At around 6:30 PM on Thursday, March 20, Andy Thayer and an estimated 10,000 other demonstrators marched onto Lake Shore Drive to protest the war in Iraq. Three and a half hours later he was sitting handcuffed in the back of a police wagon. He was taken to jail and held until Friday afternoon.
The impromptu nature of the march shouldn’t have surprised anyone, because the local antiwar movement is a coalition of numerous groups with different views on the best way to oppose the war. They believe that the dozens of marches and rallies they’ve organized over the past few months have been effective. “Everyone, I think, agrees that it’s very important to reach out to as many thousands of people as you can,” says Thayer. “Frankly, the mainstream media has for the most part either trivialized or ignored our message. Our movement thrives on direct contact with people, where we can bypass that media filter.”
As the country moved closer to war the protest groups decided they wanted to organize a march the day the bombs started falling. “But since we didn’t know when the war would begin it was not something we could really plan,” says Beckstrom. “It was sort of improvisation.”
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The initial bombing of Baghdad was announced by President Bush at 9:15 PM Chicago time on Wednesday, March 19. “But it was late at night,” says Thayer, “and raining like crazy.” So many of the activist leaders decided to meet the next day at five at Federal Plaza, on Dearborn between Jackson and Adams. They had no permit–there wasn’t time to go through the process of getting one. But, says Thayer, “it’s not unusual to have rallies or protests at Federal Plaza without a permit. You don’t even need city approval to protest there. Since it’s federal property, you go through the General Services Administration. There’s tons of protests that happen there without permits. People are outraged about something that happens in federal court? They show up at the plaza to protest.”
“We had thousands of people who decided they wanted to march on Lake Shore Drive–we could either force them away from the drive or allow them to go on the drive,” says Police Department spokesman Pat Camden. “The issue is that we have 10,000 people who are technically breaking the law–and they were breaking the law as soon as they stepped off Federal Plaza, since they had no permit to march. We have to keep them in order. You could start a mass arrest, but we wanted to avoid that at all costs.”
Other march leaders say it would have made no sense to agree to march all the way to North Avenue. “Some of us had our cars back in the Loop, near Federal Plaza,” says Michael McConnell, a regional director of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that’s been helping lead the antiwar protests. “Sooner or later we would have to turn back south to return to the plaza. You have to turn back somewhere. It made sense to turn back at Oak.”
It was then that Beckstrom realized that thousands of green zone marchers were getting caught up in a red zone situation. “I wasn’t there to get arrested–I was there to march,” she says. “I was there with my ten-year-old son, and I could see the tenor was changing.” She walked east along Oak to Lake Shore Drive, where she saw another long line of police had formed. “I said, ‘Look, I have my son–we just want to go home,’” she says. “They let us through. But it was completely arbitrary. They were letting some people through and forcing other people to stay.”
