About 120 people came out to the Detroit area ‘State of Emergency, Drown Out Bush’s Lies’ protest 1/31. We marched through downtown Royal Oak, a trendy city just north of Detroit. Loud chants of 1-2-3-4 we don’t want Bush’s wars, 5-6-7-8 drive out Bush, the world can’t wait echoed all through town along with the noise of whistles, pots and pans, drums, car horns and all manner of weird and unusual noise makers.
The group was mainly white middle class workers and professionals along with students, radicals and revolutionaries, a couple university professors, the Raging Grannies, some skateboarders, Green Party activists, a minister, NLG legal observers, and at least one group of pre-Super Bowl partiers who joined the ruckus along the way. Overwhelmingly, and many people commented on this, this was not a group of activists, or even people who had been to a protest before.
Before the march we rallied at a large statue/fountain just off the Main thoroughfare through Royal Oak. We decorated the whole area with very cool, custom WCW banners a local graphics guy contributed. First we did a collective reading of the World Can’t Wait call, gave speeches from the WCW steering committee, and heard poems from a radical/earth poet Susan Sunshine. Wayne State University (downtown Detroit University) Professor Rayfield Waller, inspired by the point from the WCW Call ‘Silence and paralysis are NOT acceptable) ‘, spoke of African Americans knowing oppression very well and the need to stand in solidarity with Arab Americans and immigrants who are under attack right now. A cheer went up for Cindy Sheehan who had just been arrested in DC, and for the Bush statue that had just been toppled in San Francisco. A ‘get on the bus’ talk was given and 3 people wrote checks right there with a few more before the night was over.
Our very loud march passed by clubs and bars, coffee shops and restaurants full of sports fans in town for this weekends Super Bowl (we’ve had fun talking about ‘get on the bus’ as the Pittsburgh Steelers star runningback Jerome ‘The Bus’ Bettis is a hugely popular Detroit native) and people watching the State of the Union address. At one point when WCW activists were planning to wrap up the march, people were so amped they voted no with their feet and kept on marching. One of the legal observers remarked after the march ‘I did not see one sign of disagreement with the marchers from anyone. It was all horns honking, clenched fists and peace signs. Usually you see SOME disagreement, but not tonight’.
This was a diverse, angry and spirited group who were mainly new to this sort of thing. The more seasoned activist community was largely absent from this protest. Our failure to mobilize this section of the movement was a weakness on our part that we will work to do better at, that we HAVE to do better at.
One problem we encountered was the Royal Oak police department throwing up some obstacles at the last minute, over-ruling the city clerks contention that a permit is not needed to demonstrate in Royal Oak, and also falsely telling us that there is a noise ordinance. Lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild stepped in and resolved these problems, and our march went off without a hitch.
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