The Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution

~ The ‘surprisingly sensible’ 28th Constitutional Amendment ~

Mark Drought ~ February 20, 2019

Facebook is filled with all sorts of fatuous nonsense — from fake news emanating from all parts of the political spectrum to silly pseudoscience posted by flat earthers, climate change deniers and creationists. Often, the most enlightening things you’ll see might be cute videos of unlikely animal friends or enticing photos of your Facebook friends’ food.

However, a proposition has recently begun making the rounds that sounds surprisingly sensible — a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Most proposed amendments are silly and pointless. For example, whenever something happens to whip up nationalistic fervor (e.g., 9/11, the Gulf War or kneeling football players), faux patriots inevitably suggest that flag burning be outlawed, even though almost no one ever burns one. This proposition is antithetical to the spirit of free expression, so it’s no wonder the courts typically smack down such blatant assaults on the First Amendment.

Unfortunately, something as misguided as the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) was enacted, then had to be repealed by the 21st Amendment. Later, a proposal as stunningly self-evident as the Equal Rights Amendment, which should have been a “no-brainer” in a democracy, was scuttled by conservatives and evangelical Christians, who took literally the notion that all “men” are created equal.

Although the Constitution is a living document, the framers purposefully designed it to be difficult to alter. Since ratification in 1788, thousands of amendments have been considered; however, only 27 have been approved. It wasn’t meant to remain frozen in the 18th century, but the Founding Fathers must have realized that such a well-thought-out framework demands the arduous amendment process set forth in Article V.

Amendments must be proposed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or by a constitutional convention convened by two-thirds of the state legislatures. The latter has never happened (all 27 amendments have been proposed by Congress), but, in either case, a three-fourths majority of the state legislatures (or conventions) is required to ratify.

Of course, almost everyone, including those who call themselves “strict constructionists,” has a pet cause. Many liberals consider Article I, Section 3 — which gives the 37 people and 2,500 prairie dogs living in North Dakota the same number of senators as the 40 million residents of California — an affront to democracy. Meanwhile, many far-right-wingers (including the John Birch Society and the ultraconservative Koch brothers) would love to see the 17th Amendment repealed. This altered Article I to mandate the election of senators by the citizens of the states, rather than by their state legislatures.

But I digress. Stated simply, the 28th Amendment would not allow Congress to make any laws that apply to American citizens that don’t apply equally to the members of Congress. And it would preclude them from making any laws that apply to themselves, but don’t apply to all U.S. citizens. No longer could they exempt themselves from prosecution for sexual harassment or from the health care reform they pass for the rest of the country. They couldn’t retire at full pay after just one term, and their children would be required to pay back their college loans, just like everyone else.

This amendment would move the congressional retirement fund into the Social Security system, in which representatives would participate like ordinary citizens. And legislators could no longer vote their own pay raises. Instead, they’d receive 3 percent annually or the Consumer Price Index (CPI), whichever is lower. And they’d receive no pay after leaving office, so they’d go back to being ordinary working stiffs, like the rest of us.

Because an inordinately large percentage of our representatives are millionaires, most wouldn’t be hurt all that much by this amendment. However, the goal is not to penalize anyone, but to promote equality — to at least pay lip service to the notion that our politicians should be citizen legislators, not a bunch of elitists using outrageous perks to line their own pockets at taxpayer expense. And this is the ideal time for such a change.

Americans on both the Right and the Left rightfully hate Congress (71 percent disapproval in the RealClearPolitics poll) even more than our rightfully unpopular president (56 percent disapproval). If the recent 35-day government shutdown proved anything, it’s that politicians care more about scoring partisan points than they do about their constituents, especially the 800,000 federal employees victimized by Congress and our chief executive’s aversion to compromise.

Congress is as likely to drain its swamp by supporting this amendment as a billionaire, born a millionaire, who hires multimillionaires for his administration, would be to drain the executive branch swamp. It’s both stupid and naive to expect oligarchs with power to reduce their own influence by changing a system that provided their advantages.

Hence, passing the 28th Amendment would probably require a constitutional convention. It would takes 38 states to convene one, but 35 governors have already filed suits against the U.S. Congress for passing legislation that imposes burdensome unfunded mandates on their states, so it’s not out of the question.

Perhaps, if we had a less elitist legislative branch, staffed by people who lived by the same rules as the rest of us, we’d be less likely to be duped into voting for a fake-populist, white-supremacist conman who treats his income tax returns as a matter of national security. And maybe we wouldn’t take seriously Starbucks’ Howard Shultz, another egomaniacal billionaire businessman with no governing experience.

Greenwich native Mark Drought (markdrought4@gmail.com) is an editor at a Stamford IT firm and was an adjunct English professor at the University of Connecticut-Stamford.

Source: https://apnews.com/62a8b65326e2434c91e605c1fa983875

~ Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution ~

A “proposed 28th Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution (since circulated in modified form as the “Congressional Reform Act of 2018“) is several years old, has nothing to do with American business magnate Warren Buffett, and has not been proposed or submitted by any member of the U.S. Congress or by President Trump:

Warren Buffett is asking everyone to forward this email to a minimum of 20 people, and to ask each of those to do likewise. In three days, most people in the United States will have the message. This is an idea that should be passed around.

For too long we have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. Many citizens had no idea that Congressmembers could retire with the same pay after only one term, that they didn’t pay into Social Security, that they specifically exempted themselves from many of the laws they have passed (such as being exempt from any fear of prosecution for sexual harassment) while ordinary citizens must live under those laws. The latest is to exempt themselves from the Healthcare Reform that is being considered — in all of its forms.

Somehow, that doesn’t seem logical. We do not have an elite that is above the law. I truly don’t care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or whatever. The self-serving must stop. This is a good way to do that. It is an idea whose time has come.

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution:

“Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.”

Each person contact a minimum of Twenty people on their Address list, in turn ask each of those to do likewise.

Then in three days, all people in The United States of America will have the Message. This is one proposal that really should be passed around.

This is a great idea. Only need 3/4 of the State Legislatures to pass this to become law… AND IT IS VETO PROOF including no appeal to the Supreme Court.

Let’s get this passed around – Congress has brought this upon themselves!!!

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. TERM LIMITS

12 years only, one of the possible options below.

A. Two Six-year Senate terms

B. Six Two-year House terms

C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2. NO TENURE/NO PENSION

A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

3. CONGRESS (past, present & future) PARTICIPATES in SOCIAL SECURITY

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system and Congress participates with the American people.

4. CONGRESS CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN RETIREMENT PLAN

Just like each and every other American.

5. CONGRESS WILL NO LONGER VOTE THEMSELVES a PAY RAISE

Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 2.5%.

6. CONGRESS LOSES THEIR CURRENT HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

Congress will participate in the same health care system as the American people.

7. CONGRESS MUST EQUALLY ABIDE by ALL LAWS

No special exemptions or treatment.

8. ALL CONTRACTS WITH PAST AND PRESENT CONGRESSMEN ARE VOID

Effective 3/1/17.

Think of the money this will save and the problems that it will much more quickly solve! Health care, medicare, social security, IRA and pension plan reform and on and on.

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

Although this item could be said to have no real “true” or “false” quality to it (since what it references is just a hypothetical proposal and not a real piece of legislation), all of the supporting arguments accompanying it are false, and the answers to common questions asked about it are all nearly all negative:

Q: Does this text represent the actual 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?

A: No. The U.S. Constitution has only 27 amendments, the last of which (a limit on Congressional pay increases) was ratified in 1992.

Q: Does this text represent a proposed 28th Amendment?

A: This item is a “proposed 28th amendment” only in the very loose sense that any change to the U.S. Constitution suggested since the ratification of the 27th Amendment is a “proposed 28th Amendment.” However, when this piece hit the Internet back in 2009 it was just a bit of online politicking, not something that had been introduced or proposed as a potential amendment by any member of Congress.

In August 2013, nearly four years after this item began making the rounds on the Internet, two Congressmen (Ron DeSantis of Florida and Matt Salmon of Arizona) did introduce a joint resolution (H.J.RES.55) similar to one of its elements, proposing an amendment to the Constitution stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting the citizens of the United States that does not also apply to the Senators and Representatives.” That bill died in committee, and it is exceedingly unlikely that any such broadly worded amendment could ever pass muster in Congress without the underlying idea being subject to a good many qualifications.

Q: Could this amendment be passed without Congress’ voting on it?

A: Possibly, not not likely. Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution specifies two procedures for amendments. One method is for two-thirds of states legislatures to call for a constitutional convention at which new amendments may be proposed, subject to ratification by three-fourths of the states. The constitutional convention method allows for the Constitution to be amended by the actions of states alone and cuts Congress out of the equation — no Congressional vote or approval is required. However, not once in the history of the United States have the states ever called a convention for the purpose of proposing new constitutional amendments.

The other method for amending the Constitution (the one employed with every amendment so far proposed or enacted) requires that the proposed amendment be approved by both houses of Congress (i.e., the Senate and the House of Representatives) by a two-thirds majority in each, and then ratified by three-fourths of the states. It’s probably safe to speculate that the odds that a supermajority of both houses of Congress would pass an amendment which placed such restrictions upon them are very low indeed.

Q: Can members of Congress retire with full pay after serving only a single term?

A: No. This is a long-standing erroneous rumor which we have covered in detail in a separate article.

Q: Are members of Congress exempt from paying into Social Security?

A: No. As noted in our article about Congressional pensions, although Congress initially participated in the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) rather than Social Security, since 1984 all members of Congress have been required to pay into the Social Security fund.

Q: Are members of Congress exempt from prosecution for sexual harassment?

A: No. The passage of Public Law 104-1 (the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995, also known as CAA) made a variety of laws related to civil rights and workplace regulations applicable to the legislative branch of the federal government. Section 1311(a) of the CAA specifically prohibits sexual harassment (as well as harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin).

Q: Are members of Congress exempt from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (i.e., “Obamacare”) health care legislation?

A: No. One of the provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed by Congress is a requirement that lawmakers give up the insurance coverage previously provided to them through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program and instead purchase health insurance through the online exchanges that the law created:

(D) MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN THE EXCHANGE.

(i) REQUIREMENT — Notwithstanding any other provision of law, after the effective date of this subtitle, the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available to Members of Congress and congressional staff with respect to their service as a Member of Congress or congressional staff shall be health plans that are:

(I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or

(II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act).

An August 2013 ruling by the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was widely and inaccurately reported as exempting members of Congress from the requirement that they give up their Federal Employees Health Benefits Program coverage and instead purchase health insurance through online exchanges. That reporting was incorrect: Lawmakers are still required to purchase health insurance through government-created exchanges; what the OPM’s ruling actually declared was that members of Congress and their staffs did not have to give up the federal subsidies covering part of the costs of their insurance premiums which they had previously been receiving (and which are afforded to millions of other federal workers).

An October 2011 variant of this item is prefaced by a statement made by Warren Buffett: “‘I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.'” This quote came from a 7 July 2011 CNBC interview in which the Oracle of Omaha addressed the then-current issue of raising the debt limit. The rest of the message however, has nothing to do with Warren Buffett.

Some versions of this item include a statement asserting that the children and staffers of U.S. Congressmen are exempt from paying back student loan obligations. That statement is false.

Later versions of this item have been prefaced with the statement that “Governors of 35 states have filed suit against the Federal Government for imposing unlawful burdens upon them. It only takes 38 (of the 50) States to convene a Constitutional Convention.” Actually, only 34 states are required to convene such a convention.

The most recent variant submitted to us by Snopes readers circulated in 2020 under the header “The TRUMP Rules: Congressional Reform Act of 2017.

Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/28th-amendment/

Please share with your social networks far and wide. This is sorely needed in the 21st Century to update provisions in the 1787 Constitution as supported by 27 subsequent Amendments. This 28th Amendment would balance the scales! ~ J. D. H. W. Bryan-Royster ~

Economic Update: COVID Pandemic's Lesson About Capitalism

~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzSYZcvuqR0 ~

~ Richard D. Wolff: The Pandemic's Lesson About Capitalism ~

HEIR TO AUSTRIAN THRONE IS ASSASSINATED IN 1914!

~ Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand ~

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and Franz Ferdinand's wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, occurred on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo when they were mortally wounded by Gavrilo Princip. Princip was one of a group of six assassins also containing Mehmedbašić, Vaso Čubrilović, Nedeljko Čabrinović, Cvjetko Popović and Trifun Grabež (one Bosniak and five Serbs consecutively) coordinated by Danilo Ilić, a Bosnian Serb and a member of the Black Hand secret society. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary's South Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Yugoslavia. The conspirators' motives were consistent with the movement that later became known as Young Bosnia. The assassination led directly to World War I when Austria-Hungary subsequently issued an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia, which was partially rejected. Austria-Hungary then declared war on Serbia, triggering actions leading to war between most European states.

The Serbian military conspiracy was organized by Chief of Serbian Military Intelligence Dragutin Dimitrijević with the assistance of Major Vojislav Tankosić and spy Rade Malobabić. Tankosić armed the assassins with bombs and pistols and trained them. The assassins were given access to the same clandestine network of safe-houses and agents that Malobabić used for the infiltration of weapons and operatives into Austria-Hungary.

The assassins, the key members of the clandestine network, and the key Serbian military conspirators who were still alive were arrested, tried, convicted and punished. Those who were arrested in Bosnia were tried in Sarajevo in October 1914. The other conspirators were arrested and tried before a Serbian court on the French-controlled Salonika Front in 1916–1917 on unrelated false charges; Serbia executed three of the top military conspirators. Much of what is known about the assassinations comes from these two trials and related records.

While various countries of the former Yugoslavia largely view Gavrilo Princip as a terrorist, the governments of Republika Srpska and Serbia continue to insist that Princip is a hero.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand

HOMELESSNESS IN SEATTLE: LIFE ON THE STREETS...

Seattle is Dying

~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw&t=57s ~

3 CITIES: LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, & SEATTLE...

KOMO News documentary: A Tale of 3 Cities

~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS4bofDMbkw&t=501s ~

LIGHTING OF THRESHOLD LANTERN AT MY ART TABLE

SUMMER SOLSTICE, SIRIUS STONE CIRCLE ~ 2018

Joseph as the 9th Archetype in Tarot Majors, The Hermit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbYoXeTxVc8&t=348s

Critical Crossroads During Solstice/Eclipse Time

Truth Frequency over Corruption and Control!

By Laura Magdalene Eisenhower

Today, I do set an Intention to Light Threshold Lantern of 9th Archetype, The Hermit, within my apartment...

 

6 Sq. blocks: Meet the Activists inside Seattle's Police-Free Zone

In the early morning on June 9th, Seattle activists took over about 6 blocks surrounding the recently abandoned East Precinct of the Seattle Police Department — and they haven’t left. The People's Revolution has begun!

YouTube Video Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ4FRKRl5Vk

Don’t Listen to Fox. Here’s What’s Really Going On in Seattle’s Protest Zone.

SEATTLE — It seems I live in a city undergoing a “totalitarian takeover” that will lead to “fascist outcomes” and could “metastasize across the country.” Its government “has handed over an entire portion of the city to domestic terrorists.” This “group of rogue protesters” is attempting “to get a stranglehold on the city.” This radical “army” of “conquistadors” has “rolled over the police like Cortez rolling over the Aztecs.”

Welcome to our world, out here in Seattle—at least according to the hosts and commentators of Fox News. Lesser voices on the digital right have announced even more dire supposed developments: “Rapper-turned-warlord rules commune streets with the iron fist of a privatized police force.” But it’s Fox that has been all over the story of the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or CHAZ (which its Black Lives Matter organizers on Saturday renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP): four-plus blocks of street and sidewalk in Seattle’s traditional gay and bohemian nightlife district, surrounding a boarded-up police precinct headquarters that the mayor ordered vacated last Monday to dampen a week-and-a-half of escalating confrontations between police and protesters. From there, the fluid protests, spearheaded by BLM but involving a wide spectrum of activists and ordinary citizens, coalesced with surprising rapidity into something like a provisional government.

What’s going on in these four blocks that shook the world is indeed an occupation, but it looks nothing like the conquista touted on Fox. It’s also the “block party” that Mayor Jenny Durkan has compared it to, to gleeful jeers from Fox commentators. And it’s other things as well—a protean, issue-focused but conceptually sprawling formative community, at once silly and serious, spontaneous and disciplined. Over the course of two evenings and an afternoon in the zone (plus a night observing a police/protest showdown there the week before), it seemed by turns like a commune (as in Paris 1871), an anarcho-syndicalist and small-L libertarian dream, a ’60s-style teach-in, a street fair and street market, a campout and weekend party, a poetry slam and pilgrimage, a school service day, a mass healing circle, a humbler urban version of Burning Man, and of course a protest rally.

You’d hardly guess all that from the breathless attention Fox has lavished from Day One on this tiny strip of Seattle—while ignoring, among other peaceful protests, a 60,000-strong BLM march that proceeded in solemn silence through chilly rain and nearly no police presence on Saturday. The litany of elisions, misconceptions and misrepresentations that have spread from Fox’s coverage across social media and in the public and presidential minds may still surprise even those with diminished expectations of the network.

The most brazen have been visual. On Friday the Seattle Times revealed three sleights of the photo-editing hand on the Fox site, two of which it managed to preserve before the channel took them down. In one, Fox led a package of stories headlined “Crazy Town: Seattle helpless as armed guards patrol ‘autonomous zone’” with an incendiary photo of a man running between a burning car and building. That photo was actually taken May 30 in St. Paul, Minnesota. Seattle’s protests have produced no such blazes.

Fox also undertook two cut-and-pastes of a photo of a young sentinel standing calmly with a semiautomatic rifle on a quiet nighttime street in the zone, which it had already published intact. In one altered image, it set him in front of shattered storefront windows that had been photographed a week before CHAZ/CHOP was set up, more than a mile away. (Storefronts and windows have been spared in the autonomous/organized zone—even those in the vacated police station.) In the other, he stands by a street barrier and a hand-lettered sign reading, “You Are Now Entering Free Capitol Hill.” An editor’s note acknowledging the removal of the storefront mashup called it a “collage,” suggesting it was not intended to look like a single photo.

Fox is also slippery in its verbal attributions. It has hammered at the idea that the CHOP has made neighbors alarmed and fearful. But the only purported “resident of this part of the city” it has presented is a “former Seattle City Council candidate” named Ari Hoffman, who said nothing about the neighborhood but inveighed against “domestic terrorists.” One problem: Hoffman, a familiar face on Fox, isn’t from Capitol Hill. He lives in Seward Park, an affluent neighborhood 4 miles away. And when a member of the Police Department’s African American Community Advisory Council told protesters they had “hijacked” the movement and “taken the meaning away,” a Fox headline, echoed in later coverage, blared something very different: “Black Lives Matter protesters say Seattle’s autonomous zone has hijacked message.”

Such misrepresentations reverberate in subsequent reports and commentaries, painting a dark picture of the “organized protest” as illegitimate, divided, armed and violent. Many of these tropes derive from an on-camera statement Wednesday by Police Assistant Chief Deanna Nollette. “We’ve been hearing from community members that they have been subjected to barricades set up by the protesters with some armed individuals running them as checkpoints,” Nollette said, adding, “we have heard anecdotally of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area. This is the crime of extortion.” Nollette urged “anyone who feels threatened to call 911.”

The next day, Police Chief Carmen Best walked back that statement, saying that only “rumors” and social media claimed extortion. At least one such claim is an evident fake. The Greater Seattle Business Association, which is based on Capitol Hill, checked with local businesses and “found no evidence of this occurring.” Detective Patrick Michaud, a Seattle Police spokesman, says the department has received no 911 calls or other complaints about extortion, intimidation, guns or checkpoint barriers in the CHAZ/CHOP.

It’s understandable how the barriers around the zone—movable wood and plastic left behind by the police—and the hygienically masked sentinels standing at them could look intimidating to residents. But I passed through them perhaps a dozen times over three days and, like everyone I saw and talked to in the zone, was never stopped or asked my business. Even if this were the “border wall” Fox commentators call it, it would hardly be impenetrable; people could still come and go through the park abutting the zone.

I chatted with one of the border guards, a slight young man of East Indian descent with a stick-on name tag reading “Elijah.” He lived in the suburbs, he said, and hadn’t joined in the protests. “I’d seen what the media said,” he explained. “I came out to see what it was like”—and wound up volunteering. The only disturbance he’s seen, he said, “was someone trying to pull the barriers apart. We asked her to stop.” Otherwise, he said, he was “surprised” how mellow it all was. “Some of the nicest people I’ve seen have been here.”

The barriers, other guards explained, were there to stop cars from driving into the occupied streets—a real fear. Last Sunday, a motorist drove into the protest at that very intersection and shot a man point-blank who tried to make him stop, hitting his shoulder. He then charged through the crowd, gun in hand and surrendered to police. According to charging documents, he told police he was a security guard, his brother worked at the precinct, and he’d come to the protest “to see how bad it was,” with his Glock on the seat beside him.

Fox’s Vandana Rambaran reports, without details, that there have been “multiple shootings,” at the protests. Michaud says Seattle police have received no reports of shootings or guns at protests or in the occupied zone.

There have been guns in the zone, however, at least in its first days (I never saw any in later days). The sentinels carrying them belong to a left wing gun rights and self-defense group called the Puget Sound John Brown Gun Club, which offers “support upon request to those in our communities targeted by white supremacists and other agents of oppression and exploitation.”

Mindi Welton-Mitchell, a pastor at Seattle’s Queen Anne Baptist Church, was at the “Interfaith Chaplain Table”—where Christian, Jewish and Muslim clergy offer counsel, masks and hand sanitizer—when two John Browners came by and identified themselves. Far from intimidating, she says, they were so inconspicuous, with their guns at their sides, “most people didn’t notice them.”

Welton-Mitchell and the other minister at the table, Aaron Monts, saw unarmed barrier attendants deal with a man who approached “screaming and shouting” with a “Don’t Tread on Me” bath towel draped over his shoulders. “They moved him out without touching him,” Monts says. “One talked to him, heard what he had to say, and calmed him down. The de-escalation technique was superb.”

Pastors and progressive gun-toters are just the start; just about every conceivable sort of volunteer has brought whatever she or he can offer. “We do not accept $ donations of any kind,” the No Cop Co-Op announces over tables heaped with groceries for anyone who wants them. Other ramshackle stalls and tables offer free clothes, battery charges (for tools and bikes as well as phones) and food, from camp-stove fry-ups to the enormous tureen of crab soup one Asian family ladles into disposable cups. The free books at the Chaz People’s Library and Mutual Aid Books tend to be crisp and movement-friendly.

Two women circulate with a handwritten sign offering mental-health help. Yes, they say when asked, we are certified therapists. Others circulate with garbage bags, darting at every scrap of litter. The trash cans are stuffed but I’ve never seen the street so clean.

“This is the first time I’ve done this,” says 27-year-old Layla Lacos, standing behind a card table and a handwritten sign saying “Register to vote.” “But I believe passionately in voting.” She figured this might be a good place to enlist new voters, so she secured the necessary forms and a stash of “Vote/Vota” buttons from the county and ventured into the zone. Her hunch seems spot-on. “I just got here an hour ago and I’ve already signed up 30 or 40 registrations and address changes.”

Cash-free mutual aid hasn’t entirely dimmed the entrepreneurial spirit. Despite all the free food, people line up for $6 hot dogs at a commercial cart. A vendor stationed in the middle of the street does a land-office business in $30 Black Lives Matter T-shirts.

Jordan Lyon, an irrepressibly earnest and enthusiastic young community organizer, is fired up with a more social entrepreneurship. The day before, he brought down four folding chairs and a table, hung signs saying “Conversation Cafe: Let’s make a friend” and “Let’s talk about antiracism,” and wondered if anyone would sit down. Others brought more chairs and couches, until he had some 30 seats arranged in three circles.

All are now full, and the conversations hum. Some are confessional, testimonials to racism practiced and experienced. The circle I slip into looks toward broader solutions. A middle-aged African American man who says he works in “construction and performance art” urges the mutual investment that is a perennial, and perennially difficult, goal in black communities. “We need to do what they do in Chinatown,” he says. “Invest in business!” A fair-haired young woman, just graduated from the University of Georgia, wonders if what she learned in her Marxist-Leninist study group might be pertinent. Worlds collide, but gently.

“There is a level of trust here that is remarkable,” Lyon says, and I realize he’s talking not just about this conversation space but what he calls the surrounding “commons.” “I see this as potentially permanent. I would so love to see the Black Lives Matter Commons here—like Barcelona superblocks, like [car-banishing] Copenhagen, but about black culture.”

Across the street in the park, other volunteers are planting literal roots. Someone has planted four chestnut seedlings, memorials to George Floyd and three local victims of police violence. (Alas, they’re too close together to reach full glory.) Four carefully plotted, compost-heaped vegetable gardens also have taken shape, suitably framed: “This Garden Is for Black and Indigenous Folks and their Plant Allies.” One lead gardener tempers his hopes, however. “I want it to be beautiful so it will look really bad when they tear it up.”

On Pine Street, local black artists have laid down a blocklong “street mural” so beautiful and conspicuous officials may shrink from removing it, if they even want to. Seventeen-foot-high, meticulously drawn and painted letters, each by a different artist or team, spell out “Black Lives Matter” in styles by turns whimsical, geometric and symbolic. The project emulates similar new street art in Washington, D.C., and, especially, Charlotte, N.C.

This mega-artwork symbolically reclaims embattled turf, ground zero for more than three decades in Seattle’s battles over class, power and race. The precinct headquarters was only located there in the early 1980s because of a community uproar; it was to go in the Central District, the pre-gentrification center of Seattle’s black community, a mile to the east, but activists there resisted. So the cop shop landed on Capitol Hill, where reaction was more muted, even welcoming.

In the more turbulent ’90s and 2000s, however, things changed for the testier. Police confrontations with massed street kids and May Day protesters often turned violent. Rioting broke out in downtown Seattle, as elsewhere, in 1992 following the acquittal of the Los Angeles policemen who beat Rodney King, the first on-camera police violence to become a national sensation. Seattle police ill-advisedly pushed the rioters from downtown up Pine Street, where they scattered across Capitol Hill on a smashing and torching spree. The 1999 “Battle in Seattle,” when massive demonstrations shut down the World Trade Organization meeting, culminated on these same blocks as well. Demonstrators, many from the neighborhood, massed below the precinct building until police, backed by National Guard troops, drove them off with barrages of tear gas, flash bangs and rubber bullets. It became a battle for turf, just as the current occupation has. Chants “WTO must go!” gave way to “Get off our hill!”

Now that long-simmering local history has come to a boil, precipitated by accumulated outrage at police violence and racial inequity. Everything converges here. Mayor Durkan is as besieged as the precinct building (and like the police, the target of profuse graffiti, the most printable of which proclaims “Impeach Jenny Durkan”). Protesters, and at least a third of Seattle’s left-leaning City Council, want her to resign. Her own police chief has publicly disputed her decision to evacuate the precinct. Critics on the right, including the Seattle Police Officers Guild’s firebrand president, call it craven capitulation.

That decision may look better in retrospect, however. It bought time, preventing further, perhaps catastrophic escalation and giving volatile demonstrations the chance to morph into orderly occupation. The name change announced Saturday signaled a further consolidation of the movement, although some media still managed to confuse the issue by calling the new CHOP the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.” As one of them explained, BLM organizers had no idea who slapped “CHAZ” on the project, but “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” makes it clear: “This is not an autonomous zone. We’re not trying to secede from the United States,” merely to have “our rights upheld.”

An organized protest is one you can negotiate with. City officials, protest representatives and neighborhood business and property owners have begun talking about first steps: cooperating on safety and emergency services, trimming back the CHOP perimeter to let firetrucks and ambulances through. Much bigger issues remain: At a hundreds-strong “people’s assembly” outside the shuttered precinct station, I hear Nikkita Oliver, a charismatic former mayoral candidate and the most visible presence at CHOP public gatherings, lead the throng in a catechism of “core demands”: defund the police, release all arrested protesters, close the precinct. Kshama Sawant, the furthest-left member of our City Council, wants to turn the building into a community center.

Unlikely as that last measure may sound, there are precedents. Three hallowed Seattle institutions—the Northwest African American Heritage Museum, El Centro de la Raza, and the United Indians of All Tribes’ Daybreak Star Cultural Center—were born out of protest occupations, the first two of empty schools, the last of an obsolete army fort.

At the same time, the city has been steadily closing streets deemed unnecessary for auto traffic to create open pedestrian corridors. Pedestrians are already more dominant on Capitol Hill than in any other district.

Perhaps a Black Lives Matter Commons isn’t so far-fetched.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-listen-to-fox-heres-whats-really-going-on-in-seattles-protest-zone-321507

"INKY THE HALLOWE'EN CAT" IMAGE IS ALL FINISHED!

MEMORIAL DAY 1969: PEACEFUL MARCH IN BERKELEY

People's Park in Berkeley, California is a park located off Telegraph Avenue, bounded by Haste and Bowditch streets and Dwight Way, near the University of California, Berkeley. The park was created during the radical political activism of the late 1960s.

The local Southside neighborhood was the scene of a major confrontation between student protesters and police in May 1969. A mural near the park, painted by Berkeley artist O'Brien Thiele and lawyer/artist Osha Neumann, depicts the shooting of James Rector, who was fatally shot by police on May 15, 1969.

While legally the land is the property of the University of California, People's Park has operated since the early 1970s as a free public park. Although open to all, it is often viewed as a daytime sanctuary for Berkeley's low income and large homeless population who, along with others, receive meals from East Bay Food Not Bombs. Nearby residents, and those who try to use the park for recreation, sometimes experience conflict with the homeless people.

Early history to May 1969

In 1956, the Regents of the University of California allocated a 2.8-acre (11,000 m2) plot of land containing residences for future development into student housing, parking, and offices as part of the university's "Long Range Development Plan." At the time, public funds were lacking to buy the land, and the plan was shelved until June 1967, when the university acquired $1.3 million to acquire the land through the process of eminent domain. The short-term goal was to create athletic fields with student housing being a longer-range goal.

Bulldozers arrived February, 1968 and began demolition of the residences. But the university ran out of development funds, leaving the lot only partially cleared of demolition debris and rubble for 14 months. The muddy site became derelict with abandoned cars.

On April 13, 1969, local merchants and residents held a meeting to discuss possible uses for the derelict site. At the time, student activist Wendy Schlesinger and Michael Delacour (a former defense contractor employee who had become an anti-war activist[10]) had become attached to the area, as they had been using it as a rendez-vous for a secret romantic affair.[7] The two presented a plan for developing the under-utilized, university-owned land into a public park. This plan was approved by the attendees, but not by the university. Stew Albert, a co-founder of the Yippie Party, agreed to write an article for the local counter-culture newspaper, the Berkeley Barb, on the subject of the park, particularly to call for help from local residents.

A group of people took some corporate land, owned by the University of California, that was a parking lot and turned it into a park and then said, 'We're using the land better than you used it; it's ours.'

 — Frank Bardacke, a participant in the park's development, quoted in the documentary film Berkeley in the Sixties

Michael Delacour stated, "We wanted a free speech area that wasn't really controlled like Sproul Plaza [the plaza at the south entrance to UC Berkeley] was. It was another place to organize, another place to have a rally. The park was secondary."[12] The university's Free Speech microphone was available to all students, with few (if any) restrictions on speech. The construction of the park involved many of the same people and politics as the 1964 Free Speech Movement.[11]

On April 18, 1969, Albert's article appeared in the Berkeley Barb, and on Sunday, April 20, more than 100 people arrived at the site to begin building the park. Local landscape architect Jon Read and many others contributed trees, flowers, shrubs, and sod. Free food was provided, and community development of the park proceeded. Eventually, about 1,000 people became directly involved, with many more donating money and materials. The park was essentially complete by mid-May.

On April 28, 1969, Berkeley Vice Chancellor Earl Cheit released plans for a sports field to be built on the site. This plan conflicted with the plans of the People's Park activists. However, Cheit stated that he would take no action without notifying the park builders.

Two days later, on April 30, Cheit allocated control over one quarter of the plot to the park's builders.

On May 6, Chancellor Roger W. Heyns met with members of the People's Park committee, student representatives, and faculty from the College of Environmental Design. He set a time limit of three weeks for this group to produce a plan for the park, and he reiterated his promise that construction would not begin without prior warning.

On May 13, Chancellor Heyns notified media via a press release that the University would build a fence around the property and begin construction.

May 15, 1969: "Bloody Thursday"

After its creation on April 20, during its first three weeks People's Park was used by both university students and local residents, and local Telegraph Avenue merchants voiced their appreciation for the community's efforts to improve the neighborhood. Objections to the expropriation of university property tended to be mild, even among school administrators.

However, Governor Ronald Reagan had been publicly critical of university administrators for tolerating student demonstrations at the Berkeley campus. He had received popular support for his 1966 gubernatorial campaign promise to crack down on what the public perceived as a generally lax attitude at California's public universities. Reagan called the Berkeley campus "a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants." Reagan considered the creation of the park a direct leftist challenge to the property rights of the university, and he found in it an opportunity to fulfill his campaign promise.

On Thursday, May 15, 1969 at 4:30 a.m., Governor Reagan sent California Highway Patrol and Berkeley police officers into People's Park, overriding Chancellor Heyns' May 6 promise that nothing would be done without warning. The officers cleared an 8-block area around the park while a large section of what had been planted was destroyed and an 8-foot (2.4 m)-tall perimeter chain-link wire fence was installed to keep people out and to prevent the planting of more trees, grass, flowers, or shrubs.

The action came at the request of Berkeley's Republican mayor, Wallace Johnson. It became the impetus for the "most violent confrontation in the university's history."

Rally becomes protest

Beginning at noon on May 15, about 3,000 people appeared in Sproul Plaza at nearby UC Berkeley for a rally, the original purpose of which was to discuss the Arab–Israeli conflict. Several people spoke; then, Michael Lerner ceded the Free Speech platform to ASUC Student Body President Dan Siegel because students were concerned about the fencing-off and destruction of the park. Siegel said later that he never intended to precipitate a riot; however, when he shouted "Let's take the park!," police turned off the sound system. The crowd responded spontaneously, moving down Telegraph Avenue toward People's Park chanting, "We want the park!"

Arriving in the early afternoon, protesters were met by the remaining 159 Berkeley and university police officers assigned to guard the fenced-off park site. The protesters opened a fire hydrant, several hundred protesters attempted to tear down the fence and threw bottles, rocks, and bricks at the officers, and then the officers fired tear gas canisters. A major confrontation ensued between police and the crowd, which grew to 4,000. Initial attempts by the police to disperse the protesters were not successful, and more officers were called in from surrounding cities. At least one car was set on fire. A large group of protesters confronted a small group of sheriff's deputies who turned and ran. The crowd of protesters let out a cheer and briefly chased after them until the sheriff's deputies ran into a used car facility. The crowd then turned around and ran back to a patrol car which they overturned and set on fire.

Shooting

Reagan's Chief of Staff, Edwin Meese III, a former district attorney from Alameda County, had established a reputation for firm opposition to those protesting the Vietnam War at the Oakland Induction Center and elsewhere. Meese assumed responsibility for the governmental response to the People's Park protest, and he called in the Alameda County Sheriff's deputies, which brought the total police presence to 791 officers from various jurisdictions.

Under Meese's direction, police were permitted to use whatever methods they chose against the crowds, which had swelled to approximately 6,000 people. Officers in full riot gear (helmets, shields, and gas masks) obscured their badges to avoid being identified and headed into the crowds with nightsticks swinging.

"The indiscriminate use of shotguns [was] sheer insanity."

 — Dr. Harry Brean, chief radiologist at Berkeley's Herrick Hospital

As the protesters retreated, the Alameda County Sheriff's deputies pursued them several blocks down Telegraph Avenue as far as Willard Junior High School at Derby Street, firing tear gas canisters and "00" buckshot at the crowd's backs as they fled.

Authorities initially claimed that only birdshot had been used as shotgun ammunition. When physicians provided "00" pellets removed from the wounded as evidence that buckshot had been used, Sheriff Frank Madigan of Alameda County justified the use of shotguns loaded with lethal buckshot by stating, "The choice was essentially this: to use shotguns—because we didn't have the available manpower—or retreat and abandon the City of Berkeley to the mob." Sheriff Madigan did admit, however, that some of his deputies (many of whom were Vietnam War veterans) had been overly aggressive in their pursuit of the protesters, acting "as though they were Viet Cong."

Casualties

Alameda County Sheriff's deputies also used shotguns to fire at people sitting on the roof at the Telegraph Repertory Cinema. James Rector was visiting friends in Berkeley and watching from the roof of Granma Books when he was shot by police; he died on May 19. The Alamada County Coroner's report listed cause of death as "shock and hemorrhage due to multiple shotgun wounds and perforation of the aorta." The buckshot is the same size as a .38 caliber bullet. Governor Reagan conceded that Rector was probably shot by police but justified the bearing of firearms, saying that "it's very naive to assume that you should send anyone into that kind of conflict with a flyswatter. He's got to have an appropriate weapon." The University of California Police Department (UCPD) claims Rector threw steel rebar down onto the police; however, according to Time, Rector was a bystander, not a protester.

At least 128 Berkeley residents were admitted to local hospitals for head trauma, shotgun wounds, and other serious injuries inflicted by police. The actual number of seriously wounded was likely much higher, because many of the injured did not seek treatment at local hospitals to avoid being arrested. Local medical students and interns organized volunteer mobile first-aid teams to help protesters and bystanders injured by buckshot, nightsticks, or tear gas. One local hospital reported two students wounded with large caliber rifles as well.

News reports at the time of the shooting indicated that 50 were injured, including five police officers. Some local hospital logs indicate that 19 police officers or Alameda County Sheriff's deputies were treated for minor injuries; none were hospitalized. However, the UCPD claims that 111 police officers were injured, including one California Highway Patrol Officer Albert Bradley, who was knifed in the chest.

 — Front page headline of student newspaper The Daily Californian for May 16, 1969

That evening, Governor Reagan declared a state of emergency in Berkeley and sent in 2,700 National Guard troops. The Berkeley City Council symbolically voted 8–1 against the decision. For two weeks, the streets of Berkeley were patrolled by National Guardsmen, who broke up even small demonstrations with tear gas. Governor Reagan was steadfast and unapologetic: "Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, you must expect things will happen, and that people, being human, will make mistakes on both sides."

During the People's Park incident, National Guard troops were stationed in front of Berkeley's empty lots to prevent protesters from planting flowers, shrubs, or trees. Young hippie women taunted and teased the troops, on one occasion handing out marijuana-laced brownies and lemonade spiked with LSD. According to commanding Major General Glenn C. Ames, "LSD had been injected into fudge, oranges and apple juice which they received from young hippie-type females." Some protesters, their faces hidden with scarves, challenged police and National Guard troops. Hundreds were arrested, and Berkeley citizens who ventured out during curfew hours risked police harassment and beatings.

Berkeley city police officers were discovered to be parking several blocks away from the Annex park, removing their badges and donning grotesque Halloween-type masks (including pig faces) to attack citizens they found in the park annex."

Immediate aftermath

On Wednesday, May 21, 1969, a midday memorial was held for student James Rector at Sproul Plaza on the university campus, with several thousand people attending.

Demonstrations continued for several days after Bloody Thursday. A crowd of approximately 400 were driven from Sproul Plaza to Telegraph Avenue by tear gas on May 19. On Thursday, May 22, 1969, about 250 demonstrators were arrested and charged with unlawful assembly; bail was set at $800 ($5,185 in 2014 dollars).

Showing solidarity with students, 177 faculty members said that they were "unwilling to teach until peace has been achieved by the removal of police and troops." On May 23, the Berkeley faculty senate endorsed (642 to 95) a proposal by the College of Environmental Designs to have the park become the centerpiece of an experiment in community-generated design.

In a separate university referendum, UC Berkeley students voted 12,719 to 2,175 in favor of keeping the park; the turnout represented about half of the registered student body. Although Chancellor Heyns supported a proposal to lease the site to the city as a community park, the Board of Regents voted to proceed with the construction of married student apartments in June 1969.

Institutional responses

Law enforcement was using a new form of crowd control, pepper gas. The editorial offices of Berkeley Tribe were sprayed with pepper gas and had tear gas canisters fired into the offices, injuring underground press staff.

On May 20, 1969, National Guard helicopters flew over the Berkeley campus, dispensing airborne tear gas that winds dispersed over the entire city, sending school children miles away to hospitals. This was one of the largest deployments of tear gas during the Vietnam era protests. Governor Reagan would concede that this might have been a "tactical mistake." It had not yet been banned from warfare under the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The Washington Post wrote of the incident in an editorial: "[T]he indiscriminate gassing of a thousand people not at the time in violation of any law seems more than a little excessive." The editorial also criticized legislation before the U.S. House of Representatives that would have "cut off Federal aid to universities which fail to head off campus disorders."

That legislation, the Higher Education Protection and Freedom of Expression Act of 1969 (Campus Disorder Bill, HR 11941, 91st Congress), was a response to mass protests and demonstrations at universities and colleges across the nation. It was introduced by House Special Subcommittee on Education chair Rep. Edith Green (D-OR). The bill would have required colleges and universities to file plans of action for dealing with campus unrest with the U.S. Commissioner of Education. The bill gave the institutions the power to suspend federal aid to students convicted—in court or by the university—of violating campus rules in connection with student riots. Any school that did not file such plans would lose federal funding.

Governor Reagan supported the federal legislation; in a March 19, 1969 statement, he urged Congress to "be equally concerned about those who commit violence who are not receiving aid." On May 20, 1969, Attorney General John N. Mitchell advised the Committee that existing law was "adequate." On June 13, Governor Reagan defended his actions in a televised speech delivered from San Francisco; public response was overwhelmingly supportive of the governor's actions.

Peaceful protest

By May 26, the city-wide curfew and ban on gatherings had been lifted, although 200 members of the National Guard remained to guard the fenced-off park, anticipating unrest from a march planned for May 30. Governor Reagan pledged that "whatever force is necessary will be on hand", although protest leaders declared the march would be non-violent.

On May 30, 1969, 30,000 Berkeley citizens (out of a population of 100,000) secured a city permit and marched without incident past the barricaded People's Park to protest Governor Reagan's occupation of their city, the death of James Rector, the blinding of Alan Blanchard, and the many injuries inflicted by police. Young girls slid flowers down the muzzles of bayoneted National Guard rifles, and a small airplane flew over the city trailing a banner that read, "Let A Thousand Parks Bloom."

Nevertheless, over the next few weeks National Guard troops broke up any assemblies of more than four people who congregated for any purpose on the streets of Berkeley, day or night. In the early summer, troops deployed in downtown Berkeley surrounded several thousand protesters and bystanders, emptying businesses, restaurants, and retail outlets of their owners and customers, and arresting them en masse.

One year later

In an address before the California Council of Growers on April 7, 1970, almost a year after "Bloody Thursday" and the death of James Rector, Governor Reagan defended his decision to use the California National Guard to quell Berkeley protests: "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." Berkeley Tribe editors decided to issue this quote in large type on the cover of its next edition.

Context

The May 1969 confrontation in People's Park grew out of the counterculture of the 1960s, pitting flower children against the Establishment. Berkeley had been the site of the first large-scale antiwar demonstration in the country on September 30, 1964.

Among the student protests of the late 1960s, the People's Park confrontation came after the 1968 protests at Columbia University and the Democratic National Convention, but before the Kent State killings and the burning of a branch of Bank of America in Isla Vista. Closer to home, it occurred on the heels of the Stanford University April 3 movement, where students protested University-sponsored war-related research by occupying Encina Hall.

Unlike other student protests of the late 1960s, most of which were at least partly in opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the initial protests at People's Park were mostly in response to a local disagreement about land use.

1970s

Unofficial memorial: 25 years of People's Park. "Remove parking lot, put in a paradise" is an allusion to Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi".

After the peaceful march in support of People's Park on May 30, 1969, the university decided to keep the 8-foot-tall perimeter chain-link wire fence and maintain a 24-hour guard over the site. On June 20, the University of California Regents voted to turn the People's Park site into a soccer field and parking lot.

In March 1971, when it seemed as though construction of the parking lot and soccer field might proceed, another People's Park protest occurred, resulting in 44 arrests.

In May 1972, an outraged crowd tore down the perimeter chain-link wire fence surrounding the People's Park site after President Richard Nixon announced his intention to mine North Vietnam's main port. In September, the Berkeley City Council voted to lease the park site from the university. The Berkeley community rebuilt the park, mainly with donated labor and materials. Various local groups contributed to managing the park during rebuilding.

Dear Indugu on the People's Stage (2010)

In 1979, the university tried to convert the west end of the park, which was already a no-cost parking lot, into a fee lot for students and faculty only. The west end of the park was (and remains) the location of the People's Stage, a permanent bandstand that had just been erected on the edge of the lawn within the no-cost parking lot. Completed in the spring of 1979, it had been designed and constructed through user-development and voluntary community participation. This effort was coordinated by the People's Park Council, a democratic group of park advocates, and the People's Park Project/Native Plant Forum. Park users and organizers believed that the university's main purpose in attempting to convert the parking lot was the destruction of the People's Stage in order to suppress free speech and music, both in the park and in the neighborhood south of campus as a whole. It was also widely believed that the foray into the west end warned of the dispossession of the entire park for the purpose of university construction. A spontaneous protest in the fall of 1979 led to an occupation of the west end that continued uninterrupted throughout December 1979. Park volunteers tore up the asphalt and heaped it up as barricades next to the sidewalks along Dwight Way and Haste Street. This confrontation led to negotiations between the university and the park activists. The park activists were led by the People's Park Council, which included park organizers and occupiers, as well as other community members. The university eventually capitulated. Meanwhile, the occupiers, organizers, and volunteer gardeners transformed the former parking lot into a newly cultivated organic community gardening area, which remains to this day.

People's Park Annex/Ohlone Park

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Main article: Ohlone Park

The Bay Area Rapid Transit has substantial property under which the new San Francisco trains will run. The surface has been offered to the city, without charge, for such a park and is located only a few blocks away from this park. Actually, the space available for a park there is substantially larger. If the real issue is a park for people, why not develop that?

 — State Sen. Gordon Cologne, June 1969 editorial, The Desert Sun

In the immediate aftermath of the May 1969 People's Park demonstrations, and consistent with their goal of "letting a thousand parks bloom," on May 25, People's Park activists began gardening a two-block strip of land called the "Hearst Corridor," located adjacent to Hearst Avenue just northwest of the university campus. The Hearst Corridor was a strip of land along the north side of Hearst Avenue that had been left largely untended after the houses had been torn down to facilitate completion of an underground subway line by the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District. Although BART officials offered to lease the site to the city for a park, on the night of June 6, approximately 400 people were forcibly evicted from what was then called "People's Park No. 2" by Berkeley police, who also removed playground equipment and trees that had been recently planted.

During the 1970s, local residents, especially George Garvin, pursued gardening and user development of this land, which became known as "People's Park Annex." Later on, additional volunteers donated time and energy to the Annex, led by David Axelrod and Charlotte Pyle, urban gardeners who were among the original organizers of the People's Park Project/Native Plant Forum.

As neighborhood and community groups stepped up their support for the preservation and development of the Annex, BART abandoned its original plan to build apartment complexes on Hearst Corridor. The City of Berkeley negotiated with BART to secure permanent above-ground rights to the entire five block strip of land, between Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Sacramento Avenue. By the early 1980s, this land had become a city park comprising 9.8 acres (40,000 m2), which residents decided to name "Ohlone Park" in honor of the Ohlone band of Native Americans who once lived there.

Today, the Berkeley Parks and Recreation Commission mediates neighborhood and community feedback concerning issues of park design and the maintenance, operation, and development of Ohlone Park amenities. These amenities—which include pedestrian and bicycle paths, children's playgrounds, a dog park, basketball and volleyball courts, a softball/soccer field, toilets, picnic areas, and community gardens—continue to serve the people and pets of Berkeley.

Subsequent history

The park has seen various projects come and go over the decades. The "Free Box" operated as a clothes donation dropoff site for many years until it was destroyed by arson in 1995. Subsequent attempts to rebuild it were dismantled by University police.

The university built sand volleyball courts at the south end of the park in 1991. Protesters demonstrated against the project, at times sitting on the volleyball courts to prevent their use. The courts eventually were dismantled in 1997.

In 2011, People's Park saw a new wave of protests, known as the "tree-sit." It consisted of a series of individual "tree-sitters" who occupied a wooden platform in one of the trees in People's Park. The protests were troubled by abrupt interruptions and altercations. One protester was arrested, another fell from the tree while sleeping. But despite the transitions and overlapping political platforms, such as the 10 PM curfew and the university's plans for development, the protests lasted throughout most of the fall of 2011. The tree-sits were also supported by Zachary RunningWolf, a Berkeley activist and several-time mayoral candidate, who actively spoke to the media about the protesters and the causes they were championing. RunningWolf claimed that the central motive for the protests was to demonstrate that "poverty is not a crime."

Despite the protests, in late 2011, UC Berkeley bulldozed the west end of People's Park, tearing up the decades-old community garden and plowing down mature trees in what a press release issued by the school described as an effort to provide students and the broader community with safer, more sanitary conditions. This angered some Berkeley students and residents, who noted that the bulldozing took place during winter break when many students were away from campus, and followed the administration-backed police response at Occupy Cal less than two months prior.

People's Park has been the subject of long-running contention between those who see it as a memorial to the Free Speech Movement and a haven for the poor; and those who describe it as crime-infested and unfriendly to families. While the park has public bathrooms, gardens, and a playground area, many residents do not see it as a welcoming place, citing drug use and a high crime rate. A San Francisco Chronicle article on January 13, 2008 referred to People's Park as "a forlorn and somewhat menacing hub for drug users and the homeless." The same article quoted denizens and supporters of the park saying it was "perfectly safe, clean and accessible." In May 2018, UC Berkeley reported that campus police had been called 1,585 times to People's Park in the previous year. The University also said there had been 10,102 criminal incidents in the park between 2012 and 2017.

Proposed development

In 2018, UC Berkeley unveiled a plan for People's Park that would include the construction of housing for as many as 1,000 students, supportive housing for the homeless or military veterans, and a memorial honoring the park's history and legacy. On August 29, 2019, Chancellor Carol T. Christ confirmed plans to create student housing for 600-1000 students, and supportive housing for 100-125 people. San Francisco-based LMS architects has been selected to build the housing, and Christ stated that they are moving to a time of "extensive public comment" on the plans for construction.

Some critics state that any attempts to construct student housing will "inevitably be met with incandescent violence." Going further to describe it as "a shit show that will make the 1969 and 1991 riots look like an afternoon soiree of tea and crumpets."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Park_(Berkeley) 

I participated in the May 30, 1969 Peaceful March in support of People's Park while a student at the University of California, Riverside and rode up to Berkeley in an open cattle truck with many students from my campus, one of 9 in the University of California system. We gathered in Sproul Plaza for a pre-march demonstration before heading down Telegraph Avenue, flanked by monitors wearing green arm bands, as we were self-policing, while Alameda County Sheriff's Deputies stood on rooftops pointing "00" shotguns at the marchers. I helped plant "Rector Grove," in honor of James Rector who was shot and killed by police prior to the date of this march. ~ J.D.H.W. Bryan-Royster