war of death,” one protester wrote afterwards. “Police vans careened around corners, frantic to discharge their human load and return for another. Helicopters chopping overhead made us aware that the ground troops had surveillance of all of our movements.” 45
Remembered Perry Brass, “There were people just running through the streets, there were cops running after them. Any time you stood still you’d be arrested, so you had to keep moving.” There was more order to the protest chaos than there seemed to be, thanks to the affinity groups and a sophisticated communications system. “We had all these very expensive radios,” explained Jerry Coffin, “thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of radios. And every major group that had a target had a radio and was in communication with our base.”46
But all the planning and organization counted for little in the face of the government’s sweep arrests: there’s not a whole lot that nonviolent protesters can do when the government decides to send thousands of troops to round them up. Many of the 7,000 arrestees caught in the dragnet that first day were people with no connection to the protest, who just happened to be where sweeps were taking place. Others were demonstrators who were arrested preemptively, having not yet committed illegal acts. To transport the mass of prisoners, the police had to commandeer city buses; when even that wasn’t enough, they hired Hertz and Avis rent-a-trucks. Another 6,000 were arrested over three more days, most of them for blockading the Justice Department and the US Capitol.47
The city jail quickly filled, even though the police crammed as many as twenty people into two-person cells. Another 1,500 were packed into the jail’s recreation yard. That still left thousands of prisoners, whom the police herded into an outdoor practice field next to RFK Stadium. Conditions were awful, with next to no sanitary facilities, blankets, or food. One anarchist wag made a sign proclaiming the football field “Smash the State Concentration Camp #1.” People who had strongly disapproved of the Mayday Tribe’s shutdown plan were appalled by the flagrant violation of civil liberties, and upset to see the nation’s capital under military occupation. But the government was clearly more concerned with maintaining control than with maintaining public sympathy, as would prove to be the case time and again—during the Seattle WTO blockades; at an array of Occupy encampments across the country; in Ferguson, Missouri—when direct-action protests threatened public order.
Local residents, especially African Americans, almost immediately began supporting the imprisoned Mayday protesters by bringing food, blankets, and notes of encouragement to the football field and throwing them over the fence. Within a day, leaders of the district’s black community, predominantly from the civil rights generation of the 1950s and early 1960s and representing more than fifty organizations, organized a large-scale food drive for the crowd of arrestees, delivering the supplies in a twelve-car caravan. “We’ve been through all the head beatings and open compounds and we’re not going to do it again. But we did want to help them,” veteran civil rights activist Mary Treadwell said to the press. “We gave them food so they could put their bodies on the line and disrupt the government,” she explained, noting that anything that “can upset the oppressive machinery of the government will help black people.”48
In retrospect, the moment seems rich in symbolism, like a passing of the direct-action torch. The black civil rights movement of Treadwell’s generation had made extraordinary use of nonviolent direct action in the United States to challenge segregation and racial inequality, from the pioneering Montgomery bus boycott to the legendary Southern lunch counter sit-ins to the daring Freedom Rides and even the abortive “stall-in” plan. But white resistance to change, and the unrelenting violence directed toward the movement, had propelled many organizers toward very different approaches. Over the course of the 1960s, black radicals increasingly rejected even militant nonviolence to advocate in favor of self-defense and, if necessary, armed revolution. As Black Power pioneer Stokely Carmichael put it in a 1966 essay, “We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites: come on, you’re nice guys. For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.” Malcolm X had made the point even more forcefully in his famous 1963 “Message to the Grassroots”: “There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution,” he said. “Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms … singing ‘We Shall Overcome’? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging.”49
But taking up the gun, literally or metaphorically, had only provided the white power structure with new justification for violently targeting black movements. As longstanding organizer Kai Lumumba Barrow recalled, “There was a major shift in the political expression of the black liberation movement in the mid sixties.” Barrow was raised in a radical black nationalist family and played a key role in the revival of direct action in movements of color at the turn of the millennium. The Black Panther Party and other black nationalist groups, she explained, “took the position that nonviolent direct action placed us in a very passive position,” and came to view it as a tactic for the privileged. “But what we did,” she continued, “was we went to the extreme and started engaging in armed struggle or at least self-defense, and we didn’t have enough experience with that perhaps, or we didn’t have enough support for that, and we were beat. We were beat pretty badly.” Terry Marshall, an activist who was deeply involved in a range of direct-action projects in the 1990s and onward, beginning with the Student Liberation Action Movement and continuing into Black Lives Matter, recalled, “I remember being little, I remember I thought everyone must be dead—Malcolm X was killed, Martin Luther King was killed, I was like, Angela Davis must be dead, all the Black Panthers must be dead.” He continued, “The movement was defeated because of internal weaknesses, but it was also militarily defeated.”50
In the wake of all the repression, recalled Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, an organizer and radical theologian who led direct-action trainings in Ferguson after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown, “There was a shudder. They say a wounded lion won’t fight. It makes sense, it was a shudder,” a pulling back from confrontational tactics more generally and from direct action specifically. Black-led movements in particular would not pursue direct action as a strategy to any significant degree until the anti-apartheid upsurge of the mid 1980s, and even then they would employ it in very different ways than their white counterparts; it would not be until the mid-to-late 1990s that movements of color would really begin to embrace
