Cantabrigians Protest, Prepare for War

From over 100 high school students who played hooky to a mayor who spent the day trying to secure the city against wartime risks, Cambridge residents spent yesterday reacting to the military action that began late Wednesday.

Cambridge resident Marilyn Bruderer, whose husband, a military sergeant, has been overseas and out of contact with her for three weeks said she supported the war despite “mixed emotions.”

“I’m hoping we’re doing it for all the right reasons, to free a people, and not for oil,” she said. “I’m raising my family while my husband’s off fighting. I just hope it gets over quick.”

Cambridge Mayor Michael A. Sullivan said he knew of several city employees who have already been deployed to Iraq.

“Right now my thoughts and concerns and prayers are with our troops,” he said.

Sullivan said he spent the day speaking with city officials in response to the start of the war and heightening security to meet the national code level of “orange.”

“I was working on issues with regard to homeland security,” he said, declining to offer further details except for that he focused on safety in public schools.

But at the schools, many focused on protesting the war, leaving class to join thousands at a planned event in Harvard Square.

At least a hundred students at Cambridge’s only high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (CRLS) walked out of class at 12:20 p.m. to join the sea of people who gathered in Harvard Yard in the protest organized by the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice.

According to CRLS junior Nicholas Zeig-Owens, who organized the high school walkout, between 200 and 300 students congregated outside the high school and marched en masse to the Yard, with some continuing on to protests at MIT and Government Center.

Zeig-Owens, an active member of the high school’s Students United for Global Action, said the club began preparing for yesterday’s event on Wednesday, handing out fliers and urging students to protest. The group decided to join the Yard rally after the school’s administration rejected an assembly they’d planned to educate students about the war, saying it was “too biased,” according to Zeig-Owens.

“That made us pretty angry,” he said. “We decided to stop working within the system so we decided to plan a walkout.”

Students said high school administrators were careful to say the walkout was not a school-sponsored event—but they allowed students to leave as long as they obtained permission from their parents.

“I got pulled in by the security to [Principal Sybil] Knight and she said that she supports what we’re doing but she wants us to know that she doesn’t want us to be leaving without permission from our parents,” Zeig-Owens said. “We’re supposed to be in school legally—she’s liable if any of us gets hurt.”

CRLS sophomore Kayty E. Himmelstein, another student who helped organize the protest, said Knight even reminded students of the protest, announcing over the school-wide intercom that they would need parental permission to attend.

“We got a pretty lucky break,” she said. “It’s not a school-sponsored event but it worked as amazing publicity for us.”

And, in an effort to ensure the protesters’ safety, Zeig-Owens estimated that six Cambridge Police Department officers escorted the students to the Yard.

“Security felt that they were well on their way to expressing themselves and having a meaningful experience,” said CRLS Assistant to the Principal Michael L. Young. “Personally, I just wanted to make sure it was a worthwhile experience.”

Himmelstein said she was impressed with the number of CRLS students who turned out to protest with a range of other groups.

“It was a really nice sense of community,” she said. “I really liked the diversity of ways that people were thinking about the war that were represented by the speakers.”

Other Cambridge locals put together their own smaller protests to voice opposition to the war.

All-around Cambridge activist Eli Yarden said he was mobilizing a group of local residents in the Green Party to protest what he called “Bush’s War.”

“I just see it as an unfortunate turn in American foreign policy to neo-imperialist policy,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we don’t have an anti-imperalist party in the United States.”

—Staff writer Claire A. Pasternack can be reached at cpastern@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Susanne C. Chock contributed to the reporting of this story.