"Whose Streets? Our Streets!" Marchers Chanted
Originally published in the Black World Today
"Whose Streets? Our Streets!" Marchers Chanted
Written by Herb Boyd
There may be dispute about the number of people who jammed the streets opposing the year-long war in Iraq last Saturday in Manhattan, but there is no mistaking the message, which was a sustained denunciation of the Bush administration.
By Herb Boyd
Managing Editor, TBWT
There may be dispute about the number of people who jammed the streets opposing the year-long war in Iraq last Saturday in Manhattan, but there is no mistaking the message, which was a sustained denunciation of the Bush administration.
"I will not dance to your war dreams," poet/activist Suheir Hammad recited to a throng of supporters contained by steel barriers along the eastern perimeter of Madison Square Park. "Drop tuition, not bombs!"
Councilman Bill Perkins picked up both the spirit and intent of Hammad’s protest, demanding "Taxes for peace, not war," he said, and then quoted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war."
The rancor and disgust from the podium did not spill into the streets. Fewer than a half dozen people were arrested–mainly for disorderly conduct–according to early reports from the NYPD, which had hundreds of its uniformed officers and community liaisons circling the demonstrators.
Labor organizer Ray LaForest of District Council 1707 and the Haiti Support Network, assailed Bush and his policy in the Middle East and in Haiti. "We denounce the removal of the democratically elected government of Haiti," he said.
Whatever the final tally of protesters in New York City, they were joined by millions around the world, including more than a million marching in Rome. Looking out over the crowd, Brenda Stokely, co-chair of the NYC Labor Against the War and President of DC 1707, said she saw a "people who will not be silent...bring down the imperialist powers."
"Bush must go, Bush must go!" Councilman Charles Barron chanted, exhorting listeners, who joined him in chorus after chorus of rejection. "We have lost nearly 580 troops, countless number of Iraqi citizens, and spent more than $160 billion," he continued, "and we haven’t even found a firecracker in Iraq, let alone weapons of mass destruction."
Larry Holmes, a Vietnam veteran and member of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and Racism)–one of the march’s main organizers–said in a press statement that "one year ago the Bush administration promised ‘shock and awe’ for the Iraqi people. "This was a brutally frank language describing the administration’s quick-start readiness to use limitless violence against
the people of countries that have been targeted for regime change...these policies will only lead to a further radicalization of the population similar to what happened during the Vietnam War thirty years ago."
Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who continues to campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, stopped short of condemning Sen. John Kerry, the presumed nominee, for not speaking at the march, choosing to state his own firm opposition to what he called an "immoral and unjust war."
Among the speakers before the 17-block march got underway were Rep. Major Owens; the Rev. Herb Daughtry of the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, who lashed out against the war makers; attorney Leonard Weinglass, who denounced the Bush administration and told of the plight of five Cubans arrested by the U.S. government for merely monitoring a right wing terror network; Mahdi Bray of the Muslim American Society & Freedom Foundation; and William Camacaro of the Venezuela Support Committee, who feared that President Hugo Chavez may be the next victim of the coup-minded Bush administration.
Alexa Bobe, a youth organizer, proudly boasted bringing a contingent of students to the rally. "They’ve spent billions of dollars for bombs and we need textbooks," she boomed.
More than one speaker noted that more than 575 U.S. soldiers are among the casualties in Iraq, and several speakers cited the recent disclosures by former Bush security advisor Richard Clarke, who in his new book "Against All Enemies," writes of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s desire to wage war even if there were no weapons of mass destruction there.
"We don’t need a former insider to tell us what we’ve known all along," Kucinich told Amy Goodman during an interview on Democracy Now Monday morning. Thousands who attended the march would have shouted a thunderous "Amen" to the candidate’s remarks.
Last Updated ( Monday, 22 March 2004 )
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