Despite all the talk of anarchists wreaking havoc at this summer’s Republican Convention in Tampa, most of those traveling to protest in the Cigar City this summer aren’t planning to commit mayhem, but to use the RNC as a vehicle to express what they believe is fundamentally wrong with our political system.
CL interviewed five activists from across the country who intend to exercise their First Amendment right to dissent outside the Tampa Bay Times Forum.
They shared common cause in a number of respects: They all intend to protest at the Democratic Convention just days later in Charlotte; they find the idea of a “free-speech” zone abhorrent; and they sincerely hope relations between police and activists will be better than they were at the RNC in St. Paul in 2008. Here’s a closer look.
Keith McHenry
A day before Occupy Wall Street attempted to shut down Manhattan and other cities across the country in massive Mayday protests last week, the New York Police Department visited at least three activists’ homes in New York and interrogated residents about plans for their protest.
For Food Not Bombs co-founder Keith McHenry, the police visitations were a case of déjà vu.
Days before the Republican National Convention in 2008, local officers and the FBI made a joint raid on a Food Not Bombs home in Minneapolis. It was a lousy way to begin the week for the independent collective, which is best known for serving free vegan and vegetarian food to the homeless.
Food Not Bombs plans to be in Tampa for a full week before the convention gets underway. Members will conduct public workshops on a variety of relevant subjects, including puppet-making, cultivating a community garden, learning how to talk your way out of jail, and a “Know Your Rights” session with the National Lawyers Guild.
The Taos, New Mexico resident says the group has never been this ambitious in its plans for a political convention, though its members have attended past conventions to help feed protesters. In late April, FNB chapters throughout Florida met to go over their plans for late August.
He says the group has been looking for a space to rent, but is reluctant to shed any details. Considering what happened in 2008, it makes sense.
The ethos of FNB is simple — nobody should be hungry and homeless, because there are enough resources for everyone. When asked what message he’d like to get across in Tampa, McHenry says, “The agenda of the Republicans is totally against what we’re talking about. They’re talking about austerity, more cuts in services, less freedom for basic rights of the people of the country and for the rest of the world. So we’re opposed to that.”
Tom Burke
The police will be a lot less busy than during, say, Gasparilla. That’s the prediction of Grand Rapids, Michigan activist Tom Burke, and he may have a point. Where the march he’s planning for Aug. 27 is expected to draw between 4,000-5,000, there are typically around 400,000 revelers (many of them drunk) at Tampa’s annual January bacchanal.
At a press conference in Tampa in April, Burke extolled the almost pastoral nature of the march, and continued in that vein in a recent phone interview.
“I’m a father of a little girl. My wife is a scientist. We’re the kind of people you want to have [in your city],” he said. Burke participated in marches in St. Paul four years ago, and said the only violence he saw there was perpetuated by the police.
More than 40 reporters were arrested during the RNC convention while covering the protests outside the St. Paul convention center. The charges against all of them were dropped, with three of the reporters, including Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, winning a $100,000 settlement after filing a federal suit against the U.S. Secret Service and the police departments of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
“In Minnesota, the violence I saw came from the police, who from 10-15 feet away shot Mick Kelly, who was holding the lead banner on the fourth day of the protests,” Burke says. “What could a man, standing, holding a banner, possibly be doing wrong? Other than the fact that he’s a leader of a protest and they’re targeting him with physical violence to stop him from organizing,” he adds with urgency.
Kelly filed the first lawsuit related to allegations of undue force by police at the convention. (He filed a suit asking for $250,000 in damages but ultimately accepted a settlement for $5,000.)
In addition to working full-time for the Coalition for the March of the RNC, Burke is also a spokesman for the Committee to Stop FBI Repression. He received a grand jury subpoena in September of 2010 requesting records of payments to Chicago community activist Hatem Abudayyeh, the executive director of the Arab American Action Network. Burke says the FBI claims to want to investigate him for material support of terrorism, but he says his group has never sent any money overseas. He considers the subpoena (to which he has yet to respond formally) “payback” for being an effective organizer from his time with SEIU Local 73.
“They [the feds] don’t like our agenda, which is for peace, prosperity, that working people have health care, that working people have health care, that working people have unions, and more rights on the job and the freedom to organize those without having to jump through lots of hoops.”
Rae Abileah
The 29-year-old native of the San Francisco Bay area first encountered Code Pink during the 2004 RNC in New York City, just after graduating from Barnard College. She’s now the organization’s Co-Director of Women for Peace, and a member of Occupy AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee).
A Jewish-American of Israeli descent, Abileah received worldwide attention when she disrupted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speaking engagement to a joint session of Congress a year ago with a banner that said, “Occupying land is indefensible.”
Abileah met CL late last month while she was in town for the United Methodist Church’s General Conference at the Tampa Convention Center. She was advocating for the Methodists to divest stock in companies like Caterpillar, Motorola and Hewlett-Packard that in her opinion support the occupation of Palestinian lands (the measure was rejected).
For Abileah, the Mideast situation is intensely personal. Her great uncle, Joseph Abileah, was one of the first conscientious objectors in Israel in 1948. She says she gets emails from people all over the world asking if she’s related.
The negative side is that other Jews are furious at her for supporting the boycott of settlement products. An organization that funds the Jewish Library in San Francisco cut financial support for an event in which she was to be a panelist once they learned she was involved, even though the discussion was not about Middle East politics.
She calls the idea of an Event Zone in Tampa for the convention “outrageous,” and says stories about fencing being erected in downtown Tampa remind her of the Middle East. “From what I’m hearing from organizers on the ground here, it just sounds like they’re preparing for a war zone here, and that’s outrageous.”
Code Pink became well-known for its actions in Washington during the first years of the war in Iraq. Like several of the activists featured in this story, Rae has been arrested at demonstrations, but she’s not boasting about it. “It’s a shame that the U.S. arrests people for doing very peaceful and civil protests.”
Code Pink intends to travel via caravan to Charlotte after the RNC. Abileah says it’s hard to distinguish between the political parties. “I think they’re similar … neither of those parties are presenting a government by and for the people. They’re representing a lot of corporate corruption.”
Cheri Honkala
For over 20 years, the 49-year-old Philadelphian has led the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, helping the Kensington neighborhood’s poor and homeless keep their possessions and, in extreme cases, illegally take over vacant properties. In 1997, she helped begin a second nonprofit, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, a coalition of anti-poverty groups across the country.
She’s been instrumental in leading marches on opening days over the past couple of Republican conventions, but says the 2008 march in St. Paul was “frightening.” She says the $50 million that Homeland Security has provided for Tampa (and Charlotte) for convention security has been “all about taking away the civil liberties of this country.”
Honkala says the goals of the protest in Tampa will be: a) not to let fear get in the way, and b) to send a strong message to poor and homeless people in Tampa and Florida and the nation “that the last thing we have is our voice, and we have a historical responsibility to ensure that we don’t back down.”
She relishes the fact that there will be thousands of reporters in town to tell fresh stories of Americans down and out. “This coming year there’s going to be another million families who are going to lose their homes to foreclosure – so that’s America’s new homeless. Not to mention the amount of veterans that are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan that don’t have jobs and these kinds of things.”
David Swanson
David Swanson was the press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s quixotic campaign for president in 2004, but he’s best known in progressive circles as the co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, which urged Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war.
On his blog, Swanson has called on progressive organizations planning to march at the RNC and DNC to renounce violence in advance.
“I want this movement to succeed,” he told CL in a recent telephone conversation from his home in Virginia. “And nonviolence is far more effective if we’re going to have masses of people resisting politics as normal.”
He was happy when the proprietors behind the March on the RNC website added a statement making their support for nonviolence clear — something that he says protesters at Charlotte haven’t done yet.
“Everybody wants the RNC to be nonviolent, they just weren’t saying so, and because there’s always the danger of people misunderstanding, of police initiating violence, or provocateurs or misguided individuals initiating violence… I think it’s a valuable step they took.”
Like everyone else CL spoke with, he’s intent on protesting at both conventions. “We want billionaires to pay taxes, we want corporations to pay taxes, we want the wars ended,” adding that people “need to refuse to accept free speech cages to be nonviolent — not to be submissive.”
On hearing how Mayor Buckhorn was inveighing against the threat of “anarchists” last year (the mayor has noticeably toned down his rhetoric since then), Swanson says that’s all the more reason to make clear that the people coming to Tampa are coming in peace.
And he says that in the activist community, Florida continues to have an ugly reputation after the abuses that took place at the Fair Trade of the Americas meeting in 2003. Led by former Miami Police Chief John Timoney, officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds, Tasers, electrified shields and batons against protesters.
”I think Tampa needs to restore Florida’s good name. Tampa needs to exercise restraint and small-d democracy, and to erase that legacy of Miami rather than building upon it.”
Originally published Thurs., May 10, 2012.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2012.