>From the Village Voice (C) Village Voice Published January 3 - 9, 2001 The Year in Protest - It's a Mad, Mad World Agitators. Activists. Fed up citizens. They surrounded parliaments and conference centers, they rappelled office towers and donned costumes, they linked arms, and swelled in the streets from thousands to hundreds of thousands. They demanded higher wages, a cessation in test-bombing, an end to police brutality, new presidents. These photos, documenting a handful of the year's events, tell a starkly different story from the standard script about prosperity, consensus, and apathy that dominates the evening news. They tell of rage and riot^at fuel tax hikes, corporate domination, leather jackets. And while Americans caught 30-second glimpses of these complex conflicts on their TV screens, many protests outside the U.S. never reached the news assignment desks. Have demonstrators been heard? Perhaps. California janitors won a significant new labor contract, and Yugoslavians ousted Slobodan Milosevic. Are New York City police less brutal? Perhaps. Are the ice caps still melting? Probably. Are genetically altered foods finding their way into your body? Yes. What do these images augur? That holding governments and corporations accountable often requires hitting the streets. The madder and louder people get, the harder they are to ignore. ^Lenora Todaro The Year in Protest: Philadelphia Authorities vowed they would be prepared for the mass demonstrations planned for August's Republican convention. They spied on activists in New York, enlisted the feds, and spent millions on the latest in antiriot technology. But in the end, protesters said, the cops fell back on an old tactic: manhandling and jailing dissenters, First Amendment be damned. ^Chisun Lee The Year in Protest: Florida Reverend Jesse Jackson jolted awake the long dormant voting rights movement in the weeks after the presidential election, taking to the Florida streets with African Americans and Jews who complained of rampant irregularities. Jackson has promised to turn up the heat as the January 20 inauguration approaches. "If Bush is one rail, and Gore is another rail, then civil rights is the third rail," he said. "It's the hot rail." ^Laura Conaway The Year in Protest: New York City The death of Amadou Diallo turned a Bronx vestibule into a landmark and a mother into an activist. Here, Kadiatou Diallo looks out from the doorway where her unarmed and innocent son was shot at 41 times by members of the NYPD Street Crime Unit. The killing, and this February's acquittal of the four officers, ignited a citywide anti-police-brutality movement. ^Chisun Lee The Year in Protest: Brooklyn The March 16 police killing of Haitian descendant Patrick Dorismond riled the city's already outraged communities of color. Thousands turned out for Dorismond's funeral; police accused some of violence. But attendees said the police, with their aggressive antiriot tactics, disrespected a community's mourning. ^Chisun Lee. The Year in Protest: Los Angeles There were 8500 of them, clad in their bright red "Justice for Janitors" T-shirts, swinging noisemakers, getting arrested at mass rallies of civil disobedience. Long invisible to the city's executives and power brokers, they were a workforce overwhelmingly composed of Latino immigrants, subsisting on wages of less than $7 an hour. But for three weeks last April, the janitors demanded a steep wage hike and new respect in their working lives. The strike, led by the Service Employees International Union, worked: On April 22 the janitors' union settled with nine cleaning companies for a 25 percent increase over three years. ^Tom Robbins The Year in Protest: Brooklyn When they first walked off the job in June 1999, the 284 workers at the Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg had every reason to believe their fight was just and victory would be theirs. The British firm Tate & Lyle, the owner of Domino, had all but dared them to strike, proposing the elimination of 100 jobs, the right to subcontract out all work at will, and an end to extra weekend pay. The Domino workers have languished on the picket line through two summers, two falls, and another winter. In one of the most painful strikes in years in the metropolitan area, some 100 workers swallowed their pride and crossed their own picket line this spring. The remainder have stood strong, despite little aid from the top leaders of their powerful union, the International Longshoreman's Association. ^Tom Robbins The Year in Protest: Prague Since Seattle, economic conferences have never been the same. Following the Washington, D.C., demo against the IMF and World Bank, Europeans mobilized 12,000 activists on September 26. The anticipation of conflict sparked international surveillance and numerous protesters were stopped at the border of the Czech Republic. Most confrontations were nonviolent, but riots erupted in isolated pockets of the demonstration. More than 800 protesters were detained in prison, and 100 people were injured, among them police and bankers. The finance ministers cut short their meetings. ^Lenora Todaro -- Ted Morgan Department of Political Science Lehigh University Maginnes Hall #9 Bethlehem, PA 18015 Phone: (610) 758-3345 Fax: (610) 758-6554
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