For the People

by Larry Krasner

  But over the years I started to wonder: What if “power does what it wants” is the chorus that power wanted people like me to sing? Maybe power does what it wants because we believe—and accept—that it can. And what if unrestrained power sets loose its own destruction by animating and radicalizing good, ordinary people to stand against it on the streets, in jury boxes, in voting booths, and then inside the institutions that hold that power? Could all those people attacked and arrested for speaking up be hardened into a new force that takes power back for the people? I know of at least 420 people who can answer that question. Philadelphia has its own legacy of unchecked power being abused at a national political convention.

  It was a hot night in late July 2000. Philadelphia was hosting the Republican National Convention, which was on track to nominate George W. Bush for president of the United States in several days. I was thirty-nine, and our two boys were nine and seven. Lisa was preparing for her second run for judge after her impressive near win the year before. If anyone had told me then that in seventeen years I’d be running for district attorney, I would have laughed. If anyone had told me how consequential that year’s Republican convention would end up being, I would have cried.

  In the end, Bush won the election even though Al Gore took the popular vote. Bush became president through the electoral college and the help of the U.S. Supreme Court, in a partisan decision that has besmirched the reputation of the court ever since. And then in quick succession the president most voters did not choose faced the shock of 9/11 and left us with the ill-considered Iraq War, the barely vetted Patriot Act, a very conservative Supreme Court justice, and the seemingly endless so-called war on terror that survive his presidency even as I write. The country has never been the same.

  But that was all still ahead of us. That night in July 2000, I was walking up a hilly, tree-lined street, parked up with older cars, balancing a case of local Stoudts beer on my shoulder. I was headed for Not a Squat, also known as Not Squat and Knot Squat, a group residence for activists and lefties, to share some beer with my people. I had selected the beer with care, in part because it had American flags on the box and was local—from Adamstown, Pennsylvania. Juries liked that kind of thing. If law enforcement was taking surveillance pictures for some cooked-up trial, I would give them some good photos of me carrying a flag-covered box of a quality local Pennsylvania brew. Let them put that in evidence for a Philly jury to see during a trial.

  In 2000, which many called Y2K, the Republican Party held its convention in Philadelphia, then and now an overwhelmingly Democratic city. They called it the Republican National Convention (RNC); my people called it R2K.

  City government wanted to bring in the locally deeply unpopular Republicans but was worried about what the world would think of their city if it was roiling in demonstrations. Actual freedom of speech in the cradle of freedom might repel tourists, especially the ones coming for the convention. For months, efforts by activists to obtain permits for public speech had been thwarted by city government, which unconscionably agreed to give Republicans and the RNC first dibs on the use of all public space. The ACLU was litigating. Protesters of many stripes were frustrated by the city’s one-sided restrictions, but they eventually settled for a miles-long march down Broad Street under a scalding, midday July sun as their best opportunity to be heard, at least until they collapsed or quit from heat exhaustion. Neither the city nor the RNC appeared worried that protesters would fail to complete their march.

  Three days before the convention and before any protests, a city official whose job description included protecting civil rights said he heard a municipal judge—and former Philly police officer—tell a university classroom that there was a plan to detain protesters until the convention was over. Judges aren’t allowed to do that. Judges are supposed to be impartial and separate from law enforcement. They can’t make plans with law enforcement, especially not plans for a preemptive strike to keep people from exercising their sacred free speech rights.

  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution strictly protects free speech from preemptive suppression because the loss of that illegally suppressed speech can never be restored. When speech is allowed, speakers can be held accountable for anything illegal they might do after the fact. When the city official overheard the judge’s comments, he was so alarmed that he talked about it. His words made their way to members of the press, who should have been outraged at a possible governmental plot against free speech. Instead, they were only mildly interested. Even with the judge’s gaffe, the police were giving off signs that they planned a crackdown on free speech. The police commissioner at the time, John Timoney, promised “fisticuffs” for protesters. The mayor called protesters “idiots.” District Attorney Lynne Abraham promised harsh prosecution.

  Protesters had spent a month painting signs, building papier-mâché creatures, and constructing parade floats, storing them in a giant warehouse that belonged to a sympathetic union carpenter, in preparation for the march and other events. There was a float built on a flatbed truck of a boxing ring where protesters playing Gore and Bush would mud-wrestle. There was an “Elephonkey”—a Republican elephant copulating with a Democratic donkey—to show the collusion between the parties. Anti–death penalty protesters mounted scores of six-foot-tall white cardboard skeletons on poles to represent the people executed in Governor George W. Bush’s Texas at the unprecedented rate of around one execution every nine days. The Kensington Welfare Rights Union was piling up banners and signs about poverty and homelessness. A protest troupe who dressed as the wealthy elite were painting and stacking tongue-in-cheek pro-Bush signs and preparing their Gatsby-era costumes—including tuxedos, fake furs, and long gloves for holding long, circa-1920s cigarette holders in one hand and Billionaires for Bush signs in the other. Environmental protesters built and painted floats and signs against global warming. Other protesters opposed globalization, police abuse, racism. They all had reason to be hopeful that they would be heard in what was expected to be a close presidential election, and reason to be concerned that they would not.

  I got consistent reports from different people that there had been surveillance by local and federal law enforcement on and off all week at the various groups’ houses in the area, as well as at a couple of social justice nonprofits in the city. Everyone was planning to protest, but what would be the response? One collective house, Fancy House, at Fiftieth and Christian, reported a sighting of beefy white guys with short hair knocking on their door, vaguely claiming to be city inspectors. Spiral Q Puppet Theater, an arts collective dedicated to doing art for “pageantry” (meaning marches, parades, and protests, usually) was raided by Philadelphia police. Nothing criminal was found, of course, but the raid was unjustified and intimidating.

  Not a Squat was at the epicenter of activist group lodging in Philadelphia, in the 4800 block of Baltimore Avenue. It was Philly’s best-known activist group home at the time, including to law enforcement, who were obsessed with the crimes they imagined were occurring inside. In truth, the people of Not a Squat were mostly interested in peaceful action to promote good causes, free speech, punk music, and vegan food while they lived their own way, partly off the grid. They shared the neighborhood with other group houses of a more or less political nature. Some had been around since the late 1960s. Fancy House, at Fiftieth and Christian, was a sixteen-bedroom reconfigured funeral home, complete with a coffin lift, only two blocks from Not a Squat. Sebulba, Killtime, and Stalag 13 were other group houses and warehouses that served as occasional underground punk music venues and gathering places of the West Philly activist community.

  The occupants of these group houses varied, but there were some modes of dress in common. Many wore heavy Carhartt work pants—the ones held together by rivets, with two thick layers of canvas over the knees. Carhartts were ideal for living in a poorly heated warehouse or doing heavy construction (or for their original use—working in coal
mines and the kind of factories that don’t exist in the Northeast anymore). Black was a favorite color in West Philly. Bicycles put together from cannibalized, worn parts were the primary form of travel. Bike transport meant carrying locks, sometimes a thick chain wrapped twice around the rider’s waist, or a mini-U lock that fit in a pants pocket. Carabiners linked water bottles to backpacks that were covered in cloth patches and stickers that said things like There’s No Government Like No Government or Break the System or Fugazi. It was a practical, post-apocalyptic look.

  That July was not my first time visiting Not a Squat. In fact, my business card was stuck on the inside wall by the front door in case anyone needed a lawyer to repel one of law enforcement’s occasional paranoid investigations. Some of the Notsquatters I had represented more than five times; a few I didn’t know. I wanted to see them on the eve of all the trouble we sensed the city would bring to peaceful protest. We gathered in the way that friends and neighbors gather on reports of a coming hurricane. I brought the case of beer to share.

  I counted many of the occupants of the group houses as my people. I was drawn to them and their often remarkable work, but their lives differed from mine. I was a married homeowner with kids and a professional degree who agitated as an outsider working within the system. My getting arrested by protesting with them made no sense, especially since I knew they were better served by my lawyering than by my arrest. In turn, they respected my idealism and appreciated my support. They were well-intentioned skeptics who viewed society with a critical eye from outside the system and chose to live differently and plot positive change on its margins, at whatever cost to their own freedom or future. I fondly rejected the idea of being one of them. They were, in aggregate, a group of practical-minded dreamers who offered me a tantalizing sense that fundamental change was possible—but they also offered cautionary tales about dreams deferred. Some of them have gone on to truly change the world. Others in their orbit changed nothing and fell apart.

  Kathy Change was one of the activist community’s presiding spirits—one I never met and one who fell apart. Born Kathleen Chang in 1950, she had gone through two suicide attempts, two universities, and one marriage by the time she landed in Philadelphia at thirty-one years of age. She was an actress, performance artist, and activist, the daughter of Chinese intellectuals who had emigrated to escape Mao. She lived in one of Philly’s Powelton Village–area group homes in the early eighties and became well known for dancing and performing with colorful political flags on the Penn campus and doing a weekly performance in front of the giant sand-colored pillars at the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art steps. She cartwheeled with spinning bright flags that were visible for hundreds of yards from the various scenic roadways and pedestrian sidewalks that surround the art museum’s entrance. The acrobatic visuals were a common, cheerful, and mysterious riddle in my peripheral vision from a moving car when I happened to drive by alone or with my family during the baby-seat years. I only remember seeing them on sunny days, usually on weekends.

  In 1996, Change hoped to start a non-violent social transformation (she founded her own “Transformation Party”) in which workers would democratically take control of their places of employment. In letters she wrote to explain what she did next, she said she had concluded that the media would cover only violence, but she was unwilling to use violence against any other creature just to draw attention to her transformative ideas. So instead of harming another creature, that October she went to one of her usual performance spots on the University of Pennsylvania campus, doused herself in gasoline, and self-immolated while dancing and performing. A campus police officer used his jacket to wrestle her to the ground and extinguish flames that only relit. She died within twenty minutes. Despite her sacrifice, her Transformation Party never happened. Kathy Change’s smoky angel is still looking down from the three-story heights of the group houses of West Philly when she isn’t spinning flags, a sort of patron saint of sacrifice and protest. But whatever she hoped to accomplish by dying didn’t get done.

  Others got things done. Most of my West Philly people were extremely effective, despite first impressions. Paul Davis was one of them. Paul was inside Not a Squat that night in July 2000, and he was edgy. I’d represented him a dozen times in a decade, as a leader in ACT UP. He was wily and enigmatic.

  My connection to his world as an AIDS activist and multitalented agitator started in the early nineties. When I first met Paul and his partner at the time, Julie Davids—who, like Paul, went on to do historic work around AIDS on her own—they had a fondness for black clothing, accessorized with dog collars. Paul’s adventurous life since then has included years of pushing world AIDS policy in ways that worked. He has met with Kofi Annan. He has lived and been robbed by a machete blow to the head in Kenya, where his girlfriend, an infectious disease doctor, worked in the Kibera slum, and they moved AIDS policy in Africa. But his and his colleagues’ greatest achievements started around then, the year of R2K, when they undertook saving millions of African lives and refined the art of bird-dogging.

  Bird-dogging is the art of forcing candidates for elected office to face your issue at nearly every campaign stop, until they have no choice but to give you what you want. Paul’s issue was to obtain generic AIDS drugs for Africa. He knew the disease would keep raging throughout the continent and the world unless the meds—which were completely unaffordable for Africans—became generic. He also knew that Africans were being protected even less than people from elsewhere by the world leaders whose countries had the resources to help. Neither presidential candidate supported the idea when their campaigns began, due to a combination of Big Pharma’s big lobbying, as well as unspoken homophobia, racism, and generalized fear of the disease within the electorate. I knew Paul and ACT UP and his crew were brilliant, but even I underestimated what they could achieve through protest, information gathering, well-timed warnings, and just by persistently asking candidates difficult questions.

  Paul got into campaign events almost whenever he wanted by being seriously inscrutable, showing up early, signing in, and tucking his ponytail into the collar of a white shirt. He wasn’t one to give away all his tactics, but these were the ones I knew. His team was made up of old white ladies wearing Totes hats and young clean-cut College Republican–looking types, or apparent Bill Clinton wannabes—innocuous and virtually invisible people in a crowd. Their moment would come in the Q and A. Or, if there was no Q and A, they would create the moment: They’d find just the right time, stand up, and loudly but politely demand the candidate answer whether or not they supported generic AIDS drugs for Africa. They’d sprinkle in some press-worthy facts for assembled local journalists. The bird-doggers blended into the crowds at stop after stop in every state, all over the country. They were invisible until it was too late. They did politics better than politicians. They knew how to win without resources.

  On one of his missions, Paul ended up onstage with a banner stuffed into a future journalist’s clothing. He was within a few yards of the candidate and flanked by party officials who never questioned his presence. Mid-event, Paul and the future journalist unfurled the banner, which urged generic AIDS drugs for Africa, while other bird-doggers chanted in support. As with all good modern activism, the banner drop was complete when the unfurled banner’s words were in the photograph that appeared in newspapers around the country the next day.

  Paul and his crew kept on it and honed their bird-dogging over a few years until they got most of what they wanted. It used to cost $10,000 per year to treat an HIV/AIDS patient in Africa. It now costs less than $100. An unknowably large number of African lives and other lives around the world have been saved. I’ve heard it’s 26 million. Regardless, activists made it happen. Paul’s outsiders, who had no money and no connections, took on both American political parties and forced them to support their cause by being more organized and communicating better than politicians could.

 
The day after I visited Not a Squat, phalanxes of Philadelphia police in riot gear arrived at the puppet-making warehouse. Helicopters circled overhead. Scores of mostly young people inside the warehouse locked the doors and engaged in a tense but peaceful standoff. Outside the giant warehouse the mood was both post-apocalyptic and festive as militarized law enforcement and the occasional activist engaged. From the street, a protester in clown garb loudly implored police who were walking on the giant warehouse’s roof in SWAT gear: “Don’t do it! Don’t jump! You have so much to live for!”

  Eventually, after some unsuccessful mediation by lawyers from the public defender’s office and others, approximately seventy-five people were pulled from the warehouse, arrested, and loaded into prison buses that heated up like ovens in the July sun. The people were left baking in the buses for hours. Their backpacks and belongings were taken from them by law enforcement, searched, and discarded on-site. And their months of work—signs, banners, parade floats, and the Elephonkey—were broken up and discarded into city garbage trucks that pulled up on cue.

  The city had a warrant for the raid, authorized by DA Lynne Abraham, whose antipathy for ACT UP, and nearly all other protesters, and their dramatic tactics was well known. But the warrant was signed by a young prosecutor named Dick Rubio, who would go on to become the city’s managing director, work for a company that sold food to prisons, and then one day run against me and others for district attorney himself. In 2000, Rubio privately bragged that he signed the warrant because he was “a good American.” In 2017, when we ran against each other for district attorney, he didn’t brag about it. He would claim that he’d signed the warrant only because he was junior in the office and had no choice. Philadelphia activists hadn’t forgotten. They effectively bird-dogged him on the issue at several events during our campaign. He started as a perceived frontrunner. His shot at becoming district attorney gradually slipped away.