An Occupy D.C. march last November.
The Occupy movement has long been looking forward to today. Activists are looking to make May 1, sometimes known as May Day or International Workers’ Day, a seminal moment in the seven-month-old protest.
But for today’s activities, look out for more than just the same, sometimes scraggly bunch of activists who have been a fixture of McPherson Square, Freedom Plaza (until recently) and other parts of D.C. since last October. Occupy D.C., like its counterparts in New York and elsewhere, is partnering with several labor unions and other groups for an afternoon rally and march that organizers hope will produce the movement’s biggest crowd in months. Nationally, the Occupy movement is pledging actions
in as many as 135 cities.
Since the U.S. Park Police operations in February that largely removed protesters from McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza, Occupy D.C. has remained active, though not always as visible as it once was. A pair of protests against mortgage lenders helped a pair of homeowners fight off what the group saw as predatory foreclosures; more recently, a small band of occupiers have moved their sleeping bags from the federally controlled parks where camping is prohibited to the sidewalk outside a Bank of America branch, resulting in several arrests.
But these actions yielded far smaller numbers than Occupy D.C. turned out in its mid-winter prime. In partnering with the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, the Amalgamated Transit Union and other advocacy groups, organizers are hoping to see several hundred converge on Meridian Hill Park. That would be a far cry from Occupy D.C.’s last action, a protest against a World Bank summit of finance ministers from the Group of 20 in which only a few dozen demonstrators participated.
The May Day demonstration starts at 3:30 p.m. in the hilltop park. Groups sponsoring the event say there will be live music and carnival games in addition to the usual speechifying. There will also be a considerable focus on anarchism, said Lacy MacAuley, a member of Occupy D.C. who helped coordinate the event. The rally will feature two “workshops,” MacAuley said, one of which wil be an “introduction to anarchism.” The other will address the labor movement.
“May Day doesn’t just represent the struggle that is currently taken up by the labor movement,” MacAuley said. It addresses, more broadly, “the struggle against those that are in power.” After the Meridian Hill Park activities, the protesters will march down 16th Street NW toward the White House for another rally at 7 p.m.
Celebrations of the first day of May date to the pre-Christian Roman Republic, when it coincided with the festival of Flora, the Roman godess of flowers. As a social protest, it emerged as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre, an 1886 incident in Chicago in which a crowd of striking laborers was gunned down by police after a protester threw a dynamite bomb at the officers. Several dozen workers as well as a few police officers were killed.
In D.C., at least, the best remembered May Day is probably 1971, when some 35,000 protesters converged in West Potomac Park for a three-day protest against the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration, overwhelmed by the crowd, eventually called 4,000 U.S. Army soldiers, who joined the entirety of the Metropolitan Police Department in patrolling the streets of D.C. Over 7,000 protesters were arrested on May 3 in the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.
Today’s crowd at Meridan Hill Park, under weather forecasters expect will 80-degree weather with occasional showers, likely won’t draw as many as that 1971 antiwar hullaballoo did, but with the partnership of the labor movement, Occupy D.C. could see its biggest day in months.
