A Brief History of the Die-in

As a student of historical nonviolent movements, the protests in Saint Louis have an academic as well as a personal connection for me. In particular, I am interested in the language of protest. It can differ greatly by location and time period. In many places, a particular color has a deeply woven cultural meaning of resistance—yellow in the Phillipines, green in Iran, orange in Ukraine. In other movements, a particular kind of demonstration has become the signature of the movement—the boycotts and marches in the Civil Rights movement, the salt tax protests in the Indian independence movement, and the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo’s Arab Spring. However, these different forms of language have a similar goal: by wearing a certain color or taking a particular action in a highly public manner, nonviolent protesters aim to demonstrate their rejection of an unjust system, and the system’s inability to stop them from doing so without resorting to violence.

So far, the signature action of the Ferguson protest movement, other than the ‘hands up’ gesture, has been the die-in. As organizations have begun to struggle for control of the leadership of the current movement, I think it is important to bear witness to the Saint Louis roots of this particular demonstration. It is also a fascinating case-study in the spread of nonviolent tactics and the results of activism.

A little over a week before the grand jury decision announcement, Saint Louis-based activist groups were continuing their months-long campaign of protest. Though cable news attention had waned once the minority of criminally violent demonstrators had moved on, nonviolent protests continued unabated from August to November, with a peak of activity on the weekend of Oct. 11-12, dubbed “Ferguson October.”

According to the St. Louis American, on the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 16, two groups of protesters, including members of Tribe X and Missourians Organizing for Reform (MORE) marched in University City, meeting in front of the Tivoli Theater on the Delmar Loop. After several minutes of chanting, some of them mimed holding a gun and shooting the others, who fell to the ground. Others traced chalk outlines around the ‘bodies.’ Laying in the street for 4.5 minutes, they mimicked the 4.5 hours that Michael Brown’s body lay on Canfield Ave. after he was shot. By blocking traffic and speaking over a megaphone to pedestrians, the protesters interrupted daily life and the normal flow of commerce in a business district. Delmar Blvd. is also culturally significant, as it represents the current line of segregation between white and black neighborhoods in St. Louis, according to the BBC (also see this write-up by the St. Louis Beacon). The Loop, therefore, is a liminal space in which this segregation can be challenged.

Video by the St. Louis American.

That evening, just hours after the protesters had dispersed, the New York Times put a photo of the die-in on the website’s front page.

Suddenly, the die-in was on track to spread virally. The Monday edition of the Times also featured this photo. However, it is important to consider that the activists strategically manipulated to get national coverage of this action. While the cable cameras had retreated, newspaper reporters from the Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times remained. By beginning with a march, they made sure the reporters knew where they were headed. They chose a highly photogenic action that looks good on a front page and is easily replicated by other groups. Though these choices, the organizers created conditions that nearly ensured national attention.

Since then, the die-in has spread nationwide. Most recently, medical students around the country held campus die-ins while wearing their white coats.  They often target highly-trafficked spots such as malls, large roads and interstates, and public squares.

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Nick Pistor, recently claimed on Twitter that the die-in “has officially become a pop culture thing.” I think there is an important distinction between “widespread” and “pop culture.” Pop culture is never dangerous. Demonstrators, especially people of color, take very real risks participating in die-ins, ranging from verbal abuse, to arrest for unlawful assembly, to violent police response. The Saint Louis activists created a word in the language of the current movement that, wherever spoken, continues to challenge racism and promote solidarity among groups throughout the country.

Truman Students Arrested at Nonviolent Protest

Photo by the LA Times. The two Truman students
are the first and third seated protesters from the right.

For this week's Truman Index, I wrote a feature on two students (one, Greg Fister, an old Prep News comrade) who were arrested during a nonviolent sit-in at the Shaw QuikTrip earlier this month.  For anyone curious about what it is like to be arrested for activism, take a look. Here's the first page (below the Halloween story) and here's the second page. In addition, here's the video referenced in the story showing the police officers using force on Greg to break the line of seated protesters. The Ferguson October events, which included this sit-in, produced a new wave of demonstrations that captured national attention. Depending on the outcome of the grand jury decision, we may soon see even more.

Index Ferguson Feature

Here's the link to my feature for the Truman Index on the Ferguson protests. For those of you who read the perspective that Nick and I wrote for the Prep News, it's mostly similar stuff, but this one is more from my viewpoint as a participant and less as an observer analyzing the situation at a remove, and is therefore a bit more personal to me. I also felt that the need for this kind of work at Truman was greater than at SLUH, since in Kirksville we are hours away from St. Louis, and many of us come from elsewhere and do not have a local angle on the story. 

I wrote this thinking it would just be in my normal opinions page column spot, but they made it a full-spread feature. I'm not sure how I feel about the design above the story, but I'm glad they used some of my pictures (recognize anyone in the bottom left corner?)

More importantly: the #HealSTL office, led by Alderman French, is open as of this morning in Ferguson. They are calling for volunteers from anywhere and everywhere to help work on solutions for St. Louis. Their website is due to launch soon, but their Twitter is live.

Ferguson Perspective

Nick Fandos and I teamed up once more for the Prep News as emeritus editors to write a perspective on our experience of attending a protest march in Ferguson. I was deliberately hesitant to publish thoughts on the Ferguson crisis on this blog, because I feel that there is a lot of substantial work as well as a lot of unhelpful noise out there on the Internet already about this issue. While the press corps has done good in bringing national attention to the protests, some have also done a disservice to the community by only focusing on the late-night confrontations with militarized police forces, making what was in fact mostly a series of peaceful, passionate protests look merely like a string of dust-ups. I don't want to add even in a small way to that mistake. The minority of violent agitators are as much of a menace to the nonviolent protesters as they are to the police. 

But we sat with our thoughts for a while, and this piece is what we have so far.  (If you're like me and prefer to pretend you're reading a print newspaper, click here and turn to page 6. Check out the other great coverage there, too.) What we hoped to do with this piece was engage with our high school community, the place we learned big lessons in journalism, civic engagement and the value of urban neighborhoods. However, I think it could also serve as one source for my friends who do not live in St. Louis to get a handle on the situation, which looks quite different day-to-day than what cable producers have typically chosen to show.

But for the developing story, I suggest you follow protest leaders on Twitter. The hashtag #HealSTL was recently created to bind together actions directing the protest's energy towards initiatives to move forward and combat racial injustice.  Look up State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (@MariaChappelleN), Alderman Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) and Committeewoman Patricia Bynes (@patricialicious), for a start. We could be nearing the crucial point at which protesters either disperse slowly or coalesce into a unified movement, and leaders like these have a good sense of what's happening on the ground and what's coming next.

While I will welcome questions and comments about this issue, please be civil, and please read up elsewhere on the issue before making claims about it. Our feelings and opinions are complex enough; we can at least try to be familiar with the set of established facts and debunked myths.

Active Nonviolence in Crimea

For those seeking a look at Crimea that considers the situation in relatable human terms, I highly recommend Patrick Reevell’s article, “No Bloodshed in a Standoff at an Airfield in Ukraine,” published in the New York Times this morning. It demonstrates Ukrainian soldiers using active nonviolence to protest the Russian soldiers’ occupation of their airfield Tuesday.

The Ukrainian soldiers' leader, Col. Yuli Mamchur, was acting against orders from the Ukrainian naval command, “who had ordered them to hand over their weapons to other Ukrainian units” that had defected to the pro-Russian government of Crimea. (The leader of the Ukrainian navy himself had defected.) Col. Mamchur chose to oppose the Russians’ occupation and the Crimean government’s cooperation by “order[ing] his men to meet the Russians unarmed, hoping to force a peaceful resolution.”

This is exactly the method of nonviolent protest: forcing a peaceful resolution by demonstrating dissent while refusing to use violence. By challenging the goodwill of the oppressor, the tactic denies the oppressors any excuse to use violence and gives them no option but to either become the wrongdoer through illegitimate violence or to give in to the protesters’ demands, which is what happened here. I will let you find the rest of the thrilling and bizarre details in the article (at one point during the standoff, a soccer game erupts). My point is that this action demonstrates the effectiveness of active nonviolence, a method of dissent that continues to have a low reputation and understanding. I’ve been met with giggles for using the phrase in the past, which is somewhat disturbing. However, this event shows how it is ultimately the most effective response to violent oppression. Furthermore, it shows how media attention can take an incident far from our view and whose participants may have never expected to gain recognition and bring it to the forefront of public discussion. International attention enforces the consequences of the use of violence by either side.

For more on active nonviolence, the technique pioneered by Gandhi and other 20th century protest leaders, you should check out at least the introduction of A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall. The chapters contain more fascinating stories much like what happened at the Crimean airfield yesterday.