March in DC Jan. 27? You Bet, But Give the Locals a Listen!

See the map? Lemme tell you where this map comes from.

Every time a big peace or global justice demonstration is called for Washington , DC (which means, lets face it, at least once and probably twice in any given year), I get my coat pulled by my friend Steve. Steve's a longtime activist in DC, and his calls and emails on these occasions tend to be impassioned. With the big United For Peace and Justice rally against the occupation coming up January 27, we had our usual conversation, which I will summarize here.

The message--and, trust me, Steve's language is substantially more colorful and detail-filled-- is a simple one. As a rule, the big national coalitions calling these demos treat DC poorly. They make the major decisions shaping their marches and rallies without consulting with the locals about logistics, let alone how to tie in DC's struggles or mobilize the community there to take part. What's worse, they insist that area activists subordinate themselves to the advance team the coalition has set up to build and run the demo.

This time I challenged Steve to come up with a better plan, one that wouldn't isolate the march in the governmental section of DC--what Steve calls the Dead Zone--where the only people around on weekends are visiting high school classes and Finnish tourists. A skilled geographer, he came up with two carefully designed march routes, but decided the blog should only try to promote the one shown above. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

The route's merits are easy to understand. As the maps above show, it goes through the busy commercial districts bordering major Black and Latino communities. The march route passes right by several parks, which could be used for out-of-town bus drop-offs and rallies of constituent groups before joining the main march. And there are several Metro stations along the line of march, an important factor in January, as anyone who has taken part in the hypothermia-fests that are counter-inaugurals can attest.

I will close with one of Steve's more temperate observations: "People identify with the social imaginary of Washington, and engage in magical thinking--that screaming at empty buildings and each other will change the universe. The most effective part of these demos isn't the event but rather the dispersal, when participants filter into living parts of the city. I would love to see sometime a rally that chose to have the buses drop off out of towners at a number of outlying metro stops and moving through the subway system to the assembly point, which should be accessible by metro. There is a certain inertia to the pattern we see time after time, the noglobal movement broke through the set piece normalized protest senario, but thanks to traditional movement folks everything is comfortably marginalized once again."

UPDATE:

In response to complaints that the map does not give enough detail for non-DC old-timers to tell where it was going, Steve provided the following mapquest-style written route:


My proposed route goes from Malcolm X Park, down 16th Street to K Street, over to Mt. Vernon Square and down 9th, I and 7th Streets to Constitution and on to the West side of the Capitol. The written directions were generated by the software, the little dog trot around Mt. Vernon and onto I is to avoid streets that are main arteries for cars, but in areas with heavy pedestrian traffic on the weekends.

1. Go on 16TH ST ST
1.1 mile(s)

2: Turn right on K ST
.1 mile(s)

3: Go back East on K ST Mt Vernon sq
0.5 mile(s)

4.: Turn left on K ST ST
0.2 mile(s)

5: Turn right on 9TH ST ST
0.1 mile(s)

6 Turn left on I ST ST
0.1 mile(s)

7: Turn right on 7TH ST ST
0.1 mile(s)

8 Continue South on 7TH ST ST
Drive 0.5 mile(s)

9: Turn left on PENNSYLVANIA AVE AVE
0.5 mile(s) to arrive at the Capitol .

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