The 'City of Big Shoulders' has shrugged off civil liberties, at least according to local peace activists. That complaint has become something of an annual mantra, as local antiwar groups gear up once again to battle with the City of Chicago for permits to march and rally on March 19, the day that marks the anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq in 2003.

The crux of the dispute lies in whether or not the City will allow peace activists to rally in the Gold Coast, and proceed from there to the Federal Plaza along Michigan Avenue, a march route that offers protesters maximum visibility, but that City officials say will tie up traffic for hours.

The route has both practical and symbolic importance to protesters. The area is one of the City's most visible and highly trafficked commercial areas, a shopping and meeting mecca for both local residents and tourists -- and a location protesters say will help get their message out to a huge number of people in a short period of time.

But the area is also the site of mass arrests two years ago during an emergency protest to oppose the beginning of the war. Those mass arrests sparked public outcry over police repression, City Council hearings on alleged police violence, and a civil rights lawsuit that could cost Chicago both cash and cache as a world class Blue State city.

Last year, the City also refused to grant a permit for the action. Thousands of protesters rallied at Chicago and Michigan anyway, and after a tense stand-off with police, eventually agreed to march south instead on Clark Street -- a virtual dead zone to public visibility -- in order to avoid a repeat of mass arrests. The presence of local luminaries that included Rev. Jesse Jackson failed to move police from their refusal to allow protesters to march down the Michigan Avenue corridor.

The City's posture appears unchanged this year. In January, the City denied a permit request to march from Oak Street south down Michigan to Wacker Drive, west on Wacker to State, and south on State to the Federal Plaza at Adams and Dearborn. Besides the obvious appeal of starting again at contested space in the Gold Coast, that route would have offered protesters peak visibility along some of the City's most heavily populated downtown transportation corridors.

But police argued that the route 'zigzagged' too much and would disrupt traffic. Protesters appealed, and the City denied the appeal in February. A second permit request that would have ameliorated the City's 'zigzag' issue by proposing a march straight south on Michigan to Adams street was also subsequently denied by the City, and on February 22 protesters ratcheted up the pressure by filing for an injunction in Federal court to prevent the City from denying them the right to march along their requested route.

"Mayor Daley and the police are deploying a civic double standard that ghettoizes political discourse that they don't agree with and undercuts our constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech," says Andy Thayer of the Chicago Coalition Against War & Racism. "The City allows the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association to stage it's holiday lighting ceremony every November along exactly this corridor, and every year the police department stages a commemorative march for fallen officers at exactly our proposed rallying point. What's the problem here?"

Certainly not the politics of the groups involved, according to the City.

"We recommended an alternate route based on the totality of the circumstances involved here, not on one issue," says Dave Bayless, director of news affairs for the Chicago Police Department. "One thought that we had was that the assembly on Oak Street would have necessitated full closure [of the area] for an extended period, and an impact on people who are not necessarily in the area for the protest."

Exactly, say protesters. "Marching down Clark Street is like exercising our right to free speech in a closet," says retired office worker Bill Massey, a volunteer organizer for the Chicago March 19 Coalition, the loose federation of local peace groups organizing the anniversary antiwar protest. "We've compared foot traffic on Clark Street to foot traffic on Michigan Avenue. Roughly 33 people crossed intersections at Clark Street and Erie over the span of twenty minutes on a typical Saturday morning -- compared to over 700 on Michigan Avenue and Erie. We want to be able to take our message to where the people are, not to some vacant corridor bereft of anybody but police officers sent there to intimidate us. And this police argument that they'd have to close Oak Street for hours is just baloney. We'd be there a half-our tops, and then march. And then we're out of the area."

Oak Street and Michigan Avenue have a special appeal for local peace activists. Two years ago, on March 20, 2003, more than fifteen thousand opponents of the Iraq war marched north on Lake Shore Drive with police permission to Oak Street. While police and protesters hotly contest the details of the action, videotape shows Chicago police commander Ray Risley waving people onto the Drive that evening, and news coverage and photos shot at the scene show masses of peaceful protesters -- many in work clothes, some pushing children in strollers -- high-fiving drivers caught in the traffic.

But when the crowd exited at Oak Street with what organizers thought was an agreement with police to march back south on Michigan to the rally site at the Federal Plaza, the temper of the event changed. "Police who previously had been friendly and helpful pinned us in at Chicago Avenue east of Michigan, refused to allow us to continue to march, refused to allow people to leave the area, and just started grabbing people and throwing them to the ground," says Sister Dorothy Pagosa, a nun with the 8th Day Center for Justice, a local Catholic peace project. "The violence was unbelievable, and totally unprovoked." Pagosa was among those who were arrested and hauled off to jail.

Police dispute that version of events, although police records show that over 400 people were 'officially' arrested on March 20, and many hundreds more were detained in buses and paddywagons and eventually ended up at local jails. Those arrested included local workers leaving their jobs, tourist who simply got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a number of protesters who were seriously injured, including a teenager who's arm was broken by police and another youth whose nose was broken while he was being arrested.

"We are asking for and have a right to return to the scene of the crime -- a police crime," says Thayer. "We're organizing under a key slogan: civil liberties at home, and self-determination abroad. While this government spends billions on the cost of the war and occupation of Iraq and other countries, budgets for programs that support human needs like education and affordable health care at home are being slashed. And the Bush administration has colluded with local law enforcement agencies to gut constitutional rights and basic civil liberties across the country. It is critical that we stand up for and exercise those rights, because if we don't, they will truly have evaporated."

There is some legal precedence for this position. In 1965, civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama won an injunction in federal court to march -- over the vigorous objections of local law enforcement -- across the Edmund Pettis bridge just weeks after state and local cops had brutally beaten protesters who'd tried to cross the bridge. Chicago has seen its own parallels. In 1996, protesters sued the City in federal court for preventing people from marching near the site of the Democratic National Convention. The City had sought instead to confine protesters to 'protest pits' blocks from the convention site, a policy that activists argued would hopelessly ghettoize their message. The City lost in federal court, and was forced to allow protest marches closer to the convention site -- and convention delegates.

Protest in the United States has definitely gotten tougher during the tenure of the Bush administration. Bush opponents have been summarily ejected -- and sometimes arrested -- at public events at which the President has spoken, although the phenomenon has not exactly been a hot-button issue for major media outlets. Nationally, activists have documented numerous incidents on camera and videotape at which police have beaten, peppersprayed and arrested peaceful protesters in venues that include San Francisco, Washington DC, New York City, and perhaps most notoriously in Miami during protests in November of 2003 to oppose the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas meeting. Some of those attacks have been staged by police posing undercover as protesters themselves, and activists have also documented dozens of incidents of undercover cops trying to infiltrate peace groups and activists projects -- and occasionally trying to incite those groups to violent actions.

Locally, police have taken to rallying themselves by the hundreds in full robocop attire at protest venues, most notably during a protest against the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue meeting in Chicago in November of 2002 -- and of course, at anti-war protests in the last two years. Protesters argue that those types of police activity at peaceful events have a profoundly chilling affect on dissent at a time that national legislation like the Patriot Act and routine police practices like racial profiling and lack of accountability are eroding core rights and ratcheting up people's fear of publicly expressing dissent. The City, however, rejects those claims.

"We need to strike the balance between the protesters' rights and the rights of citizens to move about the city unencumbered, to walk, to shop, to socialize, to walk out of your home without a major traffic tie-up," counters Bayless. "The middle ground is Clark Street."

Bayless also disputes the protesters' claim that they need to take their message to a high foot-traffic area to get their message out. "They marched down Clark Street last year and plenty of media covered the event," he says. "I'm sure they'll get a lot of coverage this year, as well."

Protesters dispute that assertion, as well. "We've seen events that drew hundreds and even thousands of people that got scant or no coverage from local media outlets," says Jim Fennerty, chair of the Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers' Guild and one of the lawyers representing the protesters. "Certainly protesters are also very concerned about spin from the corporate press, and feel very strongly that the best way to get a clear message out is to take it directly to the people. To do that, of course, they've got to be able to protest where the people are."

It could be argued that Chicago's 'rules' about parades and protests are abstruse, at best. Typically, no permit to 'parade' is required for sidewalk marches, as long as participants keep moving and make room for other pedestrian traffic. And Chicago police have often given permission on the fly for protesters to march in the streets when large crowds show up for actions and restricting them to the sidewalks would actually impede movement of people and vehicular traffic. It is also common practice for groups to ask for street 'parade' permits when larger crowds are expected.

But the process is nothing if not Byzantine -- and both arbitrary and subject to abuse, according to protesters. Permit requests can require input and sign-off from a dizzying array of City offices, from the Commissioner of Transportation and the Mayor's License Commission to local police brass. And activists claim that the City's hostility to anti-war actions along Michigan Avenue invariably stacks the deck against them.

While concern for the protest's potential impact on foot and vehicle traffic along Michigan Avenue has been cited by the City as a primary reason for declining the permit, that view may not be shared by Michigan Avenue businesses.

"We are not philosophically opposed to anything that happens on the street as long as it's legal and maintains the spirit of an open pedestrian way," says John Maxson of the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, the corridor's advocacy group. "The appropriateness of protest in various environments is not in the scope of our activity. We don't have a position on that."

Maxson seemed surprised when apprised of the dispute between police and protesters over constitutional rights and civil liberties. "We don't have a role in the dispute, and we would not come out opposing a march, per se, as long as it met the other criteria." Those criteria include the City's assessment of the 'legality' of the march and its impact on traffic. And regarding the traffic issue, Maxson said "I don't know how it wouldn't tie up traffic. That's for the City and the protesters to resolve."

"Look, the City permits all sorts of actions that tie up traffic and commerce," says Charles Nissim-Sabat, another attorney for the protesters. "They allow huge parades on St. Patrick's Day, on Columbus Day, for any number of other holidays and neighborhood festivals. Yet they feel that with an action like this anti-war protest, it's perfectly appropriate for them to cherry-pick who will be allowed to march, and when and where. They've inflated the number of police necessary to 'police' the protest, and distorted the affect a march will have by wrongfully saying the march will limit access to places like Northwestern Hospital, when it won't. The reality is that the City's procedure for permitting protests is anything but impartial, and it has to be overturned."

The peace activists have drawn at least one political heavyweight to their effort. Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, one of the nation's most outspoken Bush critics and a vehement opponent of both the war and the Patriot Act, has agreed to travel to Chicago to speak at the rally, and local dignitaries are also being asked to march with the group -- from Oak Street.

Protesters will go back into federal court on Wednesday, March 9 to argue their case for an injunction to prevent the City from criminalizing their march. There is no word on when the federal court might rule on the protesters' request.

-- This article originally ran in the March 2005 issue of the Third Coast Press.