Protest, Scale, and Publicity: The FBI and the H Rap Brown Act

Abstract

This paper deals with issues of political dissent and the geography of state power through the lens of a particular law and its deployment by the US state in the context of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota by American Indian Movement activists and local residents. I explore how the state responded to the highly mediated nature of the Wounded Knee occupation through tactics that minimized the visibility of its efforts to contain the protest. These efforts, I argue, also constituted a broader politics of scale. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the intersection of protest, scale and publicity. I then use the empirical example of the H Rap Brown Act to show how these dynamics were being reworked in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, I place the emergence of the H Rap Brown Act within a context of changing geographies of race and state power, more specifically as they were articulated around the unrest that was engulfing American cities. I then analyze how the law was deployed by the state during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of what the case of the H Rap Brown Act has to tell us more broadly about our theoretical understandings of the geographies of public protest.[T]he most serious domestic crisis facing America today is the ominous threat of riots and mob violence that hangs like a pall over many of our cities. We believe that the vast majority of the people share this opinion.… The majority of the committee has responded to this crisis by ordering reported a bill which will give added protection to roving fomenters of violence, such as Stokely Carmichael and H Rap Brown. 1 (US Senators James Eastland and Strom Thurmond in US Senate 1967:15)

From Militant Particularism to Anti‐neoliberalism? The Anti‐Enron Movement in India

“…Another literature relevant to this paper deals with issues of scale in the context of counter‐hegemony and resistance (see for example Boyer 2006; Brenner 2000, 2001; Cox 1998a; 1998b; Crump and Merrett 1998; D’Arcus 2003; Jonas 2006; Marston 2000; Marston, Jones and Woodward 2005; Smith 1992; Swyngedouw 1996; 2000; 2004; Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). The concept of scale, within contemporary human geography, facilitates the investigation of the discursively evolving role of space as container and contained (Chatterjee 2002), arena, level and hierarchy of socio‐spatial practices within contemporary capitalism.…”

“…Scalar practices and rescaling, however, are not confined to counter‐hegemonic strategies. States work to contain dissent—ideologically as well as geographically, or in terms of scale (D’Arcus 2003). States often try to crush dissent by restricting the geographical mobility of protesters, and by restricting access of protestors to media when they try to get their message across to a larger audience to up‐scale their concerns.…”

“…Social practice, under the hierarchical conceptualization of scale, takes a lower rung, while forces such as globalization get assigned a greater degree of social and territorial significance. Marston, Jones and Woodward's (2005) arguments are interesting, but they conflate the concept of scale with structures that agents or social practices cannot remake or transform (on the contrary, see Brenner 2000, 2001; Cox 1998a, 1998b; D’Arcus 2003; Smith 1992; Swyngedouw 1996, 2000, 2004; Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). In addition, most scale literature has been inspired by Lefebvre's (1991) concept of social production of space.…”

Immigration Policing Through the Backdoor: City Ordinances, the "right to the City," and the Exclusion of Undocumented Day Laborers

“…Much of this research, including Mitchell's, has focused on how deployments of law-particularly city ordinances-have played a central role in these struggles. Scholars have explored, for instance, the ways in which local ordinances and/or the policing of public space have been used to constrain the behavior (and therefore presence) of homeless individuals (Smith, 1992(Smith, , 1996Mitchell, 1995Mitchell, , 1998aMitchell, , 1998bMitchell, , 2003Amster, 2002), panhandlers (Ellickson, 1996), youth (Valentine, 1996(Valentine, , 2004Collins and Kearns, 2001;Stratford, 2002), protesters (Staeheli and Thompson, 1997;D'Arcus, 2003D'Arcus, , 2004Mitchell, 2004;Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005), labor organizers (Mitchell, 2002), and immigrant day laborers (Esbenshade, 2000).…”

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“…A great deal of urban research has addressed the relationship between exclusion, location and politics in public space through the optic of resistance (see D’Arcus, 2003). Resistance is seen as constitutive of ‘unfolding relations of authority, meaning and identity’, while it also is the means through which people ‘occupy, deploy and create alternative spatialities from those defined through oppression and exploitation’ (Pile, 1997: 3).…”