"Direct Communication 1" flyer after Zuccotti Park eviction

* Content Warning: police brutality *

Label

"Direct Communication 1" flyer after Zuccotti Park eviction

Creator

Unknown

Object Type

Flyers and Handouts

Description

*Content Warning: This caption includes description of police brutality* Shortly after midnight on November 15th, 2011, police in riot gear took up strategic positions around Zuccotti Park. Around 12:45 AM, they began making dispersal orders via a loudspeaker. By 1 AM, the park was completely fenced off and no one was allowed beyond the police barricades. Emergency texts, tweets, and livestreamed recordings made their way throughout the city's activist networks: Occupy Wall Street was being evicted. Protesters quickly made their way downtown to defend the park, and those who resisted the cops were pepper sprayed, beaten, and arrested. In two short hours, much of the Occupy Wall Street encampment was destroyed. By 5 AM, city sanitation dump trucks carried away the bulk of the encampment's infrastructure. Protestors would later sue the city over its destruction of more than 5,500 books from the People's Library, computers—which the city had ensured were recoverable, bicycles that were used to generate electricity, and more. In the following months, Occupy existed and persisted in a kind of exile, searching for a new home. More than 50 protesters, including clergy members, were arrested the following month during the D17 action to take over Duarte Square and the march that ensued when NYPD squashed this action. This flyer discusses the Occupy movement after the eviction, noting that "We occupied Zuccotti Park as a provocation, but that became beside the point. Living together and building a community quickly captured our attention." In this way, the flyer, in the form of a "direct communication" poses that the real and persisting threat of Occupy to the status quo, to the police, and to the ruling elite, is the establishment of a "self-contained functional community" that does not rely on capitalist and carceral systems.

Image Description

This is a two-sided flyer. It uses white text on a black background. The flyer provides texts that notes "We are not trying to return to Zuccotti Park" and instead offers lessons, strategy, and ideas learned in the first two months of the Occupy Wall Street encampment. The flyer incorporates images of bodies including the outline of a human form in white; a head, in profile, in black; a body with its arms reaching upwards; and two raised fists that are shackled by handcuffs.

Citation

Direct Communication 1, 2012; PE.029 Printed Ephemera Collection on Subjects; box 25; Occupy Wall Street (Robert Reiss Donation); Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University

Collection

Printed Ephemera PE.29

Themes

• Grassroots Organizing and Mutual Aid

Declarations

• Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
• They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.