Via: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/10 ... ys/381963/
Reaction to the protest was decidedly mixed among Atlantans, with some people going on Twitter to criticize the action with comments such as, “I support the protests in #Ferguson, but why are they shutting down a highway in Atlanta so that BLACK folks can't get home from work?” and “Look, I get standing in solidarity w/ #Ferguson, but #Atlanta traffic is already bad. So yeah, if you're stuck in that, I'm POd w/ you.”
Blocking city streets has been an urban protest tactic since there were urban protests. In the European revolutions of 1848, barricades made out of stones and other construction material became the front lines in cities around the continent, where great masses of ordinary people rebelled against the old social order. Almost 200 years later, during the Occupy movement, the old standby chant of “Whose streets? Our streets!” became ubiquitous once again. In Hong Kong, the blocking of city streets by pro-democracy protesters has caused frustration among many residents, and even sparked violent backlash.
Blocking major roads in the United States, however, is much more rare. Most notably, the Selma to Montgomery marches that were pivotal in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s used U.S. Route 80, a move that was upheld in a ruling by Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. His opinion was deeply controversial at the time: "The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups,” said the judge, “and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways."
Via: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... s-protest/
The latest blockades, after a week in which graphic videos documented the police-involved deaths of Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, follow dozens of others over the past two years. Protesters in Chicago have blocked Lake Shore Drive. In New York, they've gnarled traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. In Washington, they've targeted the 14th Street Bridge.
Researchers at the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, in a forthcoming study, counted more than 1,400 protests in nearly 300 U.S. and international cities related to the Black Lives Matter movement from November 2014 through May 2015. Half or more of the protests in that time in Saint Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., wound up shutting down transportation infrastructure.
"We systematically show that the political protest today is now almost totally focused on transportation systems, whether it’s a road, a bridge, in some cases a tunnel — rather than buildings," said Mitchell Moss, the director of the center and one of the authors of the study.
He draws a contrast with the occupations of schools, restaurants and administrative offices that commonly occurred during protests in the 1960s and 1970s, as an earlier generation rallied against segregated lunch counters or the Vietnam War.
Via: http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen ... 775567.php
...the Bay Area has its own tradition of shutting things down on the major bridges.
In January 1991, thousands of war protesters shut down the Bay Bridge for almost two hours during a furious day of demonstrations that led to 600 arrests and injuries.
But maybe the most famous bridge protest was in January 1989, when members of the San Francisco group Stop AIDS Now or Else shut down traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge for more than an hour. It’s amazing to read the stories from that time — you can substitute the quotes from “angry commuters” in this week’s stories with no dissonance at all.
“We thought long and hard about whether it was the right time for that tactic,” said Kate Raphael, a former member of the group that was on the bridge that day. “We definitely only did it because we were in a crisis, but the general public was unaware of the depth of the emergency.”
Raphael also told me that while they were “very afraid” to be out there on the bridge, and that some people were extremely angry — “One guy brandished a knife,” she remembered — others understood the message.