Southerners Take to the Streets

As the home base of the oil oligarchs dominating U.S. politics, perhaps it’s fitting that Texas should also be the home of some of the earliest and most persistent Southern protests against the Bush administration’s push for military action in Iraq.

Unlike many in the national news media, Texans seemed to sense early that George W. Bush’s war talk was more than just diplomatic strategy. True, liberal Texans may be more endangered than the Pecos pupfish, but what they lacked in numbers, they made up for in persistence.

Starting in the spring of 2002, Texas activists took the anti-war movement home to President Bush during his frequent sabbaticals in Crawford. They kept it up through the summer and into the fall, hitting Republican fundraisers and spawning the catchiest organization name of the movement: Bush’s Backyard Surprise Committee. As soon as the fall term began, University of Texas students in Austin and San Antonio began holding regular anti-war demonstrations.

One long-time Texas protester hit the national news again in the fall. It was reported by the national news media that Diane Wilson, a self-described humble “fisherwoman” and 54-year-old grandmother from Seadrift, about an hour north of Corpus Christi, had been arrested Oct. 2 after she tried to scale the White House fence. Wilson, who is famous for trying to scuttle her shrimp boat on a wastewater outflow in the Gulf twelve years ago, was only trying to hang a banner from the fence, not rush the White House, but a D.C. judge banned her from a three-block radius around the Presidential mansion.

Wilson had already succeeded, two weeks earlier with Global Exchange founder Medea Benjamin, in unfurling an anti-war banner behind Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as he testified in front of the House Armed Services Committee. Despite the court order, just before Thanksgiving she returned to D.C. for the Code Pink protest in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Police ignored her presence for a few days until she tried to erect a temporary shelter against the wind. When she argued with police, Wilson was arrested again and spent Thanksgiving in jail. Diane Wilson headed back to Texas demanding inspections of Bush’s “presidential palace” in Crawford. She vowed to return to Washington for the March 8 International Women’s Day demonstrations.

By mid-October, more than 1,500 protesters had hit the Austin streets for one rally, and three activists were cited by police for refusing to leave a sit-in at the office of U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), a supporter of the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq. A few days later the student government at the University of Texas in Austin passed an anti-war resolution.

Small-scale protests were so consistent in Austin through the fall that the Austin American Statesman felt compelled to remind its conservative readers on December 22 that the University of Texas student body included “more than 300 members of the Army, Navy and Air Force ROTC,” who were coping just fine on the UT campus. The editorial concluded that “liberal professors and a few dozen protesters do not a university make.”

Houston activist Herbert Rothschild, 63 years old and one of those arrested at Senator Hutchison’s office in November, said even in Houston he hasn’t seen support for a war. “It’s amazing how quiet the pro-war side is,” said Rothschild. “A few people say ugly things, but they’re enormously outnumbered by the supportive feedback.”

Anti-war protests across the South last fall seemed to follow the Texas pattern: small weekly or monthly actions in more liberal areas or at strategic locations, livened up with larger events for worldwide protest days. Media coverage in some states has been so lax that it’s nearly impossible to tell if there were any protests beyond two international actions on October 26 and January 18.

In northern Mississippi, several hundred protesters convened in Starkville and Tupelo on January 18. Kentucky hosted protests in Louisville and Richmond around the large January demonstrations. The only mentions of antiwar action in Arkansas were small gatherings in Little Rock on those two days.

In Alabama, a search of newspaper archives turned up no prominent mentions of the January 18 rally in Washington, D.C., that turned out more than a hundred thousand people. Despite being next door to the nation’s capital, Virginia newspapers didn’t seem to notice the October protests in D.C. The local protest that made a lead story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch involved seven anarchist protesters arrested on December 21 for “unlawful assembly.” Like much of the South, Virginia sent activists to the January 18 gathering in Washington, and about 40 people demonstrated that day in Blacksburg.

Even where they were poorly reported, however, small regular protests seem to have been common across the South. One article from Huntsville, Alabama, mentions in passing that a peace group protested at the Madison County Courthouse every week. Nashville was the site of regular protests. The Times-Picayune, in a large article in late January, hinted that New Orleans activists had managed to turn out a couple hundred people at regular intervals.

Honorable mention for thorough coverage goes to the newspapers of Charleston, West Virginia, particularly the Charleston Gazette, for running nearly every wire story about national and international rallies, even though that state’s protests seem to have been limited in size and relegated to the state capital. Charleston did, however, turn out a thousand people for Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

In Atlanta, activists targeted Senator Zell Miller (D) every week after Miller supported the Congressional resolution authorizing military action. One sit-in at Miller’s office resulted in the arrest of three activists. Tenacious South Carolina activists got Charleston’s Marion Park opened to protesters after a brief legal dispute with the two Civil War-era militia groups that administer the public park. Activists in North Carolina began organizing on a statewide level in the early fall and held a mock bombing, or “die-in,” at the office of presidential-hopeful Senator John Edwards (D) in Raleigh around Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. The North Carolina Peace and Justice Coalition continues to organize peace events and has grown to more than 90 supporting or participating organizations.

Perhaps because of the other Bush connection, protesters in Florida were just as active as those in Texas. Besides marching with the rest of the world in October and January, hundreds of Floridians transformed the gate of MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa into an anti-war rally every few weeks. Protesters had been cited with resisting arrest at MacDill in May, and the groups kept coming back regularly to make anti-war speeches and picket the base.

All of these actions and many more went off without violence, even in cases where counter-protesters showed up. As of mid-February, seven southern cities had passed resolutions against military action in Iraq. Those included Austin and Atlanta, Gainesville, Key West, Charlottesville, Virginia, Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina. Birmingham, Alabama, Staunton, Virginia, and Charleston, West Virginia, had introduced resolutions, as had Corpus Christi, Dallas, Galveston, and Houston. Herbert Rothschild was optimistic he would get enough votes from the Houston city council.

Rothschild says people shouldn’t get the wrong impression from low turnouts at protests in the South. If, 40 years ago, you had handed a Southern man a flyer, says Rothschild, he would have recoiled as if you’d handed him a snake.

“People are not as comfortable getting out in the streets in the South as they are in the North and in the West,” says Rothschild. “Remember, we were a totalitarian society for much of our history.”