Ahem. Let me point out again that the black bloc tactic does not involve using the crowd as cover for doing direct action. This is becoming a popular myth being spread by anti-anarchists in activist circles.
The black bloc tactic, when practiced in recent years, has been about protecting those in the black bloc from police harassment and violence. It involves tactics such as masking, holding arms, and unarresting. From what I've seen, the people doing black blocs are usually attacked by the police when they are either standing around, or marching down the middle of a street illegally. I can't think of any black blocs I've seen that used the bigger crowd as some kind of shield. This is just a false accusation.
Black blocs here in Washington have done things in conjunction with bigger crowds and have also served as reinforcements for another action and as a shield for other activists. During the A16 black bloc, it provided a buffer at one point between the police and nonviolent activists who had locked down in an intersection. The police had come up to the activists who were locked down and were hitting them with batons (with one woman possibly losing several teeth). The black bloc came along and threw a big orange traffic barrel at the cops, driving them back, giving everybody time to get activists between the cops and the locked down activists. The black bloc then drove the cops back several blocks.
Erlier that day, the black bloc was marching around and we got word that an RTS-type blockade at 14th adn New York needed numbers, because they thought that the police would force delegate buses through that weak point. We hustled the bloc around the police perimeter and joined up with the intersection blockade, with some in the block adding stuff to the blockade from a nearby construction site.
In January 2001, there was a black bloc for the Inauguration protests. A bunch of people joined with that bloc as it knocked down the police security perimeter along Pennsylvania Ave.
The black bloc allows you to do lots of things that normal protest tactics fail to accomplish.
Chuck0
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