MAY 12TH - WE RETURN TO THE PORT
Two weeks passed and the day came. At five o'clock in the afternoon I arrived at the West Oakland BART station, and in the plaza were a couple hundred people. More were arriving.
Along a wall was a large banner which read: no war at home, no war for empire. Another banner was one that members of the Berkeley group, Vigil for Peace, had been displaying over a freeway bridge: war is 4 profit$.
There was also a band. I asked the name of it, and was told that it was actually two groups, Brass Liberation Orchestra, and Action Music Group. Here they were playing together as one. They'd also been at the docks on April 7th, though that had apparently been earlier in the morning and so I hadn't seen them.
"Daniel!" someone called out. It was Mark, from the Lake Merritt Peace Walk, an activity which about twenty of us do every Sunday afternoon. Steve was standing next to him, and then I saw Randy and Cathy, also Laura and Tony, Ken and others who'd said they were going. A few minutes later Catherine arrived, carrying a sign with a painting of a ship and bearing the words: we still have some civil rights. Bob Miller was there in his wheelchair; I knew he wouldn't miss this.
There were people of all ages, young and old. During the course of this event I recognized many that I'd seen on April 7th. Sri Louise, was there, and so was Anna, the woman who'd been hit on the shoulder by an exploding concussion grenade. Both still bore black and blue marks from the previous event. It was especially encouraging to see them and others who'd been injured that morning but had not given in. There were of course a good many faces I remembered from that day, though I knew the names of only a few.
Some had brought their own signs, and for those of us who hadn't there were a stack of pre-printed ones. I took one that read: stop the corporate profiteers. One woman had a handbag embroidered with: help the police - beat yourself up.
Leaflets were passed out with a map of the port, showing the two gates of APL and the three of SSA. This map was especially welcome; I thought of how confused I'd been during our previous time in the port.
Then a short rally began with a Direct Action person whose name was Antonia giving the general orientation. She said:
"Today we reclaim the right to community picket, free speech, and the right to protest as we stand up to the war for empire and the war at home.
"This is a nonviolent community picket, not a civil disobedience action. Our intent is not to risk arrest or blockade cars or trucks, but to keep up a lively moving picket line and encourage everyone to honor it. Everyone is urged to remain nonviolent and to support other picketers in doing so."
She also explained a number of other things, including the negotiations with the police and their alternative offer to put us in a "protest pen" a mile from the port, an idea which the City Council had supported us in rejecting.
Among the speakers was ILWU's Clarence Thomas, and Gwen Hardy from PUEBLO, as well as representatives from the Green Party and other organizations and unions.
Another speaker from Direct Action was Liz, who told us that a smaller support rally was being held at the SSA headquarters in Seattle, and that she was speaking with them now. She held the phone up to the PA system so we could hear some of what was being said, mainly greetings from the support rally to us. Although the sound quality was pretty bad and didn't come through very clearly, the solidarity of our companions in Seattle came through loud and clear.
The rally ended and we set out with our band playing. We marched up 7th Street, then turned onto Adeline where we soon reached the Adeline Street Bridge and took up the entire right hand lane as we trooped across.
This was the same long bridge by which I'd entered the port a month earlier, but with quite a different feeling this time, marching across in the company of several hundred others and to the tune of a brass band. A couple miles behind us were the high-rise buildings of downtown Oakland, and below us was the railroad yard. Not being at the front of the column, I couldn't see much of what was up ahead, but I remembered from the previous visit the seemingly endless rows of containers which stretched on and on.
Catherine wondered what we might encounter when we entered the port at the end of this bridge. Would the police really leave us alone and respect our rights as they had promised?
"I suppose we'll soon know," she said.
Those of us from the Lake Merritt group tried to stay together, but it was difficult, and most of us soon got separated. That's the way demonstrations seem to work.
There were a large number of legal observers with us, members of the ACLU and the NLG. They were identified by their green armbands; technically they were neutral, but of course several had been shot and others arrested on April 7th.
We'd reached the end of the quarter-mile-long bridge and took up one lane on Middle Harbor Road. Semi trailer trucks in the other lane honked and waved peace signs as they drove by us. Some truck drivers had honked their support the last time too, but this time practically all of them did. They apparently knew we were coming today; presumably their union had told them about us. We cheered and waved at them in return.
Then we heard a piercing train whistle. "Is that for us?" someone wondered. We looked towards where the sound had come from and saw a train engine cruising along the railroad yard. The operator was waving at us with a two fingered peace sign, and in response, a loud cheer arose from our ranks.
We came to the first APL gate and paused. Some early picketers were already there. Someone over a bullhorn announced that we were now at the first of five gates we'd be picketing, and invited some to join the picket line. A few left our column and filled out the ranks of the picketers, and the rest of us continued on.
To the left of us were the same rows of containers and behind them the tall, alien-like cranes that I'd seen before. On either side of us was the brown, oily gravel. But today we were marching on the paved road, and being here today felt just totally different from last time.
Another quarter of a mile and we reached the APL main gate which I had helped picket before. Again we paused to augment the ranks of picketers who'd arrived earlier in the afternoon. This was as far as I'd gotten last time. It was here that I'd watched our companions of the other contingent as they'd marched on deeper into the port. Today I'd take that route myself, see those places and join the picket lines where the shootings had occurred - at the gates of SSA.
Most probably, APL was as responsible for the shootings as SSA. But SSA was where it had happened, and that was where I personally wanted to walk a picket line. We resumed our march, now filling up the entire width of Middle Harbor Road, and the music of our band filled the air of the port around us.
There was a row of trees to the right of us now; they were the only touch of green in this otherwise barren region, and it had been above these trees that I'd seen the airbursts. On our left were some buildings and a large sign that read: Stevedoring Services of America. This was where the shooting had started. I recognized it from the videos.
More people left our column to join the picket line here. The third and last gate of SSA was another half mile down the road, and when we reached it, someone called out, "The scene of the crime!"
Of course there'd been eight shootings over a period of an hour an a half, and so this whole area was full of crime scenes, but somehow this particular gate, by being in the very deepest part of the port, seemed to personify the inner sanctum of these violent war profiteers.
People had been shot, at this gate as well as at the others, just for being here with picket signs. We stepped up to join the picketers who'd arrived earlier. We were reclaiming our turf, our right to hold demonstrations, as we walked in a large circle, chanting slogans. "Whose port?" called out someone over a bullhorn. "Our port!" the rest of us shouted back.
"Whose port?" - "Our port!"
"Whose port?" - "Our port!"
"Whose port?" - "Our port!"
Similar rituals were going on at the other four gates of APL and SSA. According to the newspapers, these shippers had claimed this as their private property. Middle Harbor Road and the other streets on which we had demonstrated were of course public streets belonging to the City of Oakland, and we were reclaiming them as such.
The Native American Indians had a war ritual known as "counting coup." The idea was to touch an armed and dangerous enemy without physically harming him. The fact that Indian warriors would take risks to perform such a ritual seemed to puzzle most white people, and I must admit that I never understood it either - not until this day. Now I suddenly felt I understood it perfectly well, and I realized that's what we were doing this afternoon.
I don't know how the Indians counted coup, but the way we'd done it was to announce it well ahead of time, have it in the newspapers, broadcast it over the radio, and make absolutely certain everybody knew about it. Then march in with a brass band and set up picket lines. That's something that can be understood throughout the modern world.
Those shippers had gone to the extreme of presiding over the shooting of six dozen people, presumably in the belief that they'd be rid of us forever. Instead, they'd set themselves up to become the focus of ritualized retribution.
Naturally we were doing this in front of cameras. The photographers and videographers who'd filmed our first visit to the port were with us again today. The Labor Video Project people, Kazumi and Steve, who'd made the documentary Shots on the Docks, were here. So was Jessica, the woman whose videos I'd watched at City Hall; she'd been injured in the leg by a wooden bullet and was barely able to walk that day, but she'd somehow managed to limp along to film us on our way downtown. By now she'd recovered.
TV crews from several channels were also there, and this was aired on the evening news.
The police where also here, of course; there were about a hundred of them in the port and Chief Word was with them. But they weren't in riot gear. "We've tamed the OPD!" remarked one woman. Another woman, who was interviewed on the TV news that evening, said, "The police are behaving very well today."
The company seemed to be hunkering down behind a locked gate, perhaps receding deeper into their bunker mentality. The port was pretty silent this day, except for us and our band. We continued to picket for two hours as the late afternoon sun sank lower in the sky, now shining directly in our eyes.
The people from Food-Not-Bombs, some of whom had been shot during the previous visit, were here with a lunch for us. It was sort of a vegetarian stew and apple water.
At one point Clarence Thomas of the ILWU came by and told us that a ship was due at these docks today, but that the company had kept it out in the harbor, presumably because of our demonstration. The delay would of course cost the company money, but the big thing was the psychological significance of our presence. The precedent we'd set. The fact that we'd asserted our First Amendment rights.
The sun continued to sink down towards the horizon, and, finally, team monitors from Direct Action and the ILWU told us it was time to fold up our demonstration and begin marching back the way we'd come in. So we set out, band playing. At each gate we came to, we did just the opposite of what we'd done coming here, the protesters at each gate we passed adding to our ranks.
This meant there were a lot more of us now. It looked to me as if there were as many as a thousand of us. Most newspaper accounts, however, including the Bay Guardian, which was sympathetic to our cause, said it was around 3 or 4 hundred. I think that's an accurate number of those of us who marched in together, but adding to that the number of people who had arrived earlier as well as later, I'd say it was more like 500 to 1000.
As we marched back towards the Adeline Street Bridge, we exchanged congratulations. People who recognized each other from April 7th spoke to each other, saying, "Good to see you here!"
At this point our band struck up The International, and someone near me sang out the words:
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth,
for justice thunders condemnation,
a better world's in birth!
We reached the bridge and continued the final half mile towards the BART station. It seemed hardly possible that everything could've gone this well, exactly as it was supposed to, and that nothing disastrous had happened. The police had kept their promise and hadn't attacked or in any way bothered us - but of course we hadn't known that going in. There was no way we could've known.
There was an incredible, almost stunning feeling of success, that we'd done it.
"Sometimes we do win victories," Catherine said, as we were leaving the port, and that summed it up.
After we reached the West Oakland BART station, the band continued to play for another half hour, and people danced in the parking lot. It was now dusk and the evening lights were coming on.