In the days before the action, the Mayday Tribe set up “movement centers” throughout the city where newly arriving protesters could connect with others from their region, get information about nonviolence trainings, and obtain medical advice about possible exposure to tear gas or mace. The organizers had also obtained a permit for an encampment in West Potomac Park from the time of the mass April 24 march and rally through May 3, the Monday morning when the shutdown was to take place. Perry Brass remembered the scene as one of “high hippieism”: “People were dropping acid all over the place, smoking marijuana all over the place, just having a wonderful time with a political context to it.” John Scagliotti recalled, “It was so romantic: everybody around campfires, all these revolutionaries in their affinity groups, talking and planning their last-minute strategies.”38
As the action date approached, however, the atmosphere grew more alienating for some activists, especially women, who found little structure or opportunity for participation. “My first night at the camp, I attended an open meeting of almost the entire camp,” one woman wrote afterwards. “People from the crowd got up to the microphone and said what was on their minds—sexism seemed to be on the minds of both women and gay men. As the camp grew, however, the open meetings ceased, and were replaced by announcements made over the loudspeaker system by a male voice.” The women had hoped for something quite different, something more in the small-group spirit of participatory democracy. “What the women’s movement has done as I’ve seen it in the past year or two,” explained one feminist to a camera crew from the radical Videofreex film collective, “it has brought a whole new understanding about leadership and about people relating to each other, that is now going into the whole movement in this country … It’s about people being people; it’s getting rid of the old heavy rhetoric kind of politics.”39
That Saturday, the Mayday Collective threw a rock concert and festival (featuring “Free music! Free dope! Free food!”), which swelled the encampment to something like 45,000 people. Reports of sexual harassment and even assault grew with the crowd: a Liberation News Service account of the day claimed that six rapes had occurred, though they were only mentioned in passing. Fed up by the rowdy atmosphere and the constant sexual advances by stoned hippie men, a group of women, mainly lesbians, stormed the stage along with a handful of gay male allies and tried to turn the concert into a consciousness-raising session. “There’s a lot of men and straight women around here who really come down on the gay women when they realize that we’re gay,” one lesbian activist declared, in footage of the event captured by the Videofreex. “The straight women automatically assume that we’re going to rape them all—that’s bullshit. And the straight men automatically assume that they’re going to cure us—which is bullshit. And I would appreciate it if people would speak to me as a human being and not a freak object.”40
It’s not clear that this action had any measurable impact on the concertgoers or the protests, but the women and gay men’s disaffection highlighted the extent to which Mayday, for all its innovations, remained rooted in the male-dominated, old-school habits of the 1960s left. The decentralized, affinity-group-based direct-action techniques championed by the Mayday Tribe would only begin to reach their organizing potential after they were more fully fused with feminist practices—and after women, especially lesbians, reshaped movement culture. Lesbian activists may have had to take over the stage at Mayday to say their piece, but they would become primary transmitters of the direct-action tradition in the decades to come. Time and again from the late 1970s until the present day, women organizers of all races, and especially queer women organizers, would form the key bridges linking one direct-action movement to the next: from anti-nuclear activism to Central American solidarity work, and from there to reproductive rights and AIDS organizing, to the global justice movement and Occupy Wall Street to the Movement for Black Lives. They weren’t the only ones to do this connective work, of course, but they did it to a striking degree, weaving feminist and queer sensibilities—and ultimately, what would be called intersectional politics—into radical activism whether or not the issues being addressed were of specific interest to women or LGBTQ people. This role was perfectly captured in the title of one of the most influential texts of women of color feminism, the classic 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. But as Moraga wrote in the book’s preface, citing a comment made by black feminist pioneer Barbara Smith, “A bridge gets walked over.” The centrality of women, especially queer women, to the reinvention of American radicalism after the sixties was all too often invisible and unrecognized.41
Before dawn on Sunday, the morning after the rock concert, the government made its first move. Police descended on West Potomac Park and shut down the encampment, evicting the groggy radicals en masse and arresting those who refused to leave. Additional officers were stationed at other parks throughout the city, to prevent protesters from regrouping. Many affinity groups were able to reassemble at the movement centers, but the government’s action had the intended effect: thousands of people—notably those who had been drawn more by the rock concert than the radicalism—decided just to go home, cutting the protesters’ ranks by a half or more.42
Early on Monday morning, the 25,000 or so remaining members of the Mayday Tribe began moving into Washington to block their designated targets. The government was ready, having mobilized a combined force of 10,000 police, National Guard, and federal troops, with at least 4,000 more troops available on reserve. Their orders were to arrest every demonstrator on sight. (Attorney General John Mitchell explained to Nixon during a White House meeting to plan the government’s response to the protests, “I know they want to be arrested but, Mr. President, I don’t think that’s any reason for not arresting them.”)43
Tactical map for Mayday 1971 (designer unknown; author’s collection)
“Small battles raged all over the city as demonstrators would build crude barricades, disperse when the police came and then regroup to rebuild the dismantled obstructions,” one underground paper reported. The protesters’ nonviolence pledge did not preclude building barricades; nobody felt “that because we will be nonviolent that we could not also be militant and creative.” The barricades were indeed inventive: “We threw everything available into the streets,” one participant wrote afterwards in the Berkeley Tribe, “garbage cans, parked cars, broken glass, nails, large rocks, and ourselves. To add to the confusion, we lifted hoods of cars stopped for lights and let air out of tires.” Some of these obstacles—like the one in Georgetown that was constructed by overturning a tractor trailer—were even effective in stopping traffic for relatively long periods of time.44
But ultimately, the government had the upper hand on the streets, thanks to a military operation that, in Newsweek’s words, “seemed more appropriate to Saigon in wartime than Washington in the spring.” Waves of helicopters landed alongside the Washington Monument, ferrying Marines into the city, and federal troops lined the Key Bridge. A Marine battalion was stationed at Dupont Circle; Ann Northrop, who was working as a journalist at the time and went on to play a major role in ACT UP, recalled “tanks around the rim pointing out toward the street with their big guns.” The city was effectively under military occupation. “The scene was midway between that of a sham battle and a war of death,” one protester wrote afterwards. “Police vans careened around corners, frantic to discharge their human load and return for another. Helicopters chopping overhead made us aware that the ground troops had surveillance of all of our movements.” 45
Remembered Perry Brass, “There were people just running through