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.

Nine Haiku

For your diversion, or perhaps your distraction from evening work: Phizzog Review, led by our own Hart L'Ecuyer, was good enough to publish some haiku I wrote during a haiku frenzy in our writing workshop this spring. And they're alongside (well, below) a series of cicada haikus by Matthew Rohrer, a widely published writer. Check 'em out. 

Note - both sets of haiku are non-traditional: they don't all have 5-7-5 syllable structure. Mine do only when convenient. In this I am following Robert Hass's lead. He translated hundreds of classic haiku and sought dynamic recreations in English rather than literal replications.

Birds in Restored Campus Habitat

This fall, I have been conducting surveys at sites around Kirskville to study how birds use streamside vegetation (known as riparian zones) during fall migration. I designed the project because other students have led an effort to restore the native riparian vegetation to Truman's campus along a stream called Bear Creek. As preparation for eventual presentations of the project, I went out to get some pictures of late fall migrants foraging among the plants that have sprung up in the no-mow zone on either side of the creek on campus. 

A Red-winged Blackbird perching in a tree above the creek.

Zoomed out: so there was also an American Robin. That's less important, since the Red-winged Blackbird is primarily a wetland bird, while the Robin is more of a generalist. 

 These pictures are unfortunately a bit blurry, but they show a Red-winged Blackbird in the act of foraging on the seeds of Ambrosia trifida, otherwise known as Giant Ragweed (which I happen to be allergic to.)

A Dark-eyed Junco on a ragweed stem.  

  

A House Sparrow. Like the Robin, this is less convincing evidence of the quality of the restored habitat, since House Sparrows are urban birds, but it nonetheless shows a bird making use of the vegetation.

Two male blackbirds and a House Finch in the background.

Red Leaves, Yellow Cello Case

I don't think I could have posed a more autumnal scene on the Quad last evening. A cellist and a violist were playing pop songs and improvising around sunset.  

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.

"Wasn't it a revelation...?"

Galway Kinnell thought cancer would kill him years ago. After a prognosis gave him only a short while to live, he wrote the poem "Why Regret," which takes the form of a series of questions--to his wife or to the reader. Shortly after, he found he had years more to live. Kinnell's ecstasies in that poem and others like it--"That Silent Evening," "St. Francis and the Sow," and "Rapture"--are all the more intense and believable for the way in which he sucks the marrow of ugliness in much of his other work, such as "The Bear" and "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible." Poems like those won him his critical acclaim, establishing him as the nature poet unafraid of the inhumanity of nature. He told the Los Angeles Times that “I’ve tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events.”

But now that Kinnell has finally passed away from leukemia, perhaps it is time to return to the rhapsodic poem he wrote when he believed he was dying--to focus more of our attention on what brought this poet of fingernail-rot and earthworms his deepest joys. 

Three Watercolors Find a Home

Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, which published my poem about biting an apple in 2013, was kind enough to publish some recent watercolors of mine. Two are from Ireland and one is of a Monarch butterfly emerging in our backyard in St. Louis. Now to find homes for my other stray poems and paintings!