Washington Square, Times Square

“I am an immigrant. I came to take your job.

But you don’t have one.”

—On a sign held by Ilektra Mandragou, in Times Square

At five o’clock, on October 15, daylight had not yet faded, but Time Square’s billboards and buildings were lit up. The square was on the edge of being more crowded than usual. A group of stilt-walkers and a brass band—some members of the Rude Mechanical Orchestra—congregated in the center of the square, bound by advertisements for Broadway’s production of Bonnie & Clyde and the Bank of America building. Groups of OWS supporters—including students, Teamsters and UAW members— stood in small clusters, holding signs. Two dark-haired, bearded graduate students self-consciously, but insistently, thrust a handlettered sign in front of one of the news cameras that dotted the square. It read: “Cash Rules Everything Around Me. Destroy Capitalism.” Some tourists gawked, then moved on. A couple from Pennsylvania asked if this was OWS and if anything was going to happen, if more people were coming or if the clumps of people standing idly, if expectantly, with signs was “it.” “We’re here to support OWS,” shrugged the taller of the two bearded students, “but who knows how big this will get.” He glanced at the metal barricades that were already in place, and again thrust his sign above his head.

By 6 p.m., Times Square was packed with Occupy Wall Street supporters, many of whom were, or would become, members of the emerging NYC All Student Assembly, a group formed in support of OWS and also intent on kicking off a student movement in its own right.

***

The first all-city student assembly in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street was held on Saturday, October 8, in Washington Square Park, a public space centrally located in Greenwich Village next to NYU’s main campus.

Students were part of Occupy Wall Street from its beginnings, and the issue of student debt had been a prominent one. While never solely a youth movement, the voices of a generation determined not to passively accept an unjust order reverberated in every action. During one of the earliest marches on Wall Street, a George Washington University law student fell to his knees in the street and shouted out the story of his parents, both of whom held graduate degrees. As he spoke, he beckoned to a building façade nearby: “That’s the bank that took my parents’ home . . . They [my parents] played by the rules . . . I would rather die than be quiet and watch everything that they worked for go away . . . I’m not moving . . . I’m not going to be quiet.” Shortly after, at his own request, the man was arrested.

In the weeks that followed, students and teachers in New York City area schools, public and private, secondary and collegiate, had begun to organize and coordinate action internally. There was, however, not much communication and cohesion between and among these groups, with much of the division along institutional lines. The all-city student assemblies, beginning on this October day and continuing each Saturday, sought to remedy this.

Facebook, a Google Groups site with an accompanying listserv, fliers, and other media spread the word about the assemblies. The goal of the assemblies, as articulated by the facilitator (essentially a moderator) of the third weekly meeting, was to create, “a space for all the students of New York to come together and just figure out what we are as a movement, how we can become a movement, and how we can work together in our struggles.” Drawing students, teachers, and graduates from schools within and without the city, representatives of student activist groups such as New York Students Rising, members of the OWS Empowerment and Education working group, graduate employee unions and even parents concerned with the debt they and their college-enrolled children were incurring, the assemblies became a forum for relevant announcements, the sharing of stories, and, most immediately, the coordination of action and community-building efforts. They began to plan for a Student Day of Action.

CUNY students who make up the majority of New York’s student population were involved in organizing this day of action. Long subject to tuition hikes at public colleges that were once free, CUNY students were again facing expected $1,500 increase later in the fall. Meanwhile, CUNY Graduate students and adjunct professors worked with increasingly large class sizes, no raises and faced cuts to their already minimal health care coverage.

The CUNY Graduate Center became a major site for the initial stages of organizing the citywide student movement. Students, many of whom are also adjunct professors, were able to mobilize via networks forged as part of the PSC/CUNY’s adjunct project. Students also held walkouts, teach-ins and meetings at Hunter College, Baruch, City College and Brooklyn College. At this stage, the organization spread even to Medgar Evers College, a campus where little recent student activism had taken place. Undergraduate organizers explicitly took inspiration from the storied CUNY student organization SLAM which took on tuition increases in the 1990s, as well as the 1969 occupation of City College by the black and Puerto Rican students, an action which resulted in the “open admissions policy” for CUNY and the effective desegregation of the CUNY system.

Nevertheless, the spread-out geography of the CUNY system, its size and the busy lives of working-class CUNY students who often balance school, work parenthood and other family obligations, make CUNY organizing a mammoth task. The planning for the Day of Action was greatly helped by an alliance with students in private colleges.

Before Occupy Wall Street, alliances between students at public and private colleges and universities across the city benefited from the unionization of student workers and more general union support. Many student activists in New York Students Rising were members of Communication Workers of America (CWA) graduate employee locals. They had been active in the March 4 Day of Action earlier that year against tuition hikes, departmental cuts and other attacks on Higher Education that a growing number of students understood to be connected to the nationwide attacks on collective bargaining and the U.S. working class. NYU students have also been involved in local union fights, lending support to adjunct faculty contract negotiations (the adjunct faculty at NYU and the New School are both represented by UAW Local 7902), the Teamsters art-handlers who are currently locked out of Sotheby’s and Stella D’Oro workers. NYU graduate student workers themselves are still in the midst of a recognition campaign for their union, GSOC-UAW Local 2110.

Unionized graduate student employees kept abreast of union struggles across campuses and cities through their parent unions, but also other social justice networks, including the Coalition for Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU)—a loose affiliation of graduate employee unions and allies from the U.S. and Canada that holds a yearly conference. In August 2011, CGEU was held at New York University. It brought in speakers from Madison, Wisconsin, where their graduate union was active in the fight against Governor Scott Walker’s anti-collective bargaining initiatives. Other speakers included law student activists from the University of Puerto Rico, who spoke of the global threat to public, accessible higher education and workers’ rights—a threat that New York area students followed on Facebook and Twitter posts from activists in Greece, India, England, and across the world.

At NYU, students, faculty and staff had also been active in a nearly four-year-long campaign for the rights of migrant workers who build, operate and maintain non-U.S. site branch campuses, particularly NYU Abu Dhabi. NYU undergraduates also organized the Tuition Reform Action Committee (TRAC) and Students Creating Radical Change (SCRC) in the years leading up the occupation of the NYU Kimmel Student Center in February 2009. The NYU occupation took direct inspiration from the December 2008 student occupation of the New School. Organizers there were in contact with those in the University of California system, where student occupiers at the University of Santa Cruz famously issued no demands and issued a manifesto explaining why.

Such networks helped galvanize and firm up support between students and their affinity groups for mass NYC student action, which let to an all New York City student speak-out as part of the OWS National Day of Action that preceded the convergence at Times Square. The students could not have anticipated the events of the previous day—an attempted eviction foiled by a mass mobilization helped by labor, MoveOn and other supporters—but these, of course, boosted the energy and the numbers of the long-planned protest.

***

From the earliest days of the movement, personal story-telling had helped to build solidarity—and to put faces on OWS and better explain it to the outside world. For many, a desire to exorcise associated frustrations–toward positive ends, if possible– was deeply motivating. At general assemblies and the all-city student meetings, current and former students expressed anxiety and even despair at the prospect of continued debt accrual. For them, the stakes were high. The Occupy movement represented more to them than a pet social project or an experiment in radical grassroots politics: it offered a chance at redemption from what seemed to be impossible financial obligations.

The student speak-out in Washington Square Park, a public park at the heart of a private college campus, attracted as many as 600 participants at any one time. A facilitator took stack and one by one, students riffed on why they were participating in the day’s action. The human mic doubled every story, sending it to the back of the crowd at the south end of the park. Many of the students present had mobilized the night before to block the attempted eviction from Zuccotti Park, yet instead of being exhausted, they were emboldened and they spoke with an urgent understanding of the need for solidarity.

One woman, a mother who decided to go back to school after a decade of raising children, spoke up about how much she loved her coursework, but also her fear that even with a degree in social work, she could never repay her student loans—much less afford tuition for her own near-college age children. An energetic young woman stood up to give an impromptu teachin on student loans, their similarity to the mortgage crisis and the predatory practices of lenders. Several graduate students bemoaned recent cuts to graduate funding at the federal level. Another man, down from Vermont, mentioned joining the speak-out not because he is a student, but because he’d like to be. At twenty years old, unemployed and unable to afford school, he said, “my future seems bleak.”

While debt and tuition were the main subjects of the day, one speaker, Jason Ide—a young college graduate and president of Teamsters Local 814—made an appeal for solidarity between students and workers like the locked-out members of his local who handle art for the city’s elite auction houses. “We’re in this together,” he said. “Our members have gone without a paycheck for 12 weeks.”

At the close of the speak-out, students broke into working groups, including a student of color working group, an antioppression and safe spaces group and an action group tasked with bottom-lining future happenings. They clustered around benches, pointing at the buttons they wore and holding up signs to show who they were and what brought them to Washington Square. A young man in a boy scout uniform with a bloody rubber foot protruding from an open khaki knapsack, walked from group to group, eventually following a cluster of students who set off to try and link back up with OWS proper. Other students split up to hold actions at local bank branches, which led to several arrests.

As the students dispersed, someone at the south end of the park yelled, “See you at the 5 o’clock dance!” And then began a slow convergence from all corners of the city into Times Square, where thousands of demonstrators—some students, many not— would gather, mingling with tourists and gawkers. Some came in a celebratory mood after all, the movement had just defeated the mayor’s attempt to shut down the camps in Zuccotti Park. Others felt the occupation was still vulnerable, and wanted to defend it. But all came, too, for the same reason people show up to every Occupy protest: to put an end to plutocracy.

Though police quickly made it impossible to easily traverse the square, leaving many demonstrators unable to join friends, family or affinity groups as planned, the demonstration still had a peaceful and high-spirited tone. The day coincided with ComicCon, a gathering of comic book fanatics from around the nation, and ZombieCon which is, according to its Web site, “a loosely organized group of bloodthirsty zombies” who “gather once a year to attack NYC in a theatrical, absurdist parody of blind consumerism and brainless politics.” Attendees from both conventions joined the demonstrators in full character costume, lending the protest a unique visual flair, as superheroes and zombies mingled easily with the city’s indignant, sign-wielding 99 percent.

Along with students, the imaginary and the undead, the Times Square protest drew families with children, workers, the jobless and young professionals. Ilektra Mandragou, a freelance designer, came with her husband, a CUNY graduate student and adjunct professor. She held a sign that said, “I am an immigrant. I came to take your job. But you don’t have one.” As more people joined the crowd, the news crawl over their heads read, “Occupy Wall Street Movement Goes Worldwide,” a reference to the solidarity protests taking place in more than 80 countries that day.

The zombies, having started drinking at 1 p.m., went back downtown after about an hour, to continue their evening’s revelry, which would endure until 4 a.m. But the ranks of the Times Square protesters continued to grow.

There were more than 80 arrests that day, which compared to the Brooklyn Bridge march, was not that many. But the heavy police presence was intimidating, and could be directed even toward the most harmless protesters. “My kids almost got arrested. We dove out right as the nets were coming down,” says Rivka Little, a founder of 99 Percent School who has since become active in Occupy Harlem and Parents for Occupy Wall Street. “We had police mopeds aiming directly at us. It was scary.” Her daughters—aged six and twelve—had spent most weekends at Zuccotti, throughout the occupation. While Rivka provided plenty of Fruit Roll-Ups and warm clothing to ease their participation, incidents like those at Times Square remind her kids that changing the world is serious business. As Rivka jokes all the time, “Is this a family outing or a revolution?”

For most families that day, however, the Times Square protest ended with nothing more dramatic than hunger. Under the Hard Rock Cafe sign, one five-year-old, adapting a conventional protest chant to his own ends, began heckling his parents, chanting, “The people! United! Will now have dinner!”

Not long after, a smaller crowd surged away from Times Square, back downtown toward Zuccotti Park, still, for the moment, the movement’s hub, and still thriving.