Howard University students, faculty and alumni are set to join Occupy DC protesters on a march to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Friday to protest unemployment and call for more effective job creation. They’re the latest group to fall in step with the movement that’s set up camp in McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza over the past four weeks — a movement whose goals seem as numerous as its protesters. In McPherson Square, slogans on tents call for everything from relieving student debt to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to halting police brutality.
But today’s protest, organizer Talib Karim said, is designed not only to protest inequality but to bring the black community into the Occupy movement.
“Occupy is not truly represented by the 99 percent,” he said, adding that black, Asian and Hispanic communities haven’t been well represented at Occupy protests. “We are those people who have been the hardest hit by the unemployment and joblessness.”
Meanwhile, in tents in McPherson Square, protesters are hunkering down for their fourth week in camp, creating what some protestors call their own country in the park. A “finance” tent is receiving daily donations of food from locals and area businesses. The medical tent has gone from a few handfuls of Band-Aids to a miniature infirmary, complete with a cot, stocks of vitamins and trained nurses who often end up treating the homeless alongside protesters.
On Thursday, infirmary workers said they’re worried that Occupy DC’s close living quarters and primitive conditions could spell disaster as flu season draws closer. They’ve seen everything from protesters with foot infections resulting from this week’s rainy weather to “people who haven’t had medical care for years,” said Jean Ross, the president of National Nurses United, whose organization has sent nurses to several Occupy protests across the country.
She marched with about 30 other Occupiers to the National League of Cities on Thursday, protesting nurses’ arrests at Occupy Chicago and Occupy Oakland earlier this week.
Police allowed marchers to speak in the lobby of the league’s building across from Freedom Plaza for several minutes before informing the small crowd that anyone who remained in the building would be arrested.
And though Occupy DC has staged several similar protests in and around downtown over the past four weeks, National Parks Service spokesman Bill Line said officials there have fielded just a dozen complaints from locals — mostly office employees who work around McPherson Square concerned about “unsightly” protesters.
