The Tamiment Library Economic and Social Justice Web Collection, first began by Tamiment in 2010, contains webpages of organizations and other entities concerned with issues related to economic and social justice from a left and/or progressive perspective. These entities focus on issues ranging from corporate accountability, immigrant rights, unemployment, homelessness, urban justice, healthcare reform, wealth redistribution, and other issues. In addition, there is a huge focus in this collection on the Occupy Wall Street Movement, established in September 2011. Occupy Wall Street is a social movement, started in New York City, that works to reform both the private and public sector. The websites in the collection focus on different aspects and working groups of the movement. On the public page, these websites are tagged “Occupy Wall Street.” They make up their own series in this finding aid. These websites contain a huge variety of media, which include YouTube videos, pdfs, blog postings (including Tumblr and Wordpress blogs), petitions, news feeds, audio, and other media. These websites often act to document and update upon the organizations’ activities, schedule upcoming events, build awareness of their cause, or other media. Most websites are captured quarterly, but during periods of rapid update, the website are captured weekly or monthly. The web collection documents the publicly available content of the web page, it does not archive material that is password protected or blocked due to robot txt exclusions. Although attempts are made to completely archive the entirety of a website, linked pages are often not captured as can be pages within the host URL.
OccupyWallStreet.net is brought to you by the NYC General Assembly to provide news, information and inspiration from the occupations of Wall Street and around the world.
Cecily McMillan, wearing a red dress and high heels, her dark, shoulder-length hair stylishly curled, sat behind a table with her two lawyers Friday morning facing Judge Ronald A. Zweibel in Room 1116 at the Manhattan Criminal Court. The judge seems to have alternated between boredom and rage throughout the trial, now three weeks old. He has repeatedly thrown caustic barbs at her lawyers and arbitrarily shut down many of the avenues of defense. Friday was no exception.
The silver-haired Zweibel curtly dismissed a request by defense lawyers Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg for a motion to dismiss the case. The lawyers had attempted to argue that testimony from the officer who arrested McMillan violated Fifth Amendment restrictions against the use of comments made by a defendant at the time of arrest.
He then went on to uphold his earlier decision to heavily censor videos taken during the arrest, a decision Stolar said “is cutting the heart out of my ability to refute” the prosecution’s charge that McMillan faked a medical seizure in an attempt to avoid being arrested. “I’m totally handicapped,” Stolar lamented to Zweibel.
The Occupy Wall Street movement was not only about battling back against the rise of a corporate oligarchy that has sabotaged our democracy and made war on the poor and the working class. It was also about our right to peaceful protest. The police in cities across the country have been used to short-circuit this right. I watched New York City police during the Occupy protests yank people from sidewalks into the street, where they would be arrested. I saw police routinely shove protesters and beat them with batons. I saw activists slammed against police cars. I saw groups of protesters suddenly herded like sheep to be confined within police barricades.
I saw, and was caught up in, mass arrests in which those around me were handcuffed and then thrown violently onto the sidewalk.
The police often blasted pepper spray into faces from inches away, temporarily blinding the victims. This violence, carried out against nonviolent protesters, came amid draconian city ordinances that effectively outlawed protest and banned demonstrators from public spaces. It was buttressed by heavy police infiltration and surveillance of the movement. When the press or activists attempted to document the abuse by police they often were assaulted or otherwise blocked from taking photographs or videos. The message the state delivered is clear: Do not dissent. And the McMillan trial is part of the process.
McMillan’s journey from a rural Texas backwater to a courtroom in New York is a journey of political awakening. Her parents, divorced when she was small, had little money. At times she lived with her mother, who had jobs at a Dillard’s department store, as an accountant for a pool hall and later, after earning a degree, as a registered nurse doing shifts of 60 to 70 hours in hospitals and nursing homes. There were also painful stretches of unemployment. Her mother, from Mexico, was circumspect about revealing her ethnicity in the deeply white conservative community, one in which blacks and other minorities were not welcome. She never taught her son and daughter Spanish. As a girl McMillan saw her mother struggle with severe depression and, in one terrifying instance, taken to a hospital after she passed out from an overdose of prescription pills. For periods, McMillan, her brother and her mother survived on welfare, and they moved often; she attended 13 schools, including five high schools.
Her father worked at a Domino’s Pizza shop, striving in vain to become a manager.
She attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., under a scholarship. After graduating, she worked as a student teacher in inner-city schools in Chicago. She joined the Young Democratic Socialists. She enrolled at The New School for Social Research in New York City in the fall of 2011 to write a master’s thesis on Jane Addams, Hull House and the settlement movement. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began in the city six days after she arrived at the school. She said that at first she was disappointed with the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park. She felt it lacked political maturity. She had participated in the political protests in Madison, Wis., in early 2011, and the solidarity of government workers, including police, that she saw there deeply influenced her feelings about activism. She came away strongly committed to nonviolence.
“Police officers sat down to occupy with us,” she said of the protests in Madison.
“Everyone should come and sit through this trial to see the facade that we call democracy,” she said.
“The resources one needs to even remotely have a chance in this system are beyond most people."
This piece was originally published on Truthdig.
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