This book, in any case, doesn’t try to catalog the variety of ways that direct action has been used in recent decades. Instead, it follows the unfolding of a specific, linked, and messy set of political experiments. The movements profiled in this book embraced a particular set of organizing practices, deeply shaped by feminism and queer radicalism, in response to a broad sense of crisis and retrenchment after the 1960s. Of course they wanted to remake American society, but many concluded that they first had to remake the American left, much of which seemed dispirited and directionless as the grand hopes of the sixties receded. The new movements rejected hierarchical organizational structures, traditional leadership models, and rigid ideologies, and they sought forms of activism and political engagement that could preserve rather than subsume difference and multiplicity. Women, especially queer women, played crucial roles in this process of political reinvention, infusing this new radicalism with feminist practices and values through the very process of movement-building.
Some of the movements chronicled in this account have had enormous impact: ACT UP saved millions of lives by hastening the development of key AIDS medications and expanding access to their use. Others, though, only added a modicum of political friction as policies they opposed moved forward: though they had a variety of important political impacts, the global justice movement and Occupy Wall Street no more stopped the forward march of neoliberalism than the antiwar movement stopped the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Protest actions that felt important and empowering to participants sometimes had few repercussions outside the small world of activism, while others that seemed futile at the time had far-reaching effects that weren’t felt for years.
The book begins with an ending and ends with a beginning. It starts with the last major protest against the Vietnam War, which was also the largest and most ambitious direct-action protest in US history: a remarkable yet nearly forgotten attempt by antiwar radicals to shut down the federal government through nonviolent action in May 1971. This protest so badly rattled the Nixon administration that it ordered federal troops to sweep up protesters by the thousands, in the largest mass arrests in US history. This Mayday 1971 protest also pointed the way toward a new style and structure of radical organizing that movement after movement would embrace and adapt in the decades to come. The book concludes with another watershed moment more than forty years later, when protests against the August 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri grew into a nationwide movement for black lives, animated by disruptive direct action and an intersectional politics rooted in the feminism of queer women of color. Along the way, the book traces deep connections between movements usually viewed in isolation, and considers how activists have grappled with a political landscape divided by race and dominated by the right.
To weave together this story, much has been left out: the labor movement, for instance, mostly embattled and declining over this time period but with interesting pockets of promising insurgency, receives only glancing attention. Race is central to this narrative, but it’s largely considered in black and white; important traditions of organizing and resistance in other communities of color, from Native American organizing around land rights, environmental justice, and climate justice to the direct-action immigrant rights movement of recent decades, are only mentioned briefly. All stories are of necessity partial renderings of complex realities, this one especially so.
Those who have taken part in direct action know that it’s a profoundly embodied and often personally transformative experience. Organizer Brad Will, a builder of bridges between radical movements until his 2006 murder by right-wing paramilitaries in Mexico, captured it well in a 2000 interview. Direct action, he said, “is like a conduit, like electricity. It moves through you, not just into you. You’re not a battery, you’re a wire.” The movements that have sought to harness this kind of energy in recent decades and channel it into sweeping change have never come close to achieving their full aims. But through direct action, these movements have won more victories and catalyzed more social transformation than one might expect given their relatively modest size. Together they have fashioned a new kind of American radicalism along the way. This is a story about dealing with defeat and marginalization, but its ultimate message—for those who share the values of the movements profiled here—is one of hope: no matter how long the odds, with smart organizing, and the right tools, we can win more than we imagine.
The largest and most audacious direct action in US history is also among the least remembered, a protest that has slipped into deep historical obscurity. It was a protest against the Vietnam War, but it wasn’t part of the storied sixties, having taken place in 1971, a year of nationwide but largely unchronicled ferment. To many, infighting, violence, and police repression had effectively destroyed “the movement” two years earlier in 1969. That year, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the totemic organization of the white New Left, had disintegrated into dogmatic and squabbling factions; the Black Panther Party, meanwhile, had been so thoroughly infiltrated and targeted by law enforcement that factionalism and paranoia had come to eclipse its expansive program of revolutionary nationalism. But the war had certainly not ended, and neither had the underlying economic and racial injustices that organizers had sought to address across a long decade of protest politics. If anything, the recent flourishing of heterodox new radicalisms—from the women’s and gay liberation movements to radical ecology to militant Native American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian-American movements—had given those who dreamed of a world free of war and oppression a sobering new awareness of the range and scale of the challenges they faced.
On May 3, 1971, after nearly two weeks of intense antiwar protest in Washington, DC, ranging from a half-million-person march to large-scale sit-ins outside the Selective Service, Justice Department, and other government agencies, some 25,000 young people set out to do something brash and extraordinary: disrupt the basic functioning of the federal government through nonviolent action. They called themselves the Mayday Tribe, and their slogan was as succinct as it was ambitious: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.” The slogan was of course hyperbolic—even if Washington, DC were completely paralyzed by protest for a day or week or a month, that would not halt the collection of taxes, the delivery of mail, the dropping of bombs, or countless other government functions—but that made it no less electrifying as a rallying cry, and no less alarming to the Nixon administration (Nixon’s White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called it “potentially a real threat”). An elaborate tactical manual distributed in advance detailed twenty-one key bridges and traffic circles for protesters to block nonviolently, with stalled vehicles, improvised barricades, or their bodies. The immediate goal was to snarl traffic so completely that government employees could not get to their jobs. The larger objective was “to create the spectre of social chaos while maintaining the support or at least toleration of the broad masses of American people.”1
The protest certainly interfered with business as usual in Washington: traffic was snarled, and many government employees stayed home. Others commuted to their offices before dawn, and three members of Congress even resorted to canoeing across the Potomac to get themselves to Capitol Hill. But most of the planned blockades held only briefly, if at all, because most of the protesters were arrested before they even got into position. Thanks to the detailed tactical manual, the authorities knew exactly where protesters would be deployed. To stop them from paralyzing the city, the Nixon Administration