Greensboro
quite simply rocked on October 5th, all day long. Starting at the
UNCG campus, where our UNCG organizer organized a campus-wide “Bush Crimes Day”
based on the report of the Bush Crimes Commission. Included in the “crime scenes”
were the attacks on AIDS education and aid to Africa and on global health in
general; the attacks on abortion and reproductive rights; the attacks on
science seen in issues like global warming and evolution education; the US
military’s massacres in places like Haditha, Iraq; and a harrowing reenactment
of torture which has been legalized by this regime. These reenactments got
hundreds of visitors throughout the day, and brought several students who had
just heard about WCW that day to the protest in the evening. Teams of
leafletters also hit up the campuses of NC A&T State and Grimsley high
school, which also brought out some new people to the evening march. One
A&T student with whom we talked on campus had not heard about the new
torture law, and was horrified that such a thing had passed with no opposition.
He was at the rally that night.
The march itself was strong”about 250-300 people were the
various estimates from people there. There was a brief rally near the
courthouse downtown which was electrified with the arrival of the UNCG marching
contingent, led by the Cakalak Thunder Radical Drum Corps, who always bring the
noise”we had a fairly diverse crowd who came from many different areas,
including some who had participated in earlier actions in Chapel Hill and Asheboro. The crowd was
probably about 35-40% students and young people from UNCG, Guilford College,
Grimsley, A&T, and probably other campuses. We didn’t have any problems
from the police this time”since they clandestinely videotaped and then jumped
some of our marchers in January, they”ve found themselves involved in a spying
scandal against prominent Black citizens and Black police officers, so they are
a little more timid these days”not to mention that one of the captains in
charge told a couple of our organizers that “We can’t really talk about it
because we”re supposed to be neutral, but you”d be surprised what sort of
support you”d find out here”. Interesting”
Our march was one of the loudest and most colorful to hit
the streets of Greensboro
in years. Cakalak Thunder kept things rocking with their Samba-based beats and
chants of “End the occupation”End! The! Occ-u-pation!” interspersed with chants
from the crowd and the bullhorn. The most popular chants seemed to be the ones
about getting rid of the Bush Regime, though anti-war chants bubbled up as well
and were taken up by the crowd. People
along the march route greeted us with cheers and applause, many even joined the
march as we noisily made our way through the downtown commercial and restaurant
district. A group of about 15 quite sharply-dressed young Black
twenty-somethings came out on the sidewalk and cheered us loudly”when we asked
them to join us they said they had something they had to be at but kept right
on cheering and applauding with GREAT enthusiasm. Downtown workers cheered us
on, and of course there were a few of the obligatory “thumbs down” greetings,
but they were usually side-by-side with someone else who was applauding.
We entered the plaza for the final rally to the sounds of a
great new recording by New York-based MC Koba called “Rise Up Move!” and opened
the final rally with a singer-songwriter Jeremy Gilchrist, who has a song in the
top ten of Neil Young’s chart of independent political singers-he ended his
last song “The Revolutionary” with a singalong of the last line, “We”re gonna
drive out the Bush Regime”.
Speakers:
The speakers included a Greensboro WCW organizer who spoke
about the gutting of abortion and reproductive rights for women as part of a
broader agenda of control (control of speech, control of the media, control of
global politics and the world’s energy resources) of the Bush Regime.
A Guilford College WCW organizer read a 90’s Gulf War poem
on the need for courage in dangerous times, then shared the stage with her
father in reading the WCW national steering committee statement.
A person who participated in the WCW action in Asheboro
earlier in the day was there to report that more than 30 people lined a busy
Asheboro street and got an enthusiastic response from passing cars.
A spokesperson for Greensboro Food Not Bombs spoke in
solidarity, Greensboro FNB have been out among Greensboro’s homeless for many
years now, involving them in feeding hot meals to other homeless people and
standing up against abuses. Several homeless guys who work with FNB had joined
the march.
A teacher from Chile
spoke about how the pro-socialist government of his country was overthrown in
1973 with the help of the US
government, and was plunged into a fascist dictatorship.
A supporter of the Revolutionary Communist Party spoke about
the importance of October 5th and in building a strong and inclusive
movement, then introduced a young student from a refugee camp in Palestine, who marched
during their Ramadan fast with a group of Palestinian students. She told the
story of how her grandfather was killed by the Israeli army for breaking a
24-hour, forty-day curfew to get his family some bread. He was shot 35 times,
and she pointed out that the bullets all said “Made in the USA” and to remember
the people who are murdered by this government, and how much it means to the
people of the world when Americans rise up to stop it.
A former candidate for the US Congress who is a full-time
nurse and STRONG WCW supporter spoke on the horrors of war and torture to big
cheers from the crowd. She later introduced our final speaker, a Gold Star
mother who lost her son in Iraq, allegedly of a drug overdose, though a later
independent autopsy found no drugs. She moved the crowd to tears talking about
how she had tried to keep her son from joining up, but that he saw joining the
military as a way to get help for his education, only to lose him in a war that
had cost not only thousands of American lives, but the lives of hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis, pointing out the Gold Star Families for Peace have strong
bonds with Iraqi families as well.
Follow up:
Bush, the Criminal-in-Chief himself, will be in Greensboro THIS MONTH in
the old-money neighborhood of Irving Park to raise funds for his kind of
pro-fascist candidates. We plan to give him a BIG un-welcome, and invite the
movement that has been growing from across the state to help show him exactly
what we think of torturers and warmongers.
We”re still getting phone calls from people who are wanting
to get involved. We will continue having our regular Monday meetings, and
bringing in new people. We got tons of new names for our growing email list. Over
half the people there were brand-new people. The Bush visit is going to be a
GREAT way to activate these new people.
An art professor at one of the colleges who has been in
touch with us for a few months said that he would hang a couple of our banners
from the art building on campus for a week prior to Bush’s visit. According to
our Guilford
college organizer, over a hundred people gathered around to help out and offer
encouragement while the banner was being made on campus Thursday morning! We
are already following up with people to get a great big un-welcoming committee
for Bush when he arrives-watch out for our next report!