What was your first protest like? I’ve been thinking lately about mine. It goes something like this.
I woke up yet again to the sound of my dorm neighbor’s TV blaring. Usually it was gospel music or some TV preacher’s program. The neighbor was studying to be a minister or gospel singer. At least, I think that’s what he was doing.
But this time it was CNN. Not that I cared. I think I pounded on the wall and asked him to turn that shit down, or something else suitably appropriate for an 18 year old college freshman who didn’t appreciate being woken up at the most ungodly hour of 9:30am.
I’m 35, and I believe most of you can do the math here. This was September 11, 2001, and I was a college freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
Campus Activism of the Long 90s
Bloomington has an extensive history of left-wing activism, especially of the sort you’d expect to find in a midwestern college town. When I moved to Bloomington, that activism focused on the anti-corporate protest movement of what you might call the ‘long 90s.’
Anti-sweatshop activism was in style. Groups like United Students Against Sweatshops and No Sweat did a lot of work. There were plenty of organizations affiliated closely or loosely with Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups. Oh, yeah. And Nader himself had just run a presidential campaign, and was about to run another.
Naomi Klein was big. To be clear, I’m not talking about the Klein of This Changes Everything. I’m not even talking about the Klein of The Shock Doctrine. Before anti-war and climate change activism became central to the American left, Klein wrote a very 90s anti-corporate protest manifesto called No Logo.
If “long 90s” activism had a central goal, it was opposition to the marketing and branding that accompanied increasing globalization. Its central event, arguably, was the protest best known as the Battle of Seattle.
2001-2002 Bloomington Peace Camp: My First Protest
Source: https://www.visitbloomington.com/listing/dunn-meadow/779/
Activism in Bloomington closely tracked these national trends. We, of course, mixed in some local flavor. Opposition to Interstate 69 was especially important in Bloomington.
We had an anarchist bookstore and infoshop with a physical location downtown. It was called Secret Sailor. That last link is a real treat, folks. It’s to an Angelfire website that, for some inexplicable reason, still exists. I’d recommend reading The Sailor’s Code. The Sailor hasn’t existed in a physical location in well over a decade.
But after 9/11, much of the anti-corporate focus of campus activism faded away. Anti-war coalition-building became all the rage. A group called Bloomington Peace Action Coalition formed and organized a Peace Camp on the Indiana University campus.
The photo above is Dunn Meadow, where the tents sat from October 2001 to June 2002. People camped through the Indiana winter and the early days of the war in Afghanistan.
My own role was very minor. I wasn’t one of the main organizers or people who visited nightly. Not even visited weekly, for most weeks. I stopped by a number of times, spoke with the people at the camp, talked about activist history and events, or sometimes just sat and talked about not much at all. Mostly I just learned that there were a lot of people and organizations involved in left-wing work. They had all kinds of ideas and methods.
I tried recently to look into press coverage of the Peace Camp. Either not many news organizations wrote about it, or those articles have become lost. Because I didn’t find much. There’s a more sympathetic article from the La Porte County paper. Free Republic did some shitposting. Presumably the Bloomington Herald-Times and Indiana Daily Student covered it, but I couldn’t find any evidence of this. I did find one photo from the camp.
Aftermath
One purpose of the Peace Camp was opposition to the US war in Afghanistan. More than 16 years after the end of the camp, the war continues. And so, in at least one sense, the protest was a massive failure.
But I really think there’s more nuance than this. Bloomington Peace Action Coalition turned out to be a longer-lived organization. The Secret Sailor closed. I never really figured out how they were open anyway, given that they probably had to pay rent on their physical location and had no apparent business model. But some of the people from the Sailor and the Peace Camp founded another left-wing bookstore.
It’s called Boxcar Books. It’s less anarchist, and more ecumenical leftist. It opened in 2002, and it found longer term success in a house next to the Runcible Spoon, my (second) favorite breakfast joint. The Midwest Pages to Prisoners was its major project. It was still open in the fall of 2017, when I took my most recent trip to Bloomington.
Unfortunately Boxcar, too, is now closed as of the end of 2017. They issued a closing statement that recaps the history and reasons.
Postscript
Activism is cyclical and full of temporary, short-term projects, failures and successes. What doesn’t work now might work later. What works now might not work later. There’s a need to collect the history of successes and failures and to build broad, sustainable movements that can generate new projects and experiments while preserving a history of what has and hasn’t worked in particular times and contexts.
I recapped some of my best pieces of advice on activism in an early post. I wanted to rethink some of those thoughts here in a more practical context. Maybe the most important lessons are the ones about persistence and working for material interests.
As an adult, I’ve lived in three cities. One major midwestern city (Minneapolis) and two college towns (Bloomington and Iowa City). They’re different places in different states. But there are a lot of common features that stand out. They’re all in the midwest, broadly construed. There are smart, eager people ready to work on good things in all three places. All three places have similar issues with runaway housing costs, gentrification, racism and racial inequality, and sexual harassment and assault. And all three places have strong traditions of leftist organizing.
