DNC: Reports From the Freedom Cage

Kasma will be running regular on-the-scene reports from the conventions this week and next. Here are a couple sketches of the scene at the kick-off protest rallies yesterday (Sunday).

From The Freedom Cage

By Iris Bright, Kasama Project

We had a pretty radical rally run by Recreate 68, Fred Hampton, Jr., Cynthia McKinney and her running mate for the Green Party. There was some tension in the crowd between people who were supporting the Green Party and people who were saying forget the vote, basically in line with Ward Churchill’s politics [who was a speaker]. He called out some of the anarchists in the crowd and said changing your diet and changing the way you dress isn’t going to be enough, we’re talking about armed insurrection here. The American Indian Movement was in the front of the march to respect the fact that it was the longest ongoing, and the original, occupation of the US.

We marched down to the Freedom Cage. There is a seven-foot high steel mesh fence, a fence behind that, and in between the two the Secret Service was filming the crowds. A lot of press crammed up against the fence, police flanking a crowd of several hundred and they’re rattling the fence and the police are holding pepper spray bullets, guns up to basically to stand off the crowd. The most vocal part of the march was World Can’t Wait.

Overall, there are probably 1000 – 1200 people there. There has been chanting but no confrontation with the police.

Report: Ernesto Aguilar from Pacifica Radio

It was really interesting. I think generally people seem to be very fired up, a lot more clear, politically than I would have expected. I saw a little of Blue Scholars.

I’ve been very impressed by the level of folks that Recreate 68 picked up or tried to invite to speak. They had a pretty wide variety of folks; heard from Fred Hampton Jr., Kathleen Cleaver, Ward Churchill.

In general, the crowd was much smaller than expected. The police were telling people there’d be thousands and thousands of people here, therefore they were going to put up all these fences and get up all these guns and everything else, so I’m sure that scared quite a few folks and intimidated a lot of people from coming out. There were anywhere in the neighborhood of between 2000 and 5000 people.

The march started 11:30 or so, maybe closer to noon, but everything started at 9AM, so considering they got people up on a Sunday morning and got them marching, it’s actually not a bad crowd at all.

There were debates between pro-war folks who came to the protest and anti-war folks but that was pretty much it, nothing really involving the police. There was chanting but nothing out of the ordinary.