Martha T. Moore and Charisse Jones
USA TODAY
August 31, 2004
NEW YORK -- Protesters filled streets on the first official day of the Republican National Convention on Monday for demonstrations that matched the spirit if not the size of Sunday's massive march.
Nearly 15,000 demonstrators in two marches echoed the anger toward President Bush that marked Sunday's anti-war protest by hundreds of thousands. On Monday, marchers focused on homelessness, AIDS and health care.
After Sunday's march, which took place after months-long negotiations and a lawsuit against the city, a smaller group of protesters, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, was allowed to march without a permit.
Earlier in the day, a coalition of New York groups under the banner Still We Rise marched from Union Square to the police-sanctioned protest zone at the southwest corner of Madison Square Garden, the convention site.
The Poor People's group had permission for a rally at the United Nations. Scores of police with bicycles and riot helmets surrounded the protesters. But they decided on the spot to allow the group of several thousand to march to the site of the Republican convention.
"Rather than have an unsafe condition, we provided an escort for individuals that came determined to march without a permit," New York police spokesman Paul Browne said Monday.
The Poor Peoples' group also protested at the Republican convention in Philadelphia in 2000, where police decided to let the group march in the street without a permit.
About 10,000 people marched in the morning protest, including advocates for the homeless and members of AIDS support organizations. By evening, police had reported one arrest from the demonstrations, for disorderly conduct. Since Friday, 548 people have been arrested in protests.
Marchers demanded the Bush administration spend more money on health care, homelessness and poverty and less on the war in Iraq.
"I believe so much in my country. I like it. But I need help here," said Carmen Gray, 34, a mediator who says she cannot afford health insurance for her two children. She drove from Cleveland for the Poor Peoples' rally, missing her sons' first day of school, she said. "I fight for so many other peoples' causes and this really affects me."
Both protests drew large numbers of police. Cordons of police also lined the blocks surrounding Madison Square Garden. Pedestrians had to make detours. At the corner of 34th Street and Seventh Avenue near the convention site, police stretched orange nets across crowds of pedestrians to prevent them from crossing until police gave the signal.
While the last week of August is usually a quiet time in the city, the promise of inconvenience due to extra security may have kept workers at home: Penn Station, the Amtrak and commuter rail station underneath the convention site, was quiet Monday morning.
"Where is everybody?" asked David Avellar, walking from a Long Island commuter train to the subway. "From everything you heard, you expected a nightmare this week. But this is fine," he told the Associated Press.
Before the demonstration, Poor Peoples' campaign founder Cheri Honkala said the group wanted to march "because families' lives are in jeopardy," she said. "Stop spending billions of dollars on the war and start spending it on the poor."
"Housing should be for everyone, it shouldn't just be for the rich and wealthy," said Donald Rhodie, 31, a musician who said he had once been homeless. The march Monday was his first political demonstration, he said.
"Whether it's positive or negative it will have an effect. They may not like what we have to say, but they will hear us."
Karen Williams, 40, who lives in a shelter in the Bronx, marched with the group Coalition for the Homeless and said she hoped the Bush administration would increase low-income housing subsidies. "They have a lot of money for this, that and the other thing, but not for housing, and we need it bad," she said.
Sheldon Petgrave, 23, a youth training coordinator for a criminal justice advocacy group, marched with six young men. "We don't support the government putting money into prisons instead of schools."