What if they threw a party and nobody came?

Sometimes you find yourself linking to another site so often you might as well just publish a permanent redirect, but monk has been making a few suggestions about the upcoming RNC convention I believe fall into the "so crazy, it just might work" category.

In fact, the last 'stay home' I participated in was inspiring. The year, 1998, the target, the KKK (and no, I will not stoop to parallels with the RNC, but do feel free to insert your own). See the Klan had been denied parade/assemblage permits for years in cities like Washington DC, Baltimore MD, Philly PA, and Wilmington DE (where I spent my formative years and was living at the time) on the grounds of threat to public safety --due to the violence and mayhem Klan rallies inevitably produced. Of course after lengthy legal battles the First Amendment prevailed, as it should, (I have, and will continue to fight for each person's right to speak); and shortly thereafter I found myself holding a flyer that announced the first KKK rally in my town in nearly eighty years. The freaking KU KLUX KLAN for christsakes, the cross burning, evil spewing, gap-toothed, in-bred, sheet-covered mullet heads. In my town! Legally! With police protection no less. I was, and my predominately African-American neighbors were, mind-blown.

Several of us found the Klan's choice of parade route particularly interesting. Downtown Wilmington, like most cities of its size and age, is inhabited by all those left behind during the great white flight of the 50's and 60's. Translation: African-American people. The Klan plotted a route that began in front of one of the downtown municipal buildings, through Market Street (a closed-to-traffic shopping avenue much like Fulton Street Mall here in Brooklyn), ending with a rally at the old city hall, widely known for it's hopping slave trade in the 17 and 1800's. The site is now home to several museums dedicated to educating the public about the horrors of slavery, and all are clearly visible from the vantage point of the solely African-American inhabited housing projects located directly across the street.

Point being, the Klan was going to march their proud-to-be-lily-white asses through a mostly minority-owned business district en route to a former slave trade post adjacent to a totally African-American apartment complex --a move clearly designed to be nothing more than incendiary, a blatant unveiled fuck you. (Certainly when you consider such a route would have done little to 'educate their brothers' or broaden their membership base.) Several meetings with the more politically active organizations and church groups in town (Baptists and Quakers mostly, both of whom have a long history of civil rights involvement) were held to plan what our counter-protest would be. After hours and hours of discussion about the Klan's tried and true methods of using verbal assaults, intimidation, and harassment to incite riot, and how we might avoid and/or counter those measures, one (insightful) man in the group suggested following the advice of Jessie Jackson: Stay home. It was like a huge light went off. Or on.

It took a lot of work, a wink-nod campaign bolstered by vast flyer distribution, neighborhood gossip, and the impassioned pleas of local church officials, but we did it. Nobody showed up. Okay, there were a few souls who were drawn out of curiosity more than anything else, but the nightly news broadcast a scene of a downtown so overwhelmingly abandoned, the only thing missing were the tumbleweeds blowing by. I have experienced few greater joys than watching those bloated idiots shout bull-horn amplified epithets to NO ONE; to closed shops, to drawn curtains, to empty side-streets, to themselves, alone. I couldn't find the exact data, but as far as I know they did not return to Wilmington until 1996, almost ten years.

Now I know that the RNC will have a much larger choir to preach to, and bully for them. Let them have at it. And I agree with the statement that "their choice of location (NYC) and timing (the 3rd anniversary of the 911 attacks) [is] offensive and a crude attempt to capitalize on them." But I can't help but wonder if giving them a crowd to bounce their bullshit off of will only change the trajectory of the ball, not decrease it's momentum.

Posted by Antigeist at September 24, 2003 07:19 PM