In October 2011, about 100 people pitched tents in front of Oakland City Hall, mounting signs that condemned the country’s disproportionately wealthy one percent. As thousands more protesters joined them, Oakland became a high-profile outpost of a growing international movement against income inequality and corporate influence: Occupy Wall Street, which began in Zuccotti Park in New York City a month prior.
Protesters held loud dance parties and somber candlelight vigils. Danny Glover and Michael Moore stopped by to visit. Boots Riley led direct actions. At one point, the encampment grew so large that a second one was erected at nearby Snow Park.
Occupy had its problems: there were reports of sexual harassment, drug use and unsanitary conditions. One evening, a 25 year-old named Kayode Ola Foster, who had been residing in the encampment, was shot and killed not too far from the tents. On multiple occasions, “occupiers” clashed with law enforcement. During one of these confrontations, police shot a bean bag round at an Iraq War veteran named Scott Olsen; he was treated for a fractured skull, resulting in a $4.5 million settlement with the city.
At the same time, with its slogan “We Are the 99%,” Occupy painted a very clear picture of the country’s inequality, one backed up by the Congressional Budget Office. It brought conversations about bank reform, student loan debt, speculative trading, corporate tax rates and Citizens United to the public square.
And, importantly, it coincided with the rise of smartphones.
Scott Olsen, a war veteran who was injured by a police projectile during a Occupy Oakland protest, speaks in front of Occupy Oakland protesters near Oakland City Hall during the West Coast port blockage on Dec. 12, 2011. (Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP/Getty)
Technology played a huge role in Occupy, which took inspiration from the Arab Spring and its use of social networks to organize. “The streets and the internet made a pact,” explains Shake MC El (formerly Shake Anderson), who was a resident of the Occupy encampment and a member of its media team.
And at the dawn of the decade, smartphones weren’t the primary tool for on-the-street organizing and reporting. That all changed with Occupy, when “citizen journalism” became a household term, and technology became a dominant tool for protests: livestreams of police clashes in downtown Oakland, immediate information and calls to action on Twitter and in private group chats.
Occupy was just one of many major protests in the 2010s—Ferguson, Standing Rock, Charlottesville. But it was a rare sustained movement where technology aided, and didn’t overtake, on-the-street activism. Just a few years after Occupy, a hashtag could spark a movement (#OscarsSoWhite, #MeToo). And in the closing years of the decade, lengthy, on-the-street marches dwindled in favor of occasional one-off protests and the rise of clickable online activism.
Occupy Oakland started just months after the community gathered to demand justice for Oscar Grant, and protesting police brutality remained a central focus. The people of Occupy unofficially renamed Frank Ogawa Plaza as Oscar Grant Plaza, where occupants set up culinary and sanitary stations, as well as strategic lines of communication. Quickly, the movement’s popular support began to grow.
On Nov. 2, 2011, protesters organized a general strike. Thousands of people marched from downtown and eventually shut down the Port of Oakland—the third largest port on the West Coast. And on Dec. 12 of that year, the port was shut down again.
The protesters’ thinking was simple: “Now that you’ve shut down the port, you can get any political concession you want from Oakland City Council,” recalls photographer Eric Arnold.
But the triumphant feeling didn’t last long. Masked demonstrators set trash cans on fire and broke businesses’ windows, making headlines. “People questioned if these anarchists were agent provocateurs or something,” says Arnold. At that point, “Occupy just kind of devolved.”
The final straw came on Jan. 28, 2012, when protesters attempted to occupy a downtown building. Arnold described the scene as a standoff between police in riot gear and people with homemade shields and cudgels.
Over 400 arrests were reported, and soon after, Occupy fizzled.
Occupy protesters march at the Port of Oakland on Dec. 12, 2011 in Oakland, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
In a way, Occupy foreshadowed the income inequality that would affect the Bay Area in the years to come. When looking at the changes in Oakland’s protests over the course of the decade, for example, it’s clear that the displacement of working class Oaklanders, and an influx of higher-income residents, has impacted the city’s protest activity.
“What you fight for is going to be very different than what someone fights for who is making $100K a year since they got here,” says longtime activist Needa Bee, who was involved with Occupy Oakland and currently works as an advocate for unhoused people.
“Gentrification has killed our movement. You can’t really come up with a mass-base, organized protest like you could 20 years ago,” Bee continues. “Some of the most beautiful, brilliant leaders are homeless in Oakland right now.”
After Occupy, in 2014 and ’15, thousands of demonstrators across the Bay Area marched against police brutality, protesting the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The Black Lives Matter movement continued into 2016 following the high-profile police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling—and locally, Demouria Hogg, Alex Nieto, Mario Woods, Alan Blueford and others. Rapper Equipto and four other activists staged a hunger strike against the San Francisco Police Department that year, calling themselves the #Frisco5.
Once again, social media played a key role. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, galvanized street marches on Facebook and Twitter.
Black Lives Matter marches died down by late 2016, and some critics on the left—indeed, most of the people interviewed for this piece—argue that protest culture became watered down by the nonprofit sector. Black Lives Matter, many say, became less effective when it incorporated as a nonprofit organization with outside funding, undermining its initial intent.
“People started doing grassroots movements based on what was going to get funded,” Bee says, adding that a lot of nonprofits work to “fight the system” but have no exit strategy for when their work is done.
Protesters hold signs during a demonstration against police brutality on Oct. 22, 2014 in Oakland, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“There’s been a shift from people going out in large numbers—or from protesting against the system with our bodies—to a way that’s more subversive and focusing on the community and our survival,” says Oakland organizer Ashley Yates, noting that police suppression and plain exhaustion has also played a role in the shift. “You can only protest so much to move the people who don’t care, and then you have to turn around and speak to the people who do care.”
Street marches may have slowed down, but many of the “protests” in the United States are currently happening in law offices and courtrooms around the country, as well as online. And many of Oakland’s activists are focused on providing resources to the city’s unhoused populations, whose tents and possessions are routinely destroyed in city sweeps.
This November, two unsheltered mothers, Dominique Walker and Sameerah Karim, took over a vacant house in West Oakland that a corporation purchased in foreclosure and left vacant for 18 months. Calling their movement Moms 4 Housing, their occupation is a direct rebuke of Bay Area housing policy, and the ongoing action is getting people talking about solutions. (Also in November, activists demanding housing and dignity for homeless people attempted to occupy the lawn in front of Oakland’s City Hall, but over 60 police officers stopped them.)
Like the protest movements before them, Moms 4 Housing run an active Twitter account. But their physical occupation is evidence that in-person protest still serves a purpose.
If anything, the last ten years prove that in order for real change to occur, it takes a combination of social media savvy and showing up.
Copyright 2019 KQED