Early in May 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, D.C.-from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service Agency, Justice Department, and other government agencies-upwards of 25,000 young radicals set out to do something brash and extraordinary: shut down the federal government through nonviolent direct action. They called themselves the Mayday Tribe, and their slogan was as succinct as it was ambitious: "If the government won't stop the war, we'll stop the government." An elaborate tactical manual, distributed in advance, detailed twenty-one key bridges and traffic circles for protesters to block nonviolently, with stalled vehicles, jury-rigged barricades, or their bodies. The immediate goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get to their jobs. The larger objective was "to create the specter of social chaos while maintaining the support or at least toleration of the broad masses of American people."
Opinions vary as to whether the action was successful. Most of the planned blockades held only briefly, if at all, because most of the protesters were arrested before they got into position: thanks to the detailed tactical manual, the government knew exactly where protesters would be deployed. The intended tactics had been highly controversial, and the mainstream media lost no time in calling it a rout. As Mary McGrory wrote in the Boston Globe, "It was universally panned as the worst planned, worst executed, most slovenly, strident and obnoxious peace action ever committed." Even Rennie Davis, the Chicago 7 defendant and New Left leader who originally conceived the Mayday action, announced at a press conference that the protest had failed.
But the government's victory, if you can call it that, came only as a result of extreme measures. A force of more than 14,000 police and National Guardsmen was mobilized to remove the radicals from the streets, and a staggering 13,500 people were placed under arrest. (Many of these were uninvolved bystanders: as one protester noted, "[Anyone and everyone who looked at all freaky was scooped up off the street.") Nominally, the government still functioned-but only as a result of the largest sweep-arrests in U.S. history, which turned the workaday bustle of the district's streets into "qualified martial law."
The Mayday civil disobedience, moreover, was larger than any action organized by Mahatma Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In fact, more protesters were arrested on the first day of the action than in any other single event in U.S. history. According to one of the few historians to have studied the event, Mayday so unnerved the Nixon administration that it palpably speeded U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. White House aide Jeb Magruder said that the protest had "shaken" Nixon and his staff, while CIA director Richard Helms called Mayday "a very damaging kind of event," noting that it was "one of the things that was putting increasing pressure on the administration to try and find some way to get out of the war."
Yet Mayday has no place in our collective memory, thanks in part to the pop culture habit of shoe-horning protest history into "the Sixties." This nonviolent radical action, moreover, doesn't fit into the classic narrative of the New Left's rise and fall, a story in which noble democratic ideals degenerate into bitterness and violence; large movement organizations are painstakingly built and then collapse; and revolutionary phantasms overtake a radicalism based on homegrown traditions of dissent.
Mayday 1971 deserves rediscovery, for it occupies a pivotal place in American radical history. It was organized differently from any protest before it, in ways that have influenced the form of most major protests since. This flawed and daring action marks the birth of the style of radicalism that vaulted onto the world stage at the Seattle World Trade Organization protests, the forgotten segue between the activism of the New Left and the decentralized direct action movements of today.
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Sam Smith - On May Day in 1971 when the police arrested 13,000 people in DC -- including reporters and bystanders -- in what was probably the largest mass arrest in American history, I noticed a prominent black militant trapped in one of the corrals the cops had improvised. About a half hour later, he was out of the corral and talking to a top police department official. Then, not long after, he was back inside the roped off area. You learned to look for things like that just as I had learned to keep looking behind me at demonstrations so I could see where the cops were moving. Which is how I didn't get arrested on May Day 1971.
Some of those trapped were detained in an old sports arena; others were herded onto the playing field of RFK Stadium. That night the temperature dropped to the thirties.
For three days the DC police department had literally ran amuck. In a searing report , the American Civil Liberties wrote later:
"Between May 3 and May 5, more than 13,OOO people were arrested in Washington, DC-- the largest mass arrest in our country's history. The action was the government's response to anti-war demonstrations, an important component of which was the announced intention of the Mayday Coalition, organizer of the demonstrations, to block Washington rush-hour traffic. During this three-day period, normal police procedures were abandoned. Most of the 13,000 people arrested -- including law-breakers caught while attempting to impede traffic, possible potential law-breakers, war protestors engaged in entirely legal demonstrations, uninvolved passers-by and spectators -- were illegally detained, illegally charged, and deprived of their constitutional rights of due process, fair trial and assistance of counsel. The court system, unable to cope with this grand scale emergency caused by the police, was thrown into chaos."
During the Mayday police riot, people were beaten and arrested illegally, locked up by the thousands in makeshift holding pens with inadequate toilet facilities and food, or stuffed into drastically overcrowded cells. People on their way to work, patients going to see their doctor, students attending classes, reporters and lawyers were all caught up in the sweep arrests. Most of those stashed in the DC Jail exercise yard were without blankets throughout a night in which the temperatures fell into the thirties. And in the most symbolic display of contempt for the law, more than a thousand persons were arrested in front of the Capitol where they had assembled to hear speeches, including several from members of Congress. When Rep. Ronald Dellums tried to keep a policeman from arresting a member of his staff, saying, "Hey, that's a member of my staff. Get your hands off of him. I'm a United States Congressman," the policeman replied, "I don't give a fuck who you are," then hit Dellums in the side with his nightstick and pushed him down some stairs.
It was the grimmest display of mass police power -- not just selective brutality against a few -- this city had seen. And it was a clear warning of the fearful danger inherent in Washington's acceptance of police power as a form of government. The fact that neither the black chief executive, Walter Washington, nor the white liberal newspaper, the Washington Post, could summon up either the wisdom or the courage to denounce what Wilson and his men, acting under orders of the Justice Department, had done made the affair all the more dismal. More and more the city was listening to sirens luring liberty onto the rocks of repression.
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