After a day of protest on May 1, including a Black Lives Matter rally and the May 1 Immigrant and Workers’ Rights March, protesters gathered in front of Seattle Central Community College at 6 p.m. to participate in an Anti-Capitalist March hosted by the Cascadian Anarchist Liberation Movement. The crowd of over 300 was calm until a man with a large artillery weapon joined the crowd. This stirred anger among many of the protesters, who found his “open-carry” insensitive to the many people of color present. The crowd quickly surrounded him and chanted “Go away!” until he moved away from the group.
The march entered the street shortly before 6:30 p.m. engulfing all the lanes of traffic, marching north on Broadway chanting anti-capitalist slogans. The crowd turned west on Mercer to turn back around and go back onto Broadway, eventually taking the busy intersection of Broadway and John. Capitalist media has made much of isolated incidents of property damage at this stage of the march.
Liberation News was with the crowd as the protest approached Seattle Central Community College, where the police tried to sever the march into two groups. As protesters tried to rejoin the rest of their group, the police blocked them. The cops began screaming at people, shoving their police bicycles at people, shouting, “Move back!” That’s when the situation became very serious.
Police maced one protester and began throwing flash and smoke bombs into the crowd, causing people to become confused because they couldn’t see. This reporter ran towards the bangs in an effort to record footage before being shoved by an officer and bicycle. The police were able to divert the second half of the march, which then went around through a side street and reunited with the other half. The protesters took control of Pine and Harvard and pushed the barricades out of the way, tearing down the fencing around a construction site where overpriced apartments will gentrify the neighborhood further. Rocks flew as people chanted anti-gentrification slogans.
A black ocean of Seattle police came on bicycles shoving and throwing flash bombs at the group, pushing them east to Harvard and Pine, where police arrested one man in the intersection. The crowd eventually dispersed but after some time collected itself again in front of Seattle Central Community College, where police held the plaza, using flash bombs to abuse protesters. As time went on, protesters left, but the militaristic police presence continued to grow until all protesters left.
