>[From Sam Smith's Progressive Review. I was on a panel last night at
>Judson Church in NYC on the WB/IMF. The room was packed, mostly with
>young people. When one of the other panelists, Andrew Kliman, said
>something about smashing capitalism, there was a big round of
>applause. Something's happening here, and it's pretty wonderful.]
And it seems to be happening even at the high school level. From today's New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/regional/030400ny-diallo-edu.html
Eric
Hundreds of Students March Against Diallo Verdict
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
When Ben Abelson got word that some fellow students at Stuyvesant High School were planning a walkout to protest the Amadou Diallo shooting, he assumed the group would be tiny and would be turned back at the school door.
So when the skeptical Mr. Abelson joined the protesters yesterday morning and later met up with hundreds of students from at least four other city high schools outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, he became almost breathlessly exuberant.
"I thought it would be a few of us trying to walk out and getting stopped by the security guards," said Mr. Abelson, a 15-year-old sophomore. "But this is huge! I definitely have new faith in my generation."
Mr. Abelson and about 200 of his classmates from Stuyvesant marched noisily but peacefully over the Brooklyn Bridge to a lunchtime rally with more than 300 students who had abandoned classes at Fiorello H. La Guardia High School, the Beacon School, George W. Wingate High School and Edward R. Murrow High School.
Norman Siegel, the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, supervised the young insurgents and shouted advice as several dozen police officers calmly kept watch.
Matt Kelly and Shantha Susman, seniors at Stuyvesant, said they organized the protest after four police officers were acquitted last week in the shooting death of Mr. Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant who was killed in a hail of 41 bullets on Feb. 4, 1999. Mr. Kelly and Miss Susman said that they reached out to a handful of activist students they knew at other city schools, and that they all sent e-mail messages to friends and circulated fliers to raise interest in the march.
"I've never been so nervous," Mr. Kelly said as he clutched a bullhorn borrowed from the civil liberties union and led his classmates across the bridge. "But we want to let people know that as the next generation, we will not stand for the police misconduct that has become systematic in New York recently."
Though Miss Susman said her parents had taken her to protests practically since birth, many of the students who took part in yesterday's rally said they had never done anything like it.
Stuyvesant is one of the city's most rigorous high schools, and the protest organizers said walkouts were almost unheard of because students took their classes so seriously. Administrators at Stuyvesant and several of the other schools involved would not comment on the walkouts, but a spokeswoman for the Board of Education said any student who cut class to participate in the march would be marked absent.
"Each school has its own code of discipline," said the spokeswoman, Margie Feinberg. "So it's up to them to decide what measures to take."
While the Diallo verdict provided the motivation for the rally, the organizers said the point was to protest police misconduct in general. Several students said they were also protesting the shooting death of Malcolm Ferguson, a convicted drug dealer who was killed by a plainclothes officer on Wednesday night in the Bronx, just two blocks from where the police killed Mr. Diallo.
But yesterday's rally was not as hostile in tone as some others that have taken place over the last year to protest the Diallo shooting. Mr. Kelly and other organizers went out of their way to point out that not all police officers are abusive.
And while many students took up the "No justice, no peace" chant that has reverberated through so many of the protests since Mr. Diallo's death, others shouted, "Not every cop is a bad cop, but police brutality has to stop."
The police would not allow the students to protest on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall, but they gave them a last-minute permit to hold the rally along a block of Court Street. Several students from each school shouted speeches through the bullhorn while the others sat on the ground and sang "We Shall Overcome."
"It's easy not to get involved because we have our academic life, our family life, our comfortable existence," Miss Susman said. "So it's amazing to see this many students so active and aware."
Mr. Abelson said the most encouraging thing about the rally was that it brought together factions of teenagers who usually do not communicate with each other, even if they attend the same classes. Most of the students were white, but there were many blacks and Asians.
"There's a lot of different groups at Stuyvesant who don't get along," Mr. Abelson said. "The ravers, the preps, the freaks. We all have different interests, but this shows that if we all care enough about something we can all come together."