(Context: I’m participating in National Blog Posting Month, known in my local group as #NanoPoblano2024. This post is part of a series of descriptions I wrote tracking my history of activism before family and the need to make more money interfered. It starts with my Nov 17 post. It weirdly started out in second person, so I just went with that. I’m having some regrets.)
7. You skip ahead three years: By March of 1986, you have two small daughters and have been teaching in the Livingston College Writing Center but are bored after three years. You turn your attention to the annual march through New Brunswick to commemorate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
New Brunswick is home to the world headquarters of Johnson & Johnson. The march’s focus is on J&J’s racist policies in South Africa and their spearheading of racist revitalization strategies for New Brunswick that wiped out hundreds of low-income housing units.
The coalition agrees to hold a rally at J&J and build a tent city on their vast front lawn in the middle of downtown New Brunswick. This is an exciting change from usual activism in the city.
Meanwhile, the mayor has announced that the men’s shelter, which is set to close imminently until next December, will not be allowed to reopen. Legal Services wants to sue to keep it open; they tell us they could use help from an activist angle. So we focus the tent city on the lack of shelter, demanding J&J provide the money the mayor gives as an excuse for why it can’t reopen.
(Photos by David Antebi. That’s me in the sunglasses, pontificating about something.)
300 people attend the peaceful demonstration. 23 get arrested. It’s a glorious day and so much fun. You’re charged with trespassing, released, and told to come back for a court date in June.
A trial! Even more fun. You hold an organizing meeting next to the closed shelter to help Legal Services identify clients for their lawsuit and to ask the men to testify at the trial. The Plowshares trial had taught you to have justification witnesses.
You bring dinner – hastily thrown together sandwiches and fruit. You meet the next night, too, but don’t think about food because the men already had agreed to come…you don’t need an incentive. They’re disappointed, so you promise dinner the next night.
And thus begins an 18-month soup kitchen outdoors every night. For a few weeks you serve it in the parking lot next to the closed shelter building. But one night a rat runs across your sandaled foot, and you decide to move dinner to a prominent street corner.
Activism has begun to intertwine with direct service. Is it an act of resistance to provide food in places inconvenient to the powers that be: where they’re forced to watch it happen?
