What a day. Occupy Wall Street had a chockfull schedule yesterday, complete with arrests, an event featuring Parents for Occupy Wall Street, a Verizon-OWS march with hundreds of union members, and a spontaneous concert at Columbus Circle starring folk music legends Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie.
The day opened with action in Harlem where more than a dozen protesters, along with Cornel West, were arrested during a civil disobedience protest against the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy. The protest occurred outside the 28th Precinct at West 123rd Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard where activists chanted, “Stop and frisk don’t stop the crime. Stop and frisk IS the crime.”
Before his arrest, West reportedly said, “We need to bear witness to injustice. If cops need to take us to jail, take us to jail.” Protesters then locked arms before the police started making arrests.
When I arrived at Liberty Park in the early evening, Parents for Occupy Wall Street had already roped off a corner of the park and laid down some neon green matting so the younger children wouldn’t be crawling around on the asphalt. Earlier in the day, the area had operated as a Muslim prayer space. Almost 70 families RSVP’d for the event, according to the event’s organizer, Kirby Desmarais. The night before, I spoke with Kirby Desmarais, another organizer who stressed that parents wanted to bring their children to OWS because as parents they feel they’re fighting for their children’s future.
While the parent volunteers were still setting up the play area, complete with crayons and blank pieces of paper and signing in the arriving families, a group gathered under the “Joie de Vivre” sculpture. This was to be the Verizon-OWS march that soon left Liberty Park and made its way up to Verizon’s headquarters. A couple hundred protesters (including the UAW) ultimately met up with a few hundred more union members with some SEIU and Teamsters peppered in the mix.
Chris Shelton, Vice-President for CWA District 1, which is all the northeastern states, joined the protest because “Verizon is the absolute symbol of corporate greed in this country.” Shelton remarked that a company making as much money as Verizon does – $22.5 billion in the last five years – should be willing to give its employees benefits that they deserve, not “taking things away.” Verizon union workers have been protesting their company over reported benefit and pension cuts since the strike back in August.
“We’re here because we’re the 99 percent,” Shelton said. “It’s time for the one percent to kick in their fair share.”
The original plan was to march the 500 protesters to a Verizon location, but the targeted store shut down preemptively when they caught wind of the news.
That night, folk music legends Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie joined demonstrators in a march through the Upper West Side (Seeger supported himself on two canes as he marched) to Columbus Circle in the heart of one of the city’s swankest shopping districts. Seeger and Guthrie then led the crowd in a stirring rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.”
I was handed a flyer that detailed the march’s path along with the hashtag #occupythecircle, so it remains unclear if the plan had been to take Columbus Circle as a second site of the occupation.
Ultimately, not enough people turned out to make that happen, and 35 people were arrested during the march for “disorderly conduct,” though other reports describe the procession as being peaceful, and two individuals were charged with “obstructing government administration.”
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