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if things will be cold where you are: gloves, hat, coat (be careful with scarves- make sure you won’t trip on it, that no one can pull on it and choke you, etc)
write a lawyer hotline on your arm in sharpie; do not write it on your clothes or anything you can lose; do not write it on your wrist, where it can be covered by handcuffs or distorted by zipties
if you think there will be tear gas, a bandana soaked in vinegar in a ziploc
if you think there will be a sound cannon, disposable earplugs
your meds, inhaler, epipen if you need them
when protesting, you have these rights:
you can photograph and videotape police
you can protest in public spaces
you can protest without a permit
police cannot search your phone without a warrant, and you are not required to give them your passcode
police cannot delete your photos or videos under any circumstances
if you are arrested:
you are not required to speak to the police without a lawyer present
it is never, ever, ever a good idea to speak to the police without a lawyer present
if you can’t afford a lawyer, they are legally required to give you a lawyer
in addition, know where your legal observers are (from the aclu, amnesty international, etc.)
it is a bad idea to bring drugs or alcohol!
if you have any information that this post doesn’t contain, especially legal hotlines, please feel free to edit and add at will
a masterpost of protests in your area can be found here.
MALCOLM X: You don’t have to criticize Reverend Martin Luther King. His actions criticize him. Any Negro who teaches other Negroes to turn the other cheek is disarming that Negro. Any Negro who teaches Negroes to turn the other cheek in the face of attack is disarming that Negro of his God-given right, of his moral right, of his natural right, of his intelligent right to defend himself. Everything in nature can defend itself, and is right in defending itself except the American Negro. And men like King — their job is to go among Negroes and teach Negroes “Don’t fight back.” He doesn’t tell them, “Don’t fight each other.” “Don’t fight the white man” is what he’s saying in essence, because the followers of Martin Luther King will cut each other from head to foot, but they will not do anything to defend themselves against the attacks of the white man.
MALCOLM X was assassinated for his activism on February 21, 1965.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR: Non-violent direct action is a method of acting to rectify a social situation that is unjust and it involves in engaging in a practical technique that nullifies the use of violence or calls for non-violence at every point. That is, you don’t use physical violence against the opponent. Now, the love ethic is another dimension which goes into the realm of accepting non-violence as a way of life. There are many people who will accept non-violence as the most practical technique to be used in a social situation, but they would not go to the point of seeing the necessity of accepting non-violence as a way of life. Now, I accept both. I think that non-violent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and human dignity. It has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale and at the same time it works on his conscience. He just doesn’t know how to handle it and I have seen this over and over again in our struggle in the South.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR was assassinated for his activism on April 4, 1968.
In 1863 the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery. But at the same time, the nation refused to give him land to make that freedom meaningful. And at that same period America was giving millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that America was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor that would make it possible to grow and develop, and refused to give that economic floor to its black peasants, so to speak.
This is why Frederick Douglass could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time. But it does not stop there.
In 1875 the nation passed a Civil Rights Bill and refused to enforce it. In 1964 the nation passed a weaker Civil Rights Bill and even to this day, that bill has not been totally enforced in all of its dimensions. The nation heralded a new day of concern for the poor, for the poverty stricken, for the disadvantaged. And brought into being a Poverty Bill and at the same time it put such little money into the program that it was hardly, and still remains hardly, a good skirmish against poverty. White politicians in suburbs talk eloquently against open housing, and in the same breath contend that they are not racist. And all of this, and all of these things tell us that America has been backlashing on the whole question of basic constitutional and God-given rights for Negroes and other disadvantaged groups for more than 300 years…
And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.
Martin Luther King, Jr., ”The Other America.” (Stanford University, April 14, 1967).
More than 150 congressional staffers, as well as a few elected officials, walked off the job Thursday afternoon, gathering on the steps of the Capitol to join protests in support of the families of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two unarmed black men killed by police officers last summer.
