Initially, none of us were thinking about going to the No Kings Protest on October 18th. We thought that the march would be a waste of our energy, and most of us were long tired of the same formula of the A-to-B march.
However, Crimethinc’s call for anti-authoritarian blocs at No Kings 2 was enough to convince our group to give it a shot. In roughly a week, we put together a banner, a route plan, zine printing, and at least an idea of what we wanted to do at No Kings. Not bad.
On the day of No Kings, we did some last minute zine folding, as well as dealing with some last minute dropouts and miscommunication. We had an idea of where to park, but some folks were confused about the carpooling situation, which led to us marching to the rally 30 minutes after our original plan.
We bloc’d up in a discreet location near city hall, brought out our flags and marched over to the rally. We got our first stares from confused onlookers, with some liberals attempting to taunt us. Soon after, we made it to city hall, but we were swarmed by cops asking us if we were intending to counterprotest. After we said we were joining the protest, we went into the rally.
Initially, people were put off by a group of people wearing all black in a coordinated group. I guess they might have thought we were agitators, but some folks came up to ask who we were, once we reassured everyone that we weren’t fascists or MAGA, people quickly warmed up to us. Many people asked for our literature and some folks went over to have conversations and a few folks held up umbrellas to give us shadeand gave us water. (Doing black bloc in 90 degree weather is pretty rough.)
We attempted to get into the center of the crowd, but there were too many people. Instead, we moved to the side, and some of us split up and went into the crowd to hand out zines; others stayed with the banner and let people come to us to have conversations.
Eventually, we took the hill on the side of city hall facing the crowd. According to a comrade who didn’t join the bloc, we were very visible even from far away. Some folks took pictures and cheered us on. We mostly stayed up here and attracted some comrades who came up to us to give us water and other supplies.
When the march started, it took us a moment to descend the hill, taking the banner with us. We managed to get in line for the march. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a megaphone, so we could not do any of the more militant chants. We were forced to listen to the many milquetoast chants (e.g. “This is what democracy looks like!”). We dodged horseshit from the horse cops, and the march ended up being relatively short compared to the other large scale marches that happened at city hall.
After the march, we went around talking to people, some dressed individually in bloc (who weren’t affiliated with us), and did some networking. We handed out the rest of our zines, and talked to some folks who were disenchanted with the protest. We were happy to point them to some events that we were planning on putting on! The event lost energy quickly after the march, so we decided to leave before the cops decided to swarm us.
We haven’t stretched our protest/march muscles in a while, and it felt good to do so! It definitely was worth going out and talking to people about alternatives to marches and community organizing.
Overall, our experience with the No Kings rally was positive. The zines were well received by the people we were handing them out to, we should have definitely printed more. In the lead up to the event, we were running through many different scenarios in our heads, and were definitely on edge when we showed up to the rally, but once we actually got their and made our presence known, all doubts about attending the rally went away.
We definitely should have shown out with more comrades so we could have engaged with more people, the atmosphere was ripe for a more radical direction that should have been capitalized on more. Hopefully, in the future, we can refine our approach towards these demonstrations to maximize our presence and spread of our ideas.
Space City Anarchist Organization
Founded 2022 in so-called “Houston” and building a liberatory movement in support of the people.
Find out more here: spacecityao.noblogs.org
