Can't Stop Won't Stop (73 page)

Two weeks before, in Philadelphia, hip-hop activists joined the network of protestors to shut down the business district on the first day of the Republican Convention. Dozens of tightly organized groups roamed through downtown intersections, waving pickets that described their causes—workers' rights, immigrants' rights, environment, corporate globalization, prisons, racial profiling. “Whose streets?” they chanted. “Our streets!”

On one highway offramp near the INS offices, three hundred hip-hop activists—half of them of color—faced down rows of riot cops and INS police. As the protestors and the cops stared across the divide at each other, the chant became: “This is what democracy looks like!” In the afternoon, the scene turned uglier, with horsebacked cops beating and arresting hundreds. By twilight, on the deserted Ben Franklin Parkway, a few abandoned cop cruisers sat in the middle of the street—tires deflated, paint-bomb-splattered, with
FUCK THE POLICE
tagged across them.

In Los Angeles, the activists moved into an unused former swap meet building across the street from MacArthur Park, at the edge of the Rampart Division, to prepare for the Democratic National Convention and set up a “Convergence Center.” Ten cops stopped in for an impromptu warrantless search. Then they retreated to a rented apartment behind the Center, set up their surveillance equipment, and every once in a while, sent a ghetto bird to hover over the building. Although MacArthur Park was known as one of the city's hottest drug trafficking
centers, it had taken the arrival of tens of thousands of DNC protestors for the LAPD to beef up patrols in the neighborhood.

Cops handed out jaywalking tickets. They wrote down license plate numbers of the cars in the parking lot. When a young activist posted her address on a website offering help to out-of-towners looking for housing, the cops raided her house. On Monday night, police pulled the plug in the middle of a Rage Against The Machine and Ozomatli concert outside the Staples Convention Center, setting off a mini-riot. Police fired tear gas and gave orders to disperse as kids screamed, “Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!”

A few days later, marchers passed through the heart of the Pico-Union barrio. Dominique Nisperos, a Filipina who had just turned seventeen, was there with her crew of seven from the Central Valley town of Stockton. They were white, Black, Mexican and Chinese, all sporting black T-shirts and baggy pants, with black bandannas to cover their faces. A little wide-eyed and a little nervous, she said, “I hope I can do a good job here.”

Moonshine was marching also, a tall, striking, dreadlocked sixteen-year-old Black girl from New York who had hitchhiked across the country to be there. After the demonstrations she would hitchhike back north. “I want to go up to the redwoods and live there for a while,” she said. “I don't really have any plans, that's my only plan.” On her T-shirt, she had scrawled, “Chant Down Babylon.” A button of a bereted Huey Newton, shotgun in hand, adorned her beat-up grey backpack.

Silvia Beltran and Oscar Sanchez were there too, holding pickets adorned with a photo of a charismatic Latino and words that read, FREE ALEX SANCHEZ. Beltran and Sanchez were marching with thousands to demonstrate at the doorstep of the Rampart Division.

Earlier, Tom Hayden, the veteran of the 1968 Democratic Convention riots in Chicago, stood on the back of a flatbed truck in MacArthur Park, and told the crowd Alex Sanchez's story. He said that Alex had begun a hunger strike to protest the prison conditions at Terminal Island, and had organized a hundred others to join him. The crowd roared. “This is a dangerous place,” he said. “Have good heart, have no fear.”

By now, the CRASH units had been dismantled by LAPD. But part of the Democratic platform being touted a couple of miles away at the Staples Convention
Center was a proposal to hire 10,000 new prosecutors and 50,000 new police to match the 100,000 added during the Clinton-Gore administration. Even as the Street Crime Units and CRASH squads had come under fire, there was no discussion of community-based solutions. But the problem, community leaders were saying, was not that the elite police units had been taken off the streets, it was that the peacemakers like Alex Sanchez had been had off the streets.

A month later, Sanchez was released by a federal judge. Under pressure from Hayden's office, the U.S. Attorney dropped its illegal reentry case. The INS continued to press its bid for deportation, and in 2002, a federal judge finally granted Sanchez political asylum in 2002, allowing him to apply for citizenship status. “Now I don't have to run anymore,” Alex said.
¹²

But he also was aware that while he had been locked down at Terminal Island, gang homicides had again begun to skyrocket on the streets of Los Angeles, ending ten years of steep decline. The jobs were not there. The guns and the beefs still were. A new breed of gang members was coming up. The cycle was turning again.

The hip-hop activists who gathered at the most poignant protest that summer week in Los Angeles were not seeking a confrontation with police. Instead they had come to peacefully dramatize their causes: women's issues, immigrant rights, sweatshop labor, transportation policy, educational access.

They were organized like an army. At 9
A.M
, on August 15, the sun already burning hard and clear, a thousand of them, almost all of color, gathered to march at the Belmont Learning Center, a new school in the largely Latino and Filipino neighborhood just west of downtown.

The Belmont Learning Center had become a powerful symbol in the city. Located at the eastern edge of the Rampart Division at the midpoint between Echo Park, MacArthur Park, and downtown, in an impoverished inner city area, it was a desperately needed school. Kirti Baranwal, a twenty-five-year-old sixth-grade art teacher, said, “This is a high school that was built to reduce overcrowding. The reality is we do need new schools. Since 1978, L.A. Unified built eight new schools while enrollments increased by 10,000 people per year.”

It had become the most expensive high school ever built in the nation, at a price tag of $200 million. But Belmont had hardly been an enlightened investment into an underserved community. Millions were blown on a bizarre plan to create retail commercial development on school property. Then parents and students were horrified to learn the new school had been built over abandoned oil wells. Soil testing showed high levels of toxicity, and experts warned of methane leaks. The site might literally blow up. So tens of millions more were spent on elaborate environmental mitigation. Outraged parents and students fought to have the school closed. Now the sparkling new three-story edifice was sitting completed but unused, a monument, they said, to corporate pollution and municipal profligacy.

“The thing is,” Baranwal said, “people of color and working class people don't need to be given choices that aren't really choices. If the choice is between a school on a toxic site and no school, that's not a very good choice. Our kids deserve real options.”

So now the youths gathered to march toward downtown to make a statement. Some wore red-shirts emblazoned with the words: “Justice For Youth.” Some sported T-shirts and banners that proclaim their affiliations: African Student Union, MEChA, Samahang Pilipino, Asian Left Forum. Others proclaimed their passions: “The Ummah,” “Freestyle Fellowship,” “Chicana Nation.”

A flatbed truck travelling in the outer lane kept the group out of the westbound lanes and moving up the hill. It was outfitted with graffiti murals, a turntable rig, a drum and conga set, and a bass amplifier. The rappers and musicians on the truck fed a steady stream of hip-hop beats, flipping DMX's “Ruff Ryders Anthem” into a chant that went, “Who-ooa no-ooo. Toxic schools got to go-ooo!”

The march had been organized by a collective of Latino student organizers, environmental justice activists, teachers, parents and students. The older youths were veterans of the Proposition 187 blowouts, the younger ones were moved by Proposition 21. They were asking for schools not jails, a return of affirmative action and an end to standardized testing.

As in Chicago 1968, the battle lines were drawn between an aging white establishment and young radicals. On Monday night at the Staples Convention Center, outgoing two-term President Bill Clinton had drawn long ovations by
trumpeting the longest economic expansion since the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The bloody convention protests of 1968 had also come at the end of a seven-year economic expansion during an eight-year Democratic rule.

And again as in 1968, only one who was young or poor or of color could quarrel with Clinton's triumphalism. Before Clinton's speech, failed presidential candidate Bill Bradley seemed to recognize as much. “You don't have to give up your idealism to be successful in America. You don't have to become complacent. To the contrary, you should be outraged over the undermining of our democracy, the poverty of so many American children, the absence of health care, the shame of racism,” he said. “To all these young people who believe that America can be just, I say never give up and never never sell out.”

As the march proceeded toward the Ronald Reagan State Building, twenty cop cars drew up behind them, and black vans disgorged black-clad riot cops, armed with a rubber bullet guns, a baker's dozen of silver tear-gas cannisters hanging from their shoulder vests. They ran alongside the march, stopped in baton-ready formation, and as the marchers continued down the street, they would break and jog ahead to the next block to reassemble.

The march moved forward, passing in front of a war memorial. The rappers on the flatbed truck were freestyling over a fat bass line and drum snap, tumbling sheets of words throwing off history's weight. Four young women began to dance, and spontaneous movement rippled up and down the march line. Now the chant was a joyous, middle-finger salute to the cops: “This is how we protest—nonviolent!” When they arrived in front of the State Building, these daughters and sons of the revolution—to whom so much had been given, from whom so much had been stolen—stopped and turned to face the offices above.

They united in a single defiant gesture. They stopped the march. They stopped the music. They bowed their heads, and against a granite sky in the filling silence of the midday city, a thousand proud fists rose into the air.

Tomorrow is the question.

Democratic Convention, 2000.

Photo © Peter Holderness

 

 

LOOP 1. Babylon Is Burning: 1968–1977.

1. Necropolis: The Bronx and the Politics of Abandonment.

Word

Berman, Marshall.
All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.

Caro, Robert.
The Power Broker
. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Cowan, Paul. “On a Very Tense Frontier: Street-Fighting in the Bronx.” In
The Village
Voice, June 22, 1972.

DeLillo, Don.
Underworld
. New York: Scribner, 1997.

Devastation/Resurrection: The South Bronx
. Robert Jensen, project curator. New York: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1980.

Jackson, Reggie, with Mike Lupica.
Reggie: The Autobiography
. New York: Villard, 1984.

Jonnes, Jill.
“We're Still Here”: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of the South Bronx
. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. Reprinted in 2003 as
South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City
. New York City: Fordham University Press, 2002.

Plunz, Richard.
A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis
. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Rampersad, Arnold.
Jackie Robinson: A Biography
. New York: Knopf, 1997.

The South Bronx: A Plan for Revitalization
. Report prepared by the Office of the Mayor, Office of the Bronx Borough President, Department of City Planning, Office of Economic Development, Office of Management and Budget, Department of Housing Preservation and Development. December 1977.

Wallace, Deborah and Rodrick.
A Plague on Your Houses
. New York: Verso Books, 1998.

Vergara, Camilo José.
The New American Ghetto
. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Image

CBS Reports: The Fire Next Door
. Aired March 22, 1977. Viewable at the Museum of Television and Radio.

The Jeffersons
. “Blackout.” Jack Shea, director, Richard B. Eckhaus, writer. Aired January 21, 1978. Viewable at the Museum of Television and Radio.

2. Sipple Out Deh: Jamaica's Roots Generation and the Cultural Turn.

Word

Barrett, Sr. Leonard.
The Rastafarians
. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.