At 6:15 a.m. Saturday, Fokion Burgess '07 finished writing the phone number for the New York City office of the American Civil Liberties Union on his forearm and began passing his black markers around on the charter bus parked outside Faunce Arch. "In case you get arrested," he explained, then rattled off the number to around 20 assorted student activists.
Six hours later, the dreadlocked, tie-dyed first-year student was barely visible weaving between men trailing giant Palestinian flags, a chanting group of Haitians supporting their ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and a group of small old ladies with signs attached to their sunhats who were distributing stickers saying "Stop the War! No Police State!"
An estimated 200 Rhode Islanders, on a bus caravan organized by the Providence chapter of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), attended a march in New York City to mark the first anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. The students who attended the anti-war protest, one of several in cities around the world, were not all members of any single on-campus organization. Vanessa Huang '05, who sold bus tickets, found participants by putting up fliers and sending information to listservs, she said.
The event showcased the broad coalition of groups and causes that have become incorporated into the anti-war movement and the challenge to campus anti-war organizing at Brown and other colleges and universities.
Socialist networks, unaffiliated anarchists, anti-occupation Haitians, Filipinos and Palestinians, feminists, racial activists, gay rights groups, anti-imperialists, anti-corporate activists and supporters of Rep. Dennis Kucinich's (D-Ohio) presidential bid were amply represented at the event. Organizers estimated over 100,000 attendees, while city officials believe there were significantly fewer. By the time the rally began at noon, Madison Avenue was either congested or packed to a standstill between 23rd and 40th Streets, and most of the demonstrators never saw the small stage from which speakers and performers were broadcast.
The 1 p.m. march wound down Madison and up Sixth Avenue for several hours, overseen by a sizable police force. One officer was surreptitiously allowing participants to leave through his segment of metal fencing around the route, while most officers adhered to a policy in which marchers could exit onto the sidewalks or side streets only at several designed points. The officer said his chief concern was not the students and elderly protesters whom he was mostly allowing through.
"You have to watch out for professional agitators," he said, but he said he was most concerned about "you know, outside elements."
Some organizers acknowledged that some Americans might fear terrorist involvement in the march. One group, UnCon 2004, enlisted Burgess and others to distribute leaflets, urging those who planned to protest the Republican National Convention in New York City in September to use exclusively non-violent means to avoid lending inadvertent support to President George W. Bush.
Jeff Carleton '03 came to the march with his girlfriend, a member of State University of New York-Binghamton's Students for Peace and Justice, which organizes students "against occupation and excessive military spending," according to one member and which brought 16 to 20 students to "crash" at one student's house on Long Island.
Carleton, who is currently living in Brooklyn, N.Y., had been one of several students who countered anti-war protests at Brown by chalking statements like "Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You" on the sidewalk outside the Sharpe Refectory last March.
"Initially I was all for the war," he said, but allegations that the Bush administration lied about and exaggerated intelligence that supported the war have left him "kind of in between," he said.
"Coward," his girlfriend called him with a smile. "You're sitting on the fence."
Emily Rak, a freshman at the University of Vermont, came with a large group, some of whom were affiliated with UVM Students Against the War, others with the International Socialist Organization and still others with local Burlington, Vt., groups. "It takes lots of campaigning and organizing to maintain involvement" in the anti-war group on campus, she said.
"There's a lot of interest, but not a lot of people who come to meetings," agreed Emily Spare of Columbia University's anti-war group. "I don't know why!"
Organizing students around nothing more than opposition to the war has proved increasingly difficult since the war began, participants and several Brown activists said. The necessity of forming coalitions among many groups can dilute the anti-war message or drive away people who oppose the war but do not necessarily support the other causes involved.
Students Against the War in Iraq, formed last year before the start of the war, changed its name at the end of the Spring 2003 semester to the Student Anti-War Coalition to reflect a broader focus.
"At the end of last (school) year, people were really poised to take the anti-war movement further, because I think we all knew that the significance of Iraq was not just the specific case of the Bush administration making war against Saddam Hussein's regime, but it was rather symbolic of their larger approach to foreign policy," said Emma Rebhorn '06, one of the students who originally organized SAWI and who helped to lead SAWC until it stopped meeting at the end of the fall semester.
"This year, there was a lot of disarray and confusion, and this was not unique to Brown - it happened across the country to student groups, to adult groups, to whoever," Rebhorn said. "There was confusion about how we were going to approach the question of the U.S. occupation, if people were going to call for a multilateral occupation, a U.N. occupation."
Rebhorn - who did not attend this weekend's march - said the confusion, coupled with internal debate about the group's breadth of focus, caused SAWC membership to dwindle.
"I personally was really discouraged with the group, because there is absolutely no point, no efficacy in having meetings where the same five people come," she said.
The Brown College Democrats, initially members of Brown's SAWI, officially withdrew from the coalition group in the early fall.
"We were in SAWI, and we decided at the very beginning of the last semester to withdraw from that ... simply because the state of events in Iraq had changed such that there was no point in being against the war in Iraq anymore," said Ethan Ris '05, president of the College Democrats, who did not attend the march. The war had already happened, Ris said, so opposing it "was like being against water."
Participation by individual members of the Democrats, Ris said, dropped off after the first few meetings. "People got pretty disillusioned due to sort of dominance by the ISO," he said. "To their credit, (ISO members) were the sort of the instigators of the coalition," but their rhetoric "turned people off."
"Certainly not the majority, but the views most energetically expressed (within SAWI) were very radical and sort of unsatisfactory. ... Hoping that U.S. troops die is not good for anybody," he said. "At the end, there were only two or three of our hard-core Democrats" still participating, "mostly to argue."
Scott Ewing '05, who attended the march, agreed that SAWI's inclusion of disparate ideological elements had driven people away. "I felt ultimately as though the movement was hindered by a lack of activism and that the movement also scared off people who were perhaps opposed to the war but didn't want to be associated with or forced to be exposed to other fringe issues or groups," he said.
"I think strategically, if one wants to make a statement against the war on as big a scale as possible, it's not helpful to have other groups promoting their causes during the event," Ewing said. As an example, he pointed to a group that had begun chanting gay-rights slogans. "'No gay Jim Crow, homophobia's got to go,' which is a fine sentiment that has nothing to do with the Iraq war," he said.
Incorporating new issues into their missions might reduce membership in some activist groups, but Huang said organized activism cannot ignore issues like race, class, imperialism and globalization. On the bus, she distributed an "open letter to activists concerning racism in the anti-war movement" written by Elizabeth Martinez, who has taught workshops at conferences on the subject of "white activists" ignoring issues of race and class, Huang said. Huang's position was reflected by posters at the march that protested the "poverty draft" and by the participation of satirical groups like "Billionaires for Bush."
Some campuses are simply hostile to anti-war group organizing, no matter what the depth or subject matter, said Dennis Szulc and Damien Scott, two freshmen at St. John's University who came to the protest independent of any group. "No one wants to make trouble," Scott said.
"It's a controversial issue at a small Catholic school," Szulc agreed.
Their friend Melissa Loftus, a student at the Art Institute of New York, said her mostly commuter school had very few student organizations and "no real campus life," making it an unlikely platform for organized opposition to the war.
