Initially things went as planned—even better than planned. Climbers dropped their banners from the crane near the Space Needle. Organizers established an Independent Media Center (Indymedia) and an operational HQ at 420 Denny Way, where they served meals, conducted teach-ins, loaned out books, built props, and made posters. (Last year, at a commemorative WTO exhibition put on by Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, I watched footage of a 420 Denny training on civil disobedience. A handful of young activists, playing the role of cops, yell “Let’s go!” and swing their batons at a large peaceful sit-in.)
The downtown area was mapped into pie slices, labeled A through M, which protesters would move through to prevent trade officials from getting to their meetings. Day-one festivities, on N29 (activist speak for November 29), brought together a motley crowd. “We formed a human chain with 15,000 people to symbolically break the chain of [Third World] debt,” says Michael Ramos, an organizer with the Washington Association of Churches. “We had speakers and music and drummers…from one of the tribes of the area.”
N30 was more complicated. In the morning protesters chained themselves in rows to block intersections. “Rain was coming in horizontally—miserable, cold, wet,” recalls Kevin Danaher, a cofounder of the human rights group Global Exchange. Unionists gathered in a stadium as “thirty blocks” of environmentalists marched, according to a steelworker named Don Kegley. Activists using “black bloc” tactics (physical confrontation, face coverings, head-to-toe black clothing) joined the throng, but with a different philosophy: “When we smash a window,” they explained in the “N30 Black Bloc Communiqué,” “we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights” and highlight “that set of violent and destructive social relationships which has been imbued in almost everything around us.” The anarchist John Zerzan tells Gibson, “You can have a nice event that doesn’t cause any big deal or the other event which does.”
The attacks on property created a divide. Yalonda Sinde, an environmental justice leader, called the vandalism “very racist,” in that it occurred “where the people of color” were in the crowd. Local officials and law enforcement weren’t sure what to do. An obstructed street required a different response than a wrecked storefront or a rattled foreign dignitary, let alone a president caught in a mob.
Norm Stamper, Seattle’s chief of police, and Paul Schell, the mayor, thought of themselves as liberals and favored a light touch. “I wanted people to be able to gather and protest,” Stamper says. “I felt the same way about some of the issues.” When that translated into inaction, the governor of Washington, Gary Locke, nudged by the Clinton administration, summoned the National Guard. The city drew a no-go zone near the convention center, which was meant to keep activists away from trade ministers—“the equivalent of an emergency ordinance, martial law,” explains Nick Licata, a member of the city council. Gibson’s book conjures a scene of chaos: armed police, sleepless and hungry after being warehoused in an airplane hangar, unleashed on a mass of people who didn’t know where they were allowed to go.