Wages of Rebellion (23 page)

The Occupy Wall Street movement was not only about battling back against the rise of a corporate oligarchy. It was also about our right to peaceful protest. The police in cities across the country were deployed to short-circuit this right.
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I watched New York City police during the Occupy protests yank people from sidewalks into the street, where they would be arrested. I saw police routinely shove protesters and beat them with batons. I saw activists slammed against police cars. I saw groups of protesters suddenly herded like sheep to be confined within police barricades. I saw, and was caught up in, mass arrests in which those around me were handcuffed and then thrown violently onto the sidewalk. The police often blasted pepper spray into faces from inches away, temporarily blinding the victims.

This violence, carried out against nonviolent protesters, came amid draconian city ordinances that effectively outlawed protest and banned demonstrators from public spaces. It was buttressed by heavy police infiltration and surveillance of the movement. When the press or activists attempted to document the abuse by police, they often were assaulted or otherwise blocked from taking photographs or videos. The message the state delivered was clear:
Do not dissent
. And the McMillan trial was part of the message.

McMillan, who spent part of her childhood living in a trailer park in rural Texas, found herself with several hundred other activists at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan in March 2012 to mark the six-month anniversary
of the start of Occupy Wall Street. The city, fearing the reestablishment of an encampment, deployed large numbers of police officers to clear the park just before midnight of March 17. The police, heavily shielded, stormed into the gathering in fast-moving lines. Activists, as
Democracy Now!
reported, were shoved, hit, knocked to the ground, and cuffed. Some ran for safety. More than 100 people were arrested on the anniversary. After the violence, numerous activists would call the police aggression perhaps the worst experienced by the Occupy movement. In the mayhem, McMillan—whose bruises were photographed and subsequently displayed to Amy Goodman on
Democracy Now!
—was manhandled by a police officer later identified as Grantley Bovell.

Bovell, who was in plainclothes and who, according to McMillan, did not identify himself as a policeman, allegedly came up from behind and grabbed McMillan’s breast—a perverse form of assault by New York City police that other female activists also suffered during Occupy protests. McMillan’s elbow made contact with his face, just below the eye, in what she says appeared to be a reaction to the grope. She says she has no memory of the incident. By the end of the confrontation, she was lying on the ground, bruised and convulsing, after being beaten by the police. She was taken to a hospital emergency room, where police handcuffed her to a bed.

Had McMillan not been an Occupy activist, the trial that came out of this beating would have been about her receiving restitution from New York City for police abuse. Instead, she was charged with felony assault in the second degree and faced up to seven years in prison.

McMillan’s journey from a rural Texas backwater to Rikers Island was a journey of political awakening. Her parents, divorced when she was small, had little money. At times she lived with her mother, who worked in a Dillard’s department store, as an accountant for a pool hall, and later, after earning a degree, as a registered nurse doing weekly shifts of sixty to seventy hours in hospitals and nursing homes. There were also painful stretches of unemployment.

Her mother was from Mexico, and she was circumspect about revealing her ethnicity in the deeply white conservative community, one in which blacks and other minorities were not welcome. She never taught
her son and daughter Spanish. As a girl, McMillan saw her mother struggle with severe depression, and in one terrifying instance, she was taken to a hospital after she passed out from an overdose of prescription pills. For periods, McMillan, her brother, and her mother survived on welfare, and they moved often: she attended thirteen schools, including five high schools. Her father worked at a Domino’s Pizza shop, striving in vain to become a manager.

Racism was endemic in the area. There was a sign in the nearby town of Vidor, not far from the Louisiana state line, that read: I
F YOU ARE DARK GET OUT BEFORE DARK
. It had replaced an earlier sign that said: D
ON
’
T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR ASS NIGGER
.

The families around the McMillans struggled with all the problems that come with poverty—alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic and sexual violence, and despair. Cecily’s younger brother was serving a seven-year sentence for drug possession in Texas.

“I grew up around the violence of poverty,” she said. “It was normative.”

Her parents worked hard to fit into the culture of rural Texas. McMillan said she competed as a child in a beauty pageant called Tiny Miss Valentines of Texas. She was on a cheerleading team. She ran track.

“My parents tried,” McMillan said. “They wanted to give us everything. They wanted us to have a lifestyle we could be proud of. My parents, because we were … at times poor, were ashamed of who we were. I asked my mother to buy Tommy Hilfiger clothes at the Salvation Army and cut off the insignias and sew them onto my old clothes. I was afraid of being made fun of at school. My mother got up at five in the morning before work and made us pigs in a blanket, putting the little sausages into croissants. She wanted my brother and myself to be proud of her. She really did a lot with so very little.”

McMillan spent most of her summers with her paternal grandmother in Atlanta. Those visits opened up another world for her. She attended a Spanish-language camp. She went to blues and jazz festivals. She attended a theater summer camp called Seven Stages that focused on cultural and political perspectives. When she was a teenager, McMillan wrote collective theater pieces, including one in which she wore
the American flag as a burka and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a character dressed as Darth Vader walked onto the stage. “My father was horrified,” she said. “He walked out of the theater.” As a thirteen-year-old, she was in a play called
I Hate Anne Frank
. “It was about American sensationalism,” she said. “It asked how the entire experience of the Holocaust could be turned for many people into a girl’s positive narrative, a disgusting false optimism. It was not well received.”

In Atlanta, art, and especially theater, awakened her to the realities endured by others, from Muslims in the Middle East to the black underclass in the United States. And unlike in the Texas towns where she grew up, she made black friends in Atlanta. She began to wonder about the lives of the African Americans who lived near her in rural Texas. What was it like for them? How did they endure racism? Did black women suffer the way her mother suffered? She began to openly question and challenge the conventions and assumptions of the white community around her. She read extensively, falling in love with the work of Albert Camus.

“I would miss bus stops because I would be reading
The Stranger
or
The Plague
,” she said. “Existentialism to me was beautiful. It said the world is shit. It said this is the lot humanity is given. But human beings have to try their best. They swim and they swim and they swim against the waves until they can’t swim any longer. You can choose to view these waves as personal attacks against you and give up, or you can swim. And Camus said you should not sell out for a lifeboat. These forces are impersonal. They are structural. I learned from Camus how to live and how to die with dignity.”

She attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, through a partial scholarship and loans. As an undergraduate, she worked as a student teacher in inner-city schools in Chicago and joined the Young Democratic Socialists, the youth chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. In the fall of 2011, she enrolled at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where she planned to write a master’s thesis on Jane Addams, Hull House, and the settlement movement. The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began in the city six days after she arrived at the school.

McMillan said that at first she was disappointed with the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park and felt that it lacked political maturity. She had participated in the political protests in Madison, Wisconsin, in early 2011, and the solidarity of government workers, including police, that she saw there deeply influenced her feelings about activism.
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She came away strongly committed to nonviolence.

“Police officers sat down to occupy with us,” she said of the protests in Madison. “It was unprecedented. We were with teachers, the fire department, police, and students. You walked around saying thank you to the police. You embraced police. [But then] I went to Occupy in New York and saw drum circles and people walking around naked. There was yoga. I thought,
What is this?
I thought for many protesters this was just some social experiment they would go back to their academic institutions and write about. Where I come from people are hungry. Women are getting raped. Fathers and stepfathers beat the shit out of children. People die.… Some people would rather not live.

“At first I looked at the Occupiers and thought they were so bourgeois,” she went on. “I thought they were trying to dress down their class by wearing all black. I was disgusted. But in the end I was wrong. I wasn’t meeting them where they were. These were kids, some of whom had been to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, [who] were the jewels of their family’s legacy. They were doing something radical. They had never been given the opportunity to have their voices heard, to have their own agency. They weren’t clowns, like I first thought. They were really brave. We learned to have conversations. And that was beautiful. And these people are my friends today.”

She joined Occupy Wall Street’s Demands Working Group, which attempted to draw up a list of core demands that the movement could endorse. She continued with her academic work at the New School for Social Research and also worked part-time. McMillan was visiting her grandmother, who was terminally ill in Atlanta, in November 2011 when the police cleared out the Zuccotti Park encampment. When she returned to the New School, she took part in the occupation of school buildings, but some Occupiers trashed the property, leading to a bitter disagreement between her and other activists. Radical elements in
the movement who supported the property destruction held a “shadow trial” and condemned her as a “bureaucratic provocateur.”

“I started putting together an affinity group after the New School occupation,” she said. “I realized there was a serious problem between anarchists and socialists and democratic socialists. I wanted, like Bayard Rustin, to bring everyone together. I wanted to repair the fractured left. I wanted to build coalitions.”

Judge Ronald A. Zweibel was caustic and hostile to McMillan and her defense team when I attended the trial. Her defense lawyers said he barred video evidence that would have helped her case. He issued a gag order that forbade the defense lawyers, Martin Stolar and Rebecca Heinegg, from communicating with the press. The jury was also barred from being made aware of the widespread and indiscriminate violence that took place in the park that night, much of it photographed. And the judge denied her bail.

Bovell, the policeman who McMillan says beat her, had been investigated at least twice by the Internal Affairs Bureau of the New York City Police Department, according to the British newspaper
The Guardian
. Stolar’s motion requesting access to Bovell’s NYPD personnel file was rejected by Judge Zweibel, who said the attorney had “failed to even establish that ‘prior misconduct’ of any sort has been found, or documented, by the NYPD against Officer Bovell.”
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In one of these cases, Bovell and his partner were sued for allegedly using an unmarked police car to strike a seventeen-year-old fleeing on a dirt bike. The teenager said his nose was broken, two teeth were knocked out, and his forehead was lacerated. The case was settled out of court. The officer was allegedly also captured on a video that appeared to show him kicking a suspect on the floor of a Bronx grocery, according to Stolar. Stolar also said he had seen documents that implicated Bovell in a ticket-fixing scandal in his Bronx precinct.

Austin Guest, a thirty-three-year-old graduate of Harvard University who was arrested at Zuccotti Park on the night McMillan was assaulted, was at the time suing Bovell for allegedly intentionally banging his head on the internal stairs of an MTA bus that took him and other activists in for processing. The judge ruled that Bovell’s involvement in the
cases stemming from the chasing of the youth on the dirt bike and the Guest arrest could not be presented as evidence in the McMillan case, according to
The Guardian
.
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The corporate state, unwilling to address the grievances and injustices endured by the underclass, is extremely nervous about the mass movements that have swept the country in recent years. And if protests erupt again—as I think they will—the state hopes it will have neutralized much of the potential leadership. Being an activist in a peaceful mass protest was the only real “crime” McMillan committed.

“This was never about justice,” she said. “Just as it is not about justice for these other women. One mother was put in here for shoplifting after she lost her job and her house and needed to feed her children. There is another prisoner, a preschool teacher with a one-year-old son she was breast-feeding, who let her cousin stay with her after her cousin was evicted. It turns out the cousin sold drugs. The cops found money, not drugs, that the cousin kept in the house and took the mother. They told her to leave her child with the neighbors. There is story after story in here like this. It wakes you up.”

McMillan, who was released on July 2, 2014, has since worked to organize outside support for those in Rikers who endure abuse and mistreatment.