Protesters crash the U.S. Conference of Mayors to mourn the loss of our cities to special interests, gentrification and poverty
By Angie Hargot and Ben Torter
As 700 of the nation’s mayors, a presidential hopeful and a former president gathered in the plush InterContinental hotel in downtown Miami for the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors last week, hundreds of activists held a “counter conference” in the gritty streets outside.
Their message: The mayors should listen to the people they represent rather than developers and big corporations profiting at the expense of the poor.
The protesters gathered Thursday night for an organizational summit that kicked off three days of activities, including a bus tour of blighted neighborhoods, a New Orleans-style jazz funeral march and speeches on the sidewalk in front of the heavily guarded hotel.
Roughly 300 protesters from seven U.S. regions — the San Francisco Bay area, the D.C. metro area, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Boston/Providence and Miami — demonstrated in a March on the Mayors mock funeral procession Friday that began at the corner of Northwest Second Avenue and Northwest Seventh Street.
As a light rain fell on an otherwise hot and sunny afternoon, a New Orleans-style jazz band accompanied protesters carrying large black cardboard coffins, each bearing the name of cities represented by Right to the City, a national alliance of community activists.
Hoisting their umbrellas toward the murky sky, the demonstrators carried life-sized cardboard skeletons bearing the words “gentrification” and “police harassment,” symbolizing their hopes for the end of those injustices.
The band played on as the block-long procession snaked its way around a corner, while Miami police officers paced the crowd on mountain bikes and motorcycles.
“Our dear, darling mayors are talking to the wrong people,” said Shannon Reaze, a member of the Power U activist group. “They’re talking to developers, speculators and corporations. They need to talk to the workers, the mothers, the children — the majority of people that make up this city.”
Reclaiming rights
By the time the group arrived near the InterContinental hotel, the disheartening rain had become a torrential downpour. But the organizers and marchers were undaunted.
“Fuck the rain,” Reaze yelled. “Ain’t no rain gonna stop us!” The thunder was at times so fierce that it often drowned her out as she hollered the group’s demands over a speaker on the back of a flatbed truck.
“How many people had [$1,650] to get into this conference?” Reaze shouted, referring to the cost for members of the public to attend the conference. Their chants — “Whose schools? Our schools!” and “Whose community? Our community!” — resonated under nearby Metromover stations.
As the demonstrators marched on, the coffin for Boston and Providence melted in the pouring rain. However, Providence pallbearer Tomy Mooie held his head high. “Our coffin may be down, but our spirit is still up,” he said.
Protesters chanted “books not bombs” and “down with Bush, up with the people,” and held signs that said “people over profit” and “economic equality.”
“We’ve been organizing hundreds of thousands of tenants against slumlords and gentrification,” said Gilda Haas, executive director of Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, and a member of the Los Angeles chapter of Right to the City. “We want the mayors to be talking about the people’s issues and increasing democracy.”
The New Orleans-style funeral procession carried a special significance — Right to the City delegates want people, including the visiting mayors and their cities, to divest from 10 global corporations with government contracts that were cited in a congressional investigation for profiting from the devastating New Orleans floods caused by Hurricane Katrina. One of those corporations is Miami’s own Carnival Cruise Lines, a company that was paid more than $235 million to allow displaced residents to live on its ships.
“We’re declaring death on the old ways and we’re going to be pushing forward new ways of thinking about cities and justice and the economy,” Haas said. “Our mayors are talking to developers, to lawyers, to speculators — the minority of the city.”
The mayor’s conference, which featured speeches from presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, was closed to anyone who couldn’t shell out $1,650 for a ticket.
“They said you couldn’t talk to your mayors,” Reaze told the drenched congregation. “They said you couldn’t come out in the rain. But we are here.”
Mourning the city
A day before, at the group’s June 19 People’s State of the City Summit at Miami Dade College, a Caribbean Junkanoo band energized the crowd and served as a fitting opening for a multistate, multiplatform and multicultural response to the convergence of mayors.
The summit coincided with the holiday celebrated in 29 U.S. states known as Juneteenth, or Emancipation Day, celebrating the 1865 announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas.
A panel of speakers gave short speeches about the group’s demands for more affordable housing, an end to gentrification, election reform and government accountability.
New York’s Picture the Homeless spokesperson Robert Robinson, who lived on the streets of Miami from 2003 to 2005, led a dialogue with residents about Miami’s often squalid housing conditions and spoke about the importance of presenting a united front.
“We’re here to show the mayors that we ain’t taking this shit anymore,” Robinson said. “We’re here, we’re following your ass and eventually we’re getting in front of your face.”
The panel fielded cries for help from locals victimized by slumlords and skyrocketing housing costs, such as Miami resident Katherine Hutcherson, who said she was forced to live in a homeless shelter after suffering a stroke and being thrown out of her Town Park Plaza South apartment.
“How can disabled people be put out of their homes? Who can help to fight?” Hutcherson asked. “For those people who have died in the same circumstances, I want to be the voice that can speak out from the grave.”
Miami Workers Center organizer Joseph Phelan, who had been busy darting in and out of the meeting hall, crouched down beside the rows of attendees. “There’s a tour leaving in a few minutes,” he said. “You want to jump on?”
The real Miami
More than 50 activists from New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other cities packed themselves into a school bus to tour the blighted neighborhoods of Overtown, Liberty City and Little Haiti, as well as other Miami neighborhoods that have seen the effects of gentrification, such as Wynwood and the Design District.
“Ain’t no power like the power of the people, and the power of the people don’t stop,” chanted many on the bus as it pulled away from the campus.
The tour was led by Tony Romano, co-founder of the Miami Workers Center, a Liberty City-based organization that helps working-class residents fight for their rights through organization and education programs.
“There’s a war going on in Miami,” Romano hollered through a megaphone, ratcheting the vibe on the bus up to a militant level. “Any piece of land, the rich and the powerful are trying to take it to build condos.”
The bus drove by the Overtown headquarters of Power U, a group that builds tenant unions to fight slumlords.
Rather than condos, Romano called for more public housing projects where tenants pay rent based on what they earn, and if they’re unemployed, they pay nothing.
Romano spoke about the battle that many poor residents fought with the city to upgrade Wynwood’s Roberto Clemente Park. He took a dig at the Miami mega-plan that calls for using community redevelopment tax dollars from poor neighborhoods to build a baseball stadium, port tunnel, museum park and possibly trolley cars, calling it “corporate welfare for the rich.”
His message: Come together to fight injustice and take what you deserve. “The scariest thing for the powers that be is united black people,” Romano said.
The bus stopped near the sight of Umoja Village, the shantytown for the homeless that burned down last year, and picked up one of the camp’s organizers, Dennis “T-Bone” Gilbert, who happened to be strutting down an uneven sidewalk.
“Rumor is someone paid the cops to burn down Umoja Village,” Gilbert told those on the bus.
Distrust of the police and government was a common theme among those on the bus: A group of passengers chanted “Fuck the police, fuck the police” as the bus passed a Miami police officer who had pulled over a car.
They also booed at the art galleries in the Design District and Wynwood, and at the entire Midtown Miami mall and condo project, saying they’ve done nothing but displace the poor, not help them.
“We’re down [here] to take part in the [mayors’] conference and to tie together the struggle against gentrification,” said Shawn Lin, of the New York City-based Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. One of his group’s fronts is Chinatown in New York City, which, Lin says, is being gentrified to make it more tourist-friendly at the expense of immigrants who can’t afford rising property values. His group joined RTTC, a network of like-minded groups, to achieve power in numbers.
With spiky black hair and colorful tattoos covering his arms, Lin’s face was grim as he walked through the Sunnyland Trailer Park and Trinidad Court at Northwest 79th Street and Miami Court, where dilapidated mobile homes surrounded dumpsters overflowing with trash and putrid water. A young father and mother stood near their run-down trailer with their barefoot baby, who was wearing a diaper and had snot running onto a dirty T-shirt — a scene reminiscent of one of those infomercials asking for relief money for Third World countries.
“This is a really heavy tour,” said Lin.
Grave Reality
As the bus toured the city, a resident attending the People’s Summit just blocks away told of being forced out of her trailer with nowhere to go after the trailer park was sold to developers. Another told about her high school graduation, where chairs were left empty for classmates shot and killed by police. Yet another told of her roach-infested Miami apartment, where rats bite her grandchildren.
“We’ve got to start caring,” said Power U member Reginald Munnings. “When the boat rocks, we all rock with it.”
After the summit, residents and activists spilled out into the center of the campus, still discussing the demands for which they would demonstrate the next day.
“We want to make the mayors hear us,” said Lauren Wheeler, of Just Cause Oakland, a low-income tenant and worker advocate group. “There are enough of us … that the individual mayors can actually recognize us and what we’re saying.”
Le’Kedra Robertson was the delegate who gained access to the conference and spent her time lobbying the mayors with a resolution urging them to divest from the offending corporations.
“We see this as a beginning to a large urban movement in the U.S.,” said Phelan on Tuesday, still recovering from days of protesting and organizational meetings for the just 18-month-old alliance. The 150 RTTC delegates from around the country “left tired but invigorated,” he said.
Asked if he thought Miami Police Chief John Timoney made it rain, Phelan replied with a chuckle, “If he had the power, I wouldn’t doubt it.”