Protesters Gather in Philidelphia

PHILADELPHIA--In early morning hours Saturday, the people are still working. They are making goats' heads out of cardboard. They are soaking rags in vinegar to protect against tear gas. They are making peanut costumes to mock money politics. They are filling water balloons with paint. From wire, chain and pipe, they are making tools to shut down Philadelphia.

The Republicans are coming in two days, but the fun and the fury start now.

The concerned, the angry, the playful and the poor are piling up in abandoned lots, in factories and on friends' couches. A movement is beginning in Philadelphia that, for hundreds, will end in a basement jail.

In the meantime, they will fill the streets with violence, spectacle and noise. Their actions will degenerate from street festival to street-fighting, and they will paralyze this city.

Their messages are many, but they all share one feeling--that something is very wrong with the glitzy Republican gala across town, and with the state of the American democracy that created it.

They may be respected by some, laughed at by others and hated by a few. But above all, parading in front of the cameras that are here for the convention, they will be noticed. And for now, that is all they want.

Calm Before the Storm

The first gathering, a rally for hundreds of progressive organizations and issues was UNITY2000, which promised--and managed to deliver--a "peaceful, family-friendly atmosphere" without civil disobedience.

It transformed a quarter-mile of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, an eight-lane highway running through the center of the city, into a massive political flea market.

Several hundred police stood in long rows between the trees lining the Parkway and watched.

The more than two-hundred issues bandied about were diverse enough to create stark contrasts. Some demonstrators preached anarchy. Others simply preached, like the Critical Path group, which encouraged all who strolled by--black-masked punks, tie-dyed hippies and camera-happy delegates--to embrace a progressivism grounded in compassion and faith.

Many onlookers passed over the rows of issue tables and headed straight for the street's center, where the largest attractions held sway over the largest crowds.

They gathered around the peculiar contraptions placed at a few points along the parkway: rectangular wooden frames hung with large cans and bottles, metal bars, and anything else that could be banged on, all dappled in a dozen colors.

A handful of demonstrators circled the structure in a dance-percussion frenzy, surrounded by a mixed crowd, some dancing, some staring.

Philadelphia artist Melina Hammer was taking a break from clanging. She sat on the grass median of the Parkway, joining others in a late-afternoon languor. They had been marching and rallying for more almost six hours that balmy Sunday.

"I'm here because the Democrats and Republicans are hand in hand. They don't show different beliefs. The majority isn't being represented."

And the music?

"It's for unity, a way of experiencing the spiritual satisfaction of being together through music," she explained.

Further down the median, a man standing before a 30-foot-long inflatable missile shouting about America's defense spending saw his audience slowly dwindle. Many snuck away to catch glimpses of Corpzilla and its muddy message.

Corpzilla is a flatbed truck with a mud-wrestling ring and a cab transformed through paint and papier mache into a flaming dragon head.

Corpzilla's organizers say it is also a protest against the corruption of politics by corporate and special interest money, one of the foremost complaints in Philadelphia this week, a cause around which both Republican Senator John S. McCain and artist Melina Hammer can rally.

On the truck's bed, in a shallow pool of mud, a rather canine-looking man with a mud-caked beard grappled with a fellow in a two-piece bathing suit.

A woman jumped from the platform and cleared the muck from her cheeks, revealing elaborate tigress facepaint above her red sequined tanktop.

She later identified herself as Rebecca Myers, and said she helped create Corpzilla in Washington, D.C.

She discussed the Corpzilla agenda.

"The point is, it's a joke. The point is they're just the same, Democrats and Republicans. We're here to say the two-party system isn't in favor of the people."

Myers paused and looked back to the truck with a smile. "We're just fucking around."

Before she could speak further, she was interrupted by the dog-man's growling challenges to the audience.

"Who wants to wrestle?" he asked. "Who wants to wrestle?"

There were no takers.

The worry that spectacles like Corpzilla would eclipse the issues on display didn't bother a lot of people at UNITY2000, where the emphasis was on fun and exposure.

"Progressives don't have to be boring," said Leon Oboler, organizer of the carnival-like rally.

"Why?" he continued. "Because that's what we're doing, we're having fun together."

Oboler then grabbed a long list with contact information for each of the causes represented at the rally. He told assembled reporters to call every one of them, to listen to what each group had to say about the issues it campaigned for.

But not all participants in the rally were as interested in social justice as those on Oboler's list. Interspersed between the tables advocating capitalism's overthrow were red and white carnival tents offering three dollar cups of lemonade, four dollar pretzels and "all beef diggity dogs."

The capitalists were at work.

The frankfurter intrusion was, according to to Oboler, an unfortunate result of the compromise with the city--which made the rally contingent on, among other things, the vendor's presence.

The hot dogs sold briskly, despite the remonstrance of a porcine Jiminy Cricket--a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals protester in a pig suit shouting slogans at waiting patrons.

The pig complained about the lack of vegetarian food, a preferred diet for many forward-thinking activists, and vented against the UNITY2000 board.

"The organizers haven't even tried to stop the scandalous animal slaughter industry," he said.

The deal with the city did, however, maintain peace throughout the day. The only injury occurred when an abortion-rights protester jumped in front of a slowly moving camper which served as headquarters for an anti-abortion group. The religious crowd had spent the day further up the Ben Franklin Parkway in a counter-protest holding "Abortion Kills Children" signs, shouting at UNITY2000 demonstrators, and pointing out communists for passing members of the press.

The rally ended promptly at 4 o' clock so the city could avoid paying police overtime. Sanitation crews came in, sweeping up the littered "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal" signs and pamphlets marked "Living Wage" that detailed the plight of poorly-paid workers.

The Truce

With the beginning of the Republican National Convention on Monday came the end of sanctioned protests and the threat of unrest. A poverty rights group, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU), had for weeks been publicizing the March for Economic Human Rights, which, without a permit, brought the potential for mass arrests and police confrontation.

The group gathered in an abandoned lot in derelict Northern Philadelphia at a camp called "Bushville," where march participants and city homeless bivouacked during the week.

The KWRU organizers planned Bushville both as a high-visibility reminder of poverty and a disparaging comparison between George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover. During Hoover's presidency the Depression struck, sending the poor into shantytowns which they dubbed "Hoovervilles" out of contempt for the president. With both sides hoping to avoid any ugliness, KWRU lawyers and police officials negotiated a minute-to-minute truce as the march moved slowly from Bushville's Northern Philadelphia ghetto toward the main downtown thoroughfares connecting Center City to the First Union Center, where the convention would begin that night.

As officials on both sides, protester and police, agreed to cooperate, the city shut down Broad Street, making an open road for the demonstrators and hour-long traffic delays.

The protest annoyed many. A man in a white polo shirt, the casual Republican uniform, stood near the open door of his green BMW sedan talking speaking on a cell phone.

"I'm a half-hour late for lunch," he said, sweating freely.

A woman walking between the spectators who crowded the sidewalks along the mile-long parade eyed the parade, and turning to her friend asked, "My God, can you smell the body odor coming off those people."

The march formed a mile-long line of demonstrators two abreast in another day of balmy heat down the center of Broad Street, the largest East-West thoroughfare in the city.

Despite the heat and possibility of arrest, the contingent was large and multiform. Young, black-masked anarchists walked with an upside-down American flag in step behind families marching with young children.

Demonstrating with his wife and nine-year old son was Tom Hirschl, a professor of sociology at Cornell University. His was the rally's common theme: America's prosperity was driving a dangerously wide economic gap between the rich and the poor.

"The government is just responding to the economy; it's going along with it, not trying to control it," he said. "The policies of the leaders of this country are creating more homelessness."

Not all the protesters shared Hirschl's calm, measured speech. Racing back and forth between the protesters in the middle of the street and the many spectators who clogged sidewalks along the route, a man with a sprawling, unkempt beard and a banner tucked under his arm screamed in onlookers' faces.

"Start believing in your neighbors! Stop believing in these goddamned devils!" he shouted several times at a small group of women on the corner of Locust and Broad Streets.

The police, who earlier that afternoon and only a few blocks away had arrested nine members of a group protesting US-sponsored training of South American paramilitaries, stood with expressionless faces and watched the marchers pass.

One officer, about 15 feet from the nearest protester, idly drew his nightstick. A photographer rushed close to him, knelt and made ready to photograph the riot-ready policeman with nightstick drawn. The officer, noticing the man with the camera, quickly slid his baton back into his belt before the photographer could click the shutter open.

In addition to the Philadephia police, the organizers sent their own orange-vested security forces up and down the line to maintain calm. Each KWRU member in the march had taken a non-violence pledge.

Some of the last marchers on the line waved ghostly, 15-foot-tall puppets above their heads and an Uncle Sam on stilts danced among them with a drum corps.

Following them closely were the police, who formed their own parade, an assembly on foot, on horseback, in armored buses with grate windows, on motorcycles, on dirt bikes and in Police Athletic League vans. The police contingent covered four lanes of Broad Street and stretched back for six blocks.

Another man in a polo shirt walked past the mass of police and, ducking through a crowd, remarked to a few onlookers: "All of this for high school kids? They would have been all right with one car. They had less than this for the riots after they killed Martin Luther King," he said.

The march made it peacefully for three miles, without any arrests or serious confrontations, to the police barriers erected across Broad Street near the First Union Center, where the vanguard had to choose between peaceful assembly in Franklin D. Roosevelt Park across the street from the Republican Convention, or a march on the convention and the hundred of police surrounding it.

They headed for the park, and, just as Republicans from Alabama began the roll call kicking off the convention inside the First Union Center, the march ended calmly. The police saturating the area had little to do, although the city would soon find need for its marshaled forces.

All Quiet in the Protest Pit

Despite rumors of more aggressive protests, Tuesday morning was hot and uneventful. At the First Union Center, behind three walls of eight-foot chain-link fence, were police in cars every 30 feet. Franklin D. Roosevelt park, where the March For Economic Human Rights had ended the day before, was enclosed by another perimeter of fencing, and more police. Only one entrance, at 20th Street, remained open. At the southwest corner, more than 300 yards from the convention center across a highway, a parking lot, four more fences and hundred of police, was a fenced-in enclosure dubbed "the protest pit" by demonstrators. The police had planned to control demonstrators by giving them pit-time in 50-minute blocks. Media reports before had predicted the area would be the main battleground for the week's protests, the focal point of protest.

On Tuesday afternoon, except for six plain-clothes police officers and a podium, the protest pit was empty. One speaker, Cole H. Kleitsch of the Walking Civics group, knelt off to one side and gathered his belongings after he had finished his time at the podium. He warned the audience of six police about the evils of political parties taking quotes from George Washington's 1796 farewell address, in which Washington spoke of the same theme.

Kleitsch was not bothered by the turnout.

"The city was kind enough to give us the spot and so I came and did my protest," he said.

Kleitsch was the only scheduled protester who had showed up that Tuesday. On one officer's schedule for the day before, ten groups were slated. Nine had "no show" written in red ink next to their names. The Greyhound Adoption Program had shown up.

"It's bring your own audience," one plainclothes officer said.

A woman walking with her son through the park, said she had been moving along the fence for a half-hour, trying to find a way out. Several police had sent her to the enclosure, and told her police there could let her out. They could not.

"There's no way out? It's me and my three-year-old and we're stuck?" she asked police.

They directed her across the fountains and gazebos to the 20th Street entrance, and she started with child in tow.

Two police roared past her on dirt bikes, heading for a young man who had stepped off a path onto the grass. They slid the bikes in front of and behind the boy, and told him sternly, repeatedly, to get back on the gravel trail.

"Where's the Swedish-American Museum?" he asked the police.

They both gestured at the trail, he complied, and then the police took off into a grove of trees.

The Anarcho-Catholic Syndicate

Most protesters Tuesday shunned the carefully controlled conditions of the First Union Center and opted instead for havoc on the open streets of downtown Philadelphia, among the high-rise hotels where most Republican Delegates stayed.

At two in the afternoon, at the intersection of 13th and Arch Streets--just outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center that housed many convention activities--about 25 protesters, all white youths, squatted on a crosswalk with their arms linked, stopping traffic.

Behind them, 50 police officers stood two rows deep, holding batons across their chests and staring straight ahead. Men and women in business clothes with orange armbands marked "police" walked around the protesters.

Holding one post of the sign was an young woman anarchist with a shaved head and a red bandana mask. Holding the other was a nun in street clothes. She belonged to a group with signs that said, "Catholic sisters oppose the death penalty."

The anarchist shouted at the mob of press and delegates surrounding the scene. "Can you believe this unity, man? A nun and me." She acknowledged that plans for Tuesday's demonstration were more aggressive than those on previous days, but would not say explicitly whether or not she planned on violence.

"I will not be arrested without showing that I don't believe I should be arrested," she said, and pointed down to a length of wire coiled around the pole she held.

One Republican delegate looking on, Ted T. Barr, a retired police captain and sheriff from West Virginia, wasn't worried by the group.

"I've been to seven conventions and I've seen it all," Barr said.

And although the R2K network, the protesters' organizing body, had issued a statement saying that Tuesday "was a day to turn the tables on them and to disrupt the delegates' lives," Barr stood calmly a few feet from the masked woman.

He surveyed the group.

"A spoiled brat will only go so far. It makes good entertainment for the conventioneers," Barr said.

At that moment, two more rows of police followed by dozens of vans and patrol cars appeared at the other end of the street, boxing the demonstration between the buildings. A yellow school bus pulled up behind the police batallions who had arrived first, and a plainclothes officer told the sitting demonstrators they would be arrested in five minutes.

The protesters got up and slinked away quickly between a photographer and a traffic signal, moving down 13th Street.

One of the demonstration drummers, who gave his name as Drum, was left among a crowd of press, police and businesspeople.

"I think it was a success," he said. "We stopped traffic."

He then walked away, tapping idly on his empty plastic can, as the traffic began flowing smoothly down Arch Street.

Field Guide to Riots

From the radio of a car stuck in traffic by the Arch Street demonstration, a news station listed the intersections shut down by protests.

"Sixteenth and Callowhill, Broad and Spruce, 15th and J.F.K., Eighth and Vine, 18th and Vine."

Also over the radio, police asked all motorists to leave Center City.

Coordinated by cellular phone and two-way radio, protesters, predominantly white and young, were traveling in bands as large as 300.

Some burned bunting, spilled garbage, vandalized police cars and threw unidentified fluids in the faces of the police. Then, there were the black-suited members of groups like Black Bloc and the Upside Down Clowns whose agenda appeared to be petty vandalism and Republican harassment outside the Doubletree Hotel. One group which denied being part of any protest and said it was a jogging club, ran the streets in red dresses, flipping cartwheels in what appeared to be a protest against underwear. Another group, called "Billionaires For Bush (or Gore)" -one wearing top hats and brocaded dresses--lampooned the high hand of money in politics. Their slogan: "Because inequality isn't growing fast enough."

Other protestors were doctrinaires: the death penalty, poverty, political venality. To draw the cameras to their signs and slogans, they would run crepe paper around traffic lights and street signs at an intersection, forming a quick square into which they would jump and begin the chants they would use until their arrest.

"Whose street? Our street!"

There were those, too, who had no affiliation and just showed up wherever trouble was.

Sleeping Dragons Shut Down City

As the evening came and conventioneers across town prepared to hear retired general Norman H. Schwartzkopf's remarks on military readiness, the splintered groups coalesced around a few large demonstrations, mostly at blocked intersections. At Spruce and Broad streets, about 300 protesters had gathered in the center of one of the city's busiest streets and the main route from the hotels to the convention.

Police surrounded the scene. For the first time, they appeared in riot helmets. They stretched Nike golf gloves over their baton hands as they moved out from the yellow school buses toward the intersection. Thirty-five protesters linked arms in the center of the street.

Eight were chained together by devices called "sleeping dragons," two-foot long lengths of PVC pipe covered with a thick layer of duct tape. Inside each tube was a bolt and chain which locked protesters' wrist together inside the pipe.

Police methodically secured protesters arms behind their backs, wrote number for reference on their arms and lined them up to be arrested and dragged to waiting Philadelphia Sheriff's Office buses.

Other demonstrators, gathered on the sidewalk outside of the police line on the, applauded the protesters as police lifted them by their biceps and put them in the buses.

Many arrestees smiled like martyrs, or joked with police, who responded cordially. One man hopped on one foot between the police escorting him to the bus, kicking the other leg out in a black boot can-can. The plain-clothes officer by his side smiled.

The police knelt and worked for hours to separate the prone demonstrators who were chained together, finally freeing their hands, which emerged from the pipes with chains still dangling around sweat-soaked layers of athletic tape.

With the central square clear, they turned to face the protesters and spectators who had watched for three hours as the demonstration slowly dissolved, and pushed them slowly back down the side-streets.

One man tried to break through the line, claiming to be a member of the press. An officer told him several times to back away, unsuccessfully.

The policeman then, keeping his drawn baton to the side, walked at the man and, with his chest, pressed him against the Plexiglas bus barrier and moved his face in to a kissing distance.

"Do not test me today, sir," the officer said. "Do not test me."

The man did not. He turned and left.

Fire in the Skies

In West Philadelphia Tuesday afternoon, the puppet factory the police alleged was making sleeping dragons and other accessories to stop traffic was surrounded by police and its occupants arrested.

On 17th Street, Police Commisioner John Timoney, who traveled the city by bike throughout the protests, ran into a group of masked demonstrators who were busy stomping on a black Toyota Camry.

Several began to attack him.

He fought back.

While Timoney escaped with cuts and bruises, another police officer lay prone on the ground. One of the demonstrators had slammed his head into a bicycle.

Reports circulated among protestors about police brutality. By nightfall Tuesday, 285 demonstrators were in jail, 20 patrol car windows were broken, five cars' tires slashed and four police officers injured.

A few hundred demonstrators still lingered at Thomas Paine Plaza next to city hall, supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black radio journalist sentenced to death for the murder of a Philly cop in 1981.

A small group of protesters climbed a bus stop shelter covered with stickers and black-marker slogans and posed angrily while their friend snapped a group photo. Another crowd, decked in all-black outfits and masks, sat on a high concrete wall, looking down into a streets that still smelled like aerosol spray paint, watching work crews blast graffiti off buses and buildings.

Behind them, delegates with their families took pictures of the crowds, and politely refused leaflets from representatives of the International Workers of the World.

More police amassed. But the blue circle around the plaza was complete. The newly arrived police formed a line across a street without protesters and for a moment, did not know which way to face. A plain-clothes officer chose North.

As the ominous words, "If Mumia dies, fire in the skies," disappeared in a cloud of steaming water from a concrete wall. But protestors vowed to remain.

"As long as I'm alive, I'll be here," one said.

She was breathing still at 9 o' clock, when the demonstration disbanded.

The thunderstorms didn't come, and protesters drifted back through the dark into the parks and warehouses of Philadelphia.

With their promises of disruption fulfilled and many of their ranks in jail, protesters met again on Wednesday to repeat the fracas. Scattered disruptions popped up throughout the city, all peaceful, and the police entered their third day of double shifts. Officers once again saturated the streets, stopping young groups and leisurely checking identification.

At the Police Administration Building downtown, processing began for previous day's arrests. Outside, about two hundred protesters marched in support of those inside, demanding their release.

The talk among protesters was now of jail solidarity. Many prisoners were refusing to give their names or eat. The marchers around the building maintained a peaceful vigil throughout the day, and even worked out a deal with the police.

They camped at nearby Franklin Park. The city helpfully provided water and portable toilets.

Downpours came late that night, drenching the 24-person bicycle police squads that still snaked through the city. The rain made driving difficult, causing some traffic backups.

But otherwise, the streets were clear.