Outside the Brooklyn College (Gloria Dawson/ The Brooklyn Ink)

Almost every Muslim I speak to at Brooklyn College tells me about Fahad Hashmi. They speak of him much the same way as they would about a terrifying urban legend. Each one of them tells me to “look at what they did to Fahad Hashmi.” Hashmi, an outspoken Pakistan-born American and self-identified Muslim activist, lived in Queens and studied political science at Brooklyn College. He graduated in 2003. But his story lives on as a cautionary tale handed down from junior to sophomore to freshman. The message is always the same:

If it could happen to him, it could happen to me.

In 2004, Hashmi was in England, pursuing a masters degree in international relations from London Metropolitan University. He allowed an acquaintance visiting from Queens to stay at his apartment for two weeks. The acquaintance, a fellow Pakistani immigrant named Junaid Babar, was carrying a suitcase containing what prosecutors would later call “military gear.” The suitcase contained raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks that Babar was going to take to Pakistan and supply to Al-Qaeda.

Two years later, in 2006, while trying to board a flight to Pakistan from London’s Heathrow Airport, Hashmi was arrested and charged with conspiring to send money and military gear to terrorist organizations. He became the first person to be extradited to the United States from Britain on terrorism charges. Federal prosecutors admitted they had no evidence to show that Hashmi was a member of Al-Qaeda or that he himself supplied materials to them. They did, however, allege that he knew where Babar was going, lent him $300 for a plane ticket and allowed him to use his cellphone to make calls to Al-Qaeda operatives. In a strange twist, Hashmi’s case was based on the testimony of Babar himself, who had been arrested two years earlier for his involvement in several terrorist plots. In an effort to reduce his expected 70-year-sentence, Babar had turned government informant. As a result, his sentence was reduced to “time served” after four years and he is free today, after spending most of the last 10 years plotting to kill people in terrorist attacks.

Hashmi, however, spent the next three years of his life in solitary confinement. Under the Special Administrative Measures for particularly dangerous inmates he was under lockdown 23 hours in the day and allowed one visitor once every two weeks. He got one hour of exercise every day, which he had to do in a cage. There was a story about Hashmi losing his visitation rights for three months for practicing martial arts in his cell. His lawyers protested what they called “inhumane” and “unnecessary” harshness.

Last year, Hashmi pled guilty to one count of conspiring to provide material support to Al-Qaeda. It was largely seen as a deal struck with the government for a reduced sentence.

To most of the Muslims students I spoke with, it was irrelevant that Hashmi pled guilty. Nor did it matter that when Judge Loretta A. Preska asked whether he was pleading guilty “because you are in fact guilty?” he replied, “Alhamdulillah (Praise be to God), yes.” What resonated for them was that Hashmi was a regular guy, someone just like them who held views that most of them shared and who had spoken about things most of them spoke about.

In his final research paper at Brooklyn College, Hashmi had written about the abridgment of civil liberties of Muslim-American groups in the United States after 9/11. At many student meetings he had condemned U.S. foreign policy. A 2002 story in Time Magazine quoted Hashmi, then a student activist, calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world.”

The U.S. government hadn’t charged Hashmi with acts of violence. But the prosecution used the charges against him to support an argument that he had a “proclivity for violence.” For that he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

 ****

If the Hashmi case helped establish wariness in the Muslim community in Brooklyn, what happened next established outright paranoia. In August, an Associated Press story reported that the New York Police Department was conducting a surveillance program on Muslims throughout Brooklyn. They were targeting local imams, mosque attendees and Muslim student groups in colleges.

A secret division in the NYPD known as the “Demographics Unit” was given the task of mapping and monitoring ethnic neighborhoods. They followed immigrants, mapping what restaurants they ate at, what mosques they prayed at and where they socialized. Most alarming to Muslims was the AP’s revelation that the department used undercover police officers to infiltrate Muslim student groups. Activities as mundane as paintball trips were flagged as potential terrorism training. Students who were particularly vocal about their political and religious beliefs were also noted. In many instances, the student groups claimed that they had encountered infiltrators, mysterious students who would pop up at meetings and social gatherings and try to encourage people to speak about radical views or have strong political opinions in an effort to entrap them.

According to the documents obtained by the AP, The NYPD had identified 31 Muslim student associations (MSAs) on college campuses in New York City that they deemed “MSAs of concern.” The NYPD scanned online chat rooms and their undercover officers monitored student meetings and kept an eye out for individuals with strong political views.

Six of these MSAs were at branches of the City University of New York: Brooklyn College, Baruch College, City College, Hunter College, La Guardia Community College and Queens College.

Not a single arrest has been made as a result of the surveillance program since 2006.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement that the police only act on leads and do not single out groups based on religion. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the NYPD’s actions, comparing it to screening for measles. “If you want to look for cases of measles, you’ll find a lot more of them among young people,” he told Newser. “That’s not targeting young people to go see whether they have measles or not. If there is a community where the crime rate is very high, to not put more cops in that community is ridiculous.”

I traveled to Brooklyn College to speak to the students right after the story broke. I heard varied responses. There were the liberal, white kids who expressed the predictable outrage at the racism and the invasion of privacy. Others argued that the NYPD did exactly the right thing and the surveillance program was justified and made them feel safer.

Muslims students reacted with predictable outrage. Soheeb Amin, the president of the Muslim Students Association at Brooklyn College said, “When we found out about the NYPD’s activities, it actually just confirmed what we already suspected. The rights of Muslims have been restricted since 9/11 in the name of counter-terrorism, but we find that the victims of such measures end up being innocent college students who are American citizens for the most part.” Amin blamed the actions on most Americans’ ignorance of his religion. “If only they understood Islam and its true message, or maybe if they had read the Koran in its entirety and not just selected verses, they would not be suspicious of someone just because they are a practicing Muslim,” he said.

“It’s definitely scary, it makes me think twice about what I say when I’m speaking to someone on the phone when I’m on campus,” said sophomore Faria Imtiaz, a member of the Muslim Students Association at Brooklyn College. “It shows that if it could happen to us, it could happen to anyone.”

Faria Imtiaz, Muslim student at Brooklyn College (Gloria Dawson/The Brooklyn Ink)

There was that refrain again. Imtiaz was one of the first students who mentioned Fahad Hashmi to me. She also told me how she suspected one of the teachers at her high school may have been an NYPD spy – an account I was unable to verify.

What she said next however surprised me. “What can you do?” she said. “Sometimes these things are necessary.”

I couldn’t help but be surprised. Why weren’t they more angry? Where was the outrage? I asked Imtiaz.

“Of course we’re angry,” she said. “But a lot of us are also scared of speaking out.”

Listening to first Hashmi’s story, and then the reaction to the surveillance left me feeling, at turns, alarmed, paranoid and guilty. I too am a Pakistani. I am a practicing Muslim who has lived for years and studied in the United States. I have on occasion criticized American foreign policy in conversations with friends. Which left me to wonder—if it could happen to him, could it happen to me?

The alarm and the paranoia were predictable. The guilt was something different. I come from a country where almost everyone is Muslim, a country founded, with great bloodshed, on that premise. My relation to the state is not framed by my faith; it is not a reason for me to be regarded as a person of suspicion. The students I met in Brooklyn College, were caught in a very different struggle. They were caught between the forces of assimilation and identity – between fitting in as loyal Americans and resisting the temptation to appear acquiescent. Their parents may have advised caution. And some of them heeded the warning. But others were still not sure how to live lives as Muslims in a country where the visceral response to their faith, my faith, was the inevitable connection to the extremists who had killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001, and who remained the targets of the ongoing war on terror.

What was it like to be them, to be young and Muslim and living in an America where they felt not only alien but suspected of disloyalty?

I related to the fear these students were expressing. What surprised me was the degree to which they felt there was nothing they could do about it. I did not know whether they were simply afraid of speaking out and being labeled anti-American or whether they were not disturbed enough to protest. What was clear was their reluctance to attract attention for their views.

If they were going to hold their tongues, I would need to find those whose views, and whose work, captured the tension of being pulled between fear and outrage, between being accepted as yet another American and resisting the tug of trying to fit in.

 ****

 Cyrus McGoldrick, the civil rights manager at the Council on American-Islamic Relations-New York is 23 and not a typical young Muslim. In fact, until a few years ago he wasn’t even Muslim. Born to an Irish-American father and an Iranian mother, McGoldrick had grown up around Muslims but did not convert to Islam until three years ago. In his spare time, he’s a musician, rapping under the name “The Raskol Khan.” He speaks with a languid confidence, without the unease and the suspicion that I found in a lot of the Muslims who came from immigrant backgrounds. He wears a thick beard without its moustache, a white Muslim prayer cap and the traditional keffiyah or checkered cloth draped around his neck. I asked him why more Muslims weren’t reacting with greater outrage to the NYPD’s spying.

“Most Muslims feel that if they just keep their heads down, get on with their lives and show everyone that they’re just leading normal everyday lives like the everybody else, things will get better on their own,” he said. “They’ve been thinking that for the last 10 years, but they need to realize it’s not getting better.”

“The civil rights movement had the MLK’ers and the Malcolm X’ers. The Malcom X’ers always told the MLK’ers that ‘You’re always doing sit ins, you’re doing too much sittin’ down. You need to stand up!”

That is exactly what he does. Together with Ramzi Kassem, a City University New York law professor, McGoldrick has been conducting “Know Your Rights” workshops across schools, colleges, mosques and community centers. The workshops are sponsored by CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility), an initiative sponsored by CUNY that addresses the legal needs and concerns of communities in New York that are affected by the government’s counter-terrorism measures. McGoldrick says the workshops inform Muslims of their rights and how they should react if the police question them or if they suspect someone in their community is an informant.

It was a story published by the AP about these workshops that set off another war of words. In November, the AP ran a story under the headline “Angry over spying, Muslims say: “Don’t call NYPD.” The story suggested that in the wake of the surveillance program, community leaders were calling on all Muslims not to cooperate with the NYPD. New York Republican Congressman Peter King called this reaction “disgraceful.”

McGoldrick shakes his head and sighs at the mention of the story. He says he and Kassem never advocated refusing to cooperate with the NYPD. “The framing of that story was all wrong, in our workshops we explicitly tell people that if you see something (suspicious) going on, of course you need to report it,” he says. “It was not about what to do when you go to the police, it was about what to do when the police come to you.” Instead, he says, the workshops advised people not to speak to the police without knowing their rights or having legal consultation to avoid entrapping themselves.

Still, he added, he recognized the urge not to cooperate. “Pardon my language, but you can’t just shit on us and then expect us to cooperate with you,” he says. Even though the workshops hadn’t intended to send a message of non-cooperation, McGoldrick said he nonetheless could defend the sentiment. “To expect me to come forth and give you information about what people are talking about, what the imams are saying in their sermons, that’s pretty ballsy, especially after reports come out that you’ve been spying on all of us,” he says.

He had little faith in the various outreach programs that tried to promote interfaith understanding. They were, in his view, “mostly for show,” and accomplished little. In fact, his organization is boycotting Mayor Bloomberg’s annual interfaith dinner later this year and writing an open letter explaining their grievances regarding the actions of the NYPD and the mayor’s comments following them.

His attitude stands in marked contrast to what I had heard in the past from so many other American Muslims who believed that cooperation between faiths was the best way to improve relations with the rest of the community. But this was changing, according to McGoldrick. “The few Muslim leaders who are willing to attend these events and do the photo ops, even they are becoming more and more on the fringe now,” he says. McGoldrick points out that even though a large number of imams and community leaders have held regular dialogue with the police department and have maintained good relations with them, they’re still turning up in the list of people who are being spied on.

McGoldrick and his colleagues may be disillusioned with efforts at outreach. But I was not entirely convinced he was right. So I visited the Muslim American Society center on Bath Avenue to find out more about what those attempts at interfaith connection were, and what they were achieving. The center serves many functions; it has Koran classes; a prayer room; a large hall for community functions and activities for children, including karate lessons. It is also responsible for the building of many mosques and Islamic community centers in the city, an activity for which they’ve faced considerable opposition.

Ibrahim R. Mossallam arrives at the center to drop off his five-year-old son Ismael for one of those karate lessons. The 33-year-old Palestinian-American kisses his son and affectionately ties his karate belt around him, gently pushing him towards the instructor and a gaggle of other rowdy kids. I think of Fahad Hashmi and how his martial arts practice was considered a sign of insubordination.

Mossallam is the Muslim American Society outreach director for Brooklyn and Staten Island. He’s youthful, friendly and energetic, just what you’d expect from someone in his position. He’s dressed in baggy jeans and a hoodie, not at all looking like the grown up father of two young children. He speaks quickly and enthusiastically about the society’s efforts in reaching out to others in the community.

He tells me that one of his proudest achievements was the opening of a mosque in Sheepshead Bay. Much like the Park 51 episode last year where there were public protests against the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero, local residents protested the building of the mosque. They first claimed that it would be a public disturbance and then argued that it was violating building codes. Courts struck down both the challenges. Despite the opposition, Mossallam said the actual opening went smoothly. “You can’t just open it up with hordes of people coming to the mosque and not expect any hiccups,” he said. “We decided to have a pre-Ramadan dinner, created invitations and letters, gave them to the neighbors, invited local politicians, local assemblymen, priests and rabbis and opened three days before Ramadan. The neighbors loved it.”

Mossallam says his job is to show Muslims how to interact with non-Muslims, live as law-abiding Americans but still maintain their Muslim identity. “There have been those who’ve gone behind a rock and don’t even know how to talk to a non-Muslim if they are approached and just view them with suspicion.” he said. But nor does he advocate complete assimilation.

“Most Muslims, especially before 9/11 all assimilated, they all tried to blend in, very few who had strong iman (faith) would go out and make time to pray. Most Muslims here won’t even do that, they won’t pray openly,” he said. “They’ve turned into a typical American religion where they’ve separated life from religion in a lot of ways.”

But in the wake of relentless scrutiny after 9/11, he says, Muslims in America were forced to evaluate their faith and identity. “Muslims wanted to find out ‘Where in the Koran does it say you can attack civilians? What could they have possibly taken and twisted to fit their thinking?” he said. “The more I read about Islam the more I realized half the stuff I knew was false.”

The younger generation of Muslims, he continues, is much better educated and is more likely to practice the true version of the religion. His parent’s generation practices a more cultural version of the faith, depending on where they immigrated from. The result is a new generation of Muslims who are much more open about their beliefs, not particularly inclined to assimilate and more likely to react to perceived prejudice. “The first thing is to not be ashamed of being Muslim,” Mosallam says. “You do want to fit in, but not too much. When you walk down the street you don’t want someone to say ‘Oh there goes John’ or ‘There goes David’, you want them to recognize and say ‘Oh there goes Muhammad’ or ‘There goes Ibrahim.’”

I never had to decide how “Muslim” I wanted to be. I didn’t have to choose between whether I displayed my religion openly or practice in secret. For me, Islam was always something very private, not something I tried to draw too much attention to, whether I was in the U.S. or in Pakistan. This would explain my unease when I returned to Brooklyn College, to attend an Eid-ul-Adha event organized by the student chapter of the Muslim American Society.

 ****

 This Eid celebration is unlike the Eid celebrations I’ve seen in both Pakistan and America. The women all sit on one side of the room, separated from the men by a wide aisle. All but a handful of the women wear headscarves. Almost every man has a beard.

A beaming young man named Majed is speaking at the podium. Again and again he punctuates his sentences with Inshallah (God willing) and Alhamdollilah (Praise be to God). Majed is preaching as the students sit in sober silence. He is the evening’s emcee; every trip to the podium is accompanied by a Koranic reference or a mention of the Prophet. I am slightly unnerved at the absence of non-Muslims. When I was in college at Ohio Wesleyan University, Eid events were opportunities to invite people of other faiths to join in the celebration. I’m also surprised that it is such a somber, religious atmosphere. Where I grew up, celebrating Eid is more about getting together with friends, family and food. There is very little sermonizing.

Not to say there aren’t any light moments. Majed introduces the night’s first performance, a young man, barely 14 years old whose specialty is singing pop songs reworded into songs about Islam. The kid can sing, but I cringe at his acapella renditions of Chris Brown and Ne-Yo songs that, instead of being about wanton love and dancing in a club, are instead about love for Allah and getting into Jannah (heaven).

Next up is Fadi Ebrehm, a 20-year-old Syrian-American convert who writes poetry. Ebrehm is fidgety and self-conscious, mumbling introductions to his verses. But his diction is immaculate when it comes to reciting his pieces, where the topics vary from the Iraq War, to Palestine to living in America as an immigrant.

“I learned from history/That puppet rulers never speak to the people honestly/We all carry contradicting ideologies/We don’t steal/But we don’t mind the robbery.”

Later, when I caught up with Ebrehm, he told me that he felt the same discomfort at the event. “They really should have opened it up to more people,” he said. “I think they missed a real opportunity here.” Ebrehm performs his poetry at many similar events and gets frustrated when the only people to listen to him are Muslims. “It’s not just for Muslims. My work is for everyone. Being Muslim is just one part of me. It doesn’t define who I am or my work.”

The evening’s main event is a sermon by Imam Siraj Wahhaj. Imam Wahhaj is an African-American convert to Islam and also the founder of Masjid-e-Taqwa. He has given talks all around the world and it shows in his commanding presence as he takes the stage, with an palpable buzz going through the audience.

Wahhaj is a charismatic, engaging speaker. He isn’t afraid to be funny and his command when quoting from the Koran in its original Arabic is flawless. He doesn’t focus on one topic in particular, instead touching upon several issues. “I am so proud of Muslim students in the time and age we live in” he says. The implications are clear: he’s warning the students about the culture in which they’re growing u.

He speaks about the predictable evils — drugs, alcohol and pornography. He warns the students about their urges and about sexually transmitted diseases. He narrates a story of the one Muslim girl who decides to celebrate her birthday with her non-Muslim friends, got drunk in a bar and got pregnant the same night.

He then asks how many people believe abortion should be allowed. There are furtive glances around the room as if students don’t know the right answer. A few raise their hand. Wahhaj doesn’t berate them. Or immediately state his belief. Instead he tells another story, this one about a black woman who was raped by a white man. That woman, despite tremendous pressure and social stigma, decided to keep the baby. That baby grew up and became mother to one Malcolm Little, later be known as Malcolm X.

Wahhaj pauses to let his message sink in.

****

 I meet with Imam Wahhaj a couple of weeks later at Masjid-E-Taqwa, in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I take issue with some of his views, especially those on abortion. But I am intrigued by his experience as a Black Muslim. Cyrus McGoldrick had drawn parallels between the civil rights movement and the struggle of Muslims in America. As an American convert, Imam Wahhaj is free from the additional burden of being an immigrant. I’m curious to hear what he has to say.

For Wahhaj, the actions of the NYPD are nothing new. He isn’t fazed in the least, he says, because in the words of Imam Talib Abdul Rashid in Harlem, being a black Muslim means “being black twice.” He’s seen this all before. “I always thought we had this kind of surveillance on us,” he said, “especially on me.” He says the mosque’s phones are tapped, not unlike the counter-intelligence program under J. Edgar Hoover that targeted black people and leaders.” He says these situations repeat themselves. “It happens, it’s a phase right now, it’ll go away, but it won’t go away by itself. Muslims have to fight, just like black people had to fight for their freedom.”

Imam Wahhaj was born Jeffrey Kearse in Brooklyn, 1950. When he was 18, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. “That was a turning point for me,” he says. “He was my hero and the one I loved. I went home crying. And I remember thinking to myself, at that point I wanted to be either a Black Muslim or a Black Panther.”

Wahhaj says his conversion was less about religion and more about Black pride and fighting against injustice. After Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975, Wahhaj (whose name at the time was Jeffrey 12X) followed Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammad and converted to orthodox Islam. He changed his name for the last time to Siraj Wahhaj (“bright light.”)

Like Cyrus McGoldrick, Imam Wahhaj is adamant in insisting that things aren’t going to get better on their own for Muslims in America. Change will only come when Muslims can show the rest of the country that their plight is not a Muslim issue but in fact a civil rights and civil liberties issue that affects everyone.

The young Muslims I met spoke of a growing sense of alienation, both from anti-Islamic comments and post 9/11 laws that they feel target them – as they targeted Fahad Hashmi. They’re tired of being in the news for all the wrong reasons and they’re tired of apologizing, having to keep repeating, “Islam is a religion of peace.”

Despite the efforts at outreach and interfaith engagement, there are voices in the community telling this generation that their anger is justified and being passive is no longer an option. If things will ever get better, it is going to be through fighting for their rights.

As McGoldrick put it, “They sit, and they wait, thinking that if we do nothing, things will just get better on their own. But they won’t unless we do something about it. Of course everybody wants peace, but we can’t have peace without justice.”

]]> http://thebrooklynink.com/2012/01/02/39856-muslims-in-brooklyn-a-community-on-the-edge/feed/ 4 http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/12/26/39230-the-anarchivists-who-owns-the-occupy-wall-street-narrative/ http://thebrooklynink.com/2011/12/26/39230-the-anarchivists-who-owns-the-occupy-wall-street-narrative/#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:00:05 +0000 Hiten Samtani http://thebrooklynink.com/?p=39230 In room 33 on the 8th floor of Manhattan Mini Storage, Jeremy Bold unwraps a white flag. On the flag is a pair of scissors and the word “UNCUT” wrapped in a scarlet circle. Bold arranges more flags, as well as spray painted posters and several dozen cardboard signs. The signs discuss fear and greed, tax dodgers, people versus profits, Obama, Reagan and the 99%.

One and a half miles away, at Zuccotti Park, Samara Smith reconstructs the pre-eviction atmosphere. Since September she’s been capturing ambient sounds–including chants, songs, and teach-ins-—from the protests, and now she records people’s memories from the occupation. She’s creating an immersive audio walking tour of the space.

In Washington, D.C., Howard Besser, the director of New York University’s Moving Image Archive program, prepares for a call. His organization in New York, the Activist Archivists, have placed a laptop with Skype on Besser’s usual spot at the table. Their discussion will include best practices on categorizing and mapping Occupy videos, creative commons licensing and informed consent, and digital collaboration.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on November 15, NYPD officers in full riot gear raided Zuccotti Park, and the Occupy Wall Street movement lost its space. Now groups and institutions—including the Smithsonian’s Natural Museum of American History, NYU’s Tamiment Library and the New York Historical Society— are working to enshrine the movement in the form of an archive.

But who, in the end, will get to tell the definitive story?

The major players in the OWS archive (Visualization: Hiten Samtani/The Brooklyn Ink)

 

Jeremy Bold sports horn-rimmed glasses and a Tahrir Square inspired beard. The 27-year-old recent graduate of NYU’s library science program is a key figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement’s archives group. He points out that that the word “archive” derives from the Greek arkheion, which refers to the home or dwelling of the Archon, or ruler. The first archives were filed at the Archon’s home, and he would decide what documents would enter the historical record. “The idea was that it can’t be like that,” Bold says of the Occupy Wall Street archive. “We can’t structure it like that if we want to represent the people and claim that the people are the arbiters of their own history.”

Bold has been floating the idea of an initiative he believes would better fit the ideals of a movement that was intentionally leaderless. He calls it an anarchive, an archive that would distribute power and responsibility for collecting material among the people. “We cannot possibly capture everything that is being produced in this movement,” he says. “What better way to make the archive accountable to the people then to make the people accountable for the archive?” Everyone in the movement, he says, should be responsible for thinking historically.

Jeremy Bold at 60 Wall St. (Photo: Hiten Samtani/The Brooklyn Ink)

But absolute democracy can spell trouble for an archive in the absence of efficiency and direction. The initial material for an archive usually comes from the “heroic narrative of key players,” says Richard John, a historian of communications and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School Of Journalism. He says archives of movements such as the civil rights movement began with the personal documents of figures like Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. “Individuals have letters,” he says. “That’s where history is derived. Can we think of a major historical movement without a central figure?”

John says that the archive project’s leaderless nature means that the movement’s message will be lost in the noise. “If you don’t believe in leaders,” he says, “you might say ‘Oh my God, I have to collect everything.’ ”

For now, that’s exactly what the movement is doing. Shazz Baric—whose legal name is David McNerney—is in the public atrium at 60 Wall Street. The building is the national headquarters of Deutsche Bank. But its public atrium is a privately-owned public space that has become a de facto conference space for OWS groups. Baric heads towards the street, swinging his shoulders noticeably when he walks. He chews on his cigarette. “Hey sweetie, have you got a light?” he says to a woman walking by. Baric is bullish about the archives project. “It can serve as a function in transparency, democracy, humanism,” he says while tugging his scruffy beard. He had been staying at Zuccotti Park until the eviction. He first came in to New York from California on November 1 to pitch his book on radical politics, “The Complete American’s Guide to REVOLUTION.” He talks rapidly about the archive’s scope: tweets, Facebook feeds, oral histories, physical and digital ephemera: “It’s going to be one of the most ambitious and complex digital initiatives ever undertaken.”

He enters an office at 50 Broadway, a few blocks from 60 Wall Street. The office is home to several of the movement’s groups. Past the green and black Nirvana poster on the far wall is a space for cubicles. Here, Baric pulls out an oversized garbage bag and retrieves a fist-sized piece of an electric blue banjo. He says it was retrieved from the Department of Sanitation after the police’s overnight raid. “We also retrieved the bodies of puppies that were crushed during the eviction,” he says, “but we couldn’t keep those.” (Note: There are various posts on social networks such as Facebook and reddit about the puppies, but no confirmed reports.)

The garbage bag also contains a poster of a young girl mouthing the words “We are the 99%,” a rolled-up infographic showing the disproportionate wealth of “the 1 percent”, and a Spy vs. Spy adaptation of Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope” poster. The current storage arrangement is hazardous to long-term preservation; the environment is not controlled for light and temperature, and lumping together artifacts in a garbage bag could lead to mold.

But the immediacy of this problem doesn’t resonate with some members of the archives group. “Maybe at some point, but we don’t have to worry about it now,” says James Molenda, 32. He wears a bright blue sweater and a furry dog-eared hat, balanced against a perpetual frown and a slow, monotone voice. He is the managing editor of FOUND Magazine, a sporadically published collection of crowdsourced notes, letters and photographs. He is focused on cataloging artifacts as they come in and tagging them according to theme and medium. “For example,” he says, “a cardboard sign protesting police brutality would be dated, tagged with “police” and “cardboard” and entered into the catalogue with a low-resolution photograph.” The next stage involves, he says, “those who are trained for this stuff,” referring to the library science students such as Bold, who can organize the catalogue in a meaningful structure that would allow a narrative to form.

Scroll through the slideshow below to see the movement’s own OWS Archive

SimpleViewer requires JavaScript and the Flash Player. Get Flash.

 

Meanwhile, a few miles north at the New York Historical Society, Matthew Murphy, head of cataloging and metadata for the society’s library, opens a brown box. Inside are flyers, posters and other ephemera that call for affordable housing, better healthcare, and the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It may sound very corny,” says Jean Ashton, the director of the society’s library, “but without the aid of original records, history is nothing more than a tissue of myth and fable.” Ashton and Murphy are spearheading the society’s own Occupy Wall Street archive. Ashton says that the society discussed collecting ephemeral material shortly after the movement began. “It’s not up to us to judge whether this will be remembered for posterity,” she says. “Even if it’s a small thing, it’s a piece of New York history.”

The society, she explains, is comparing the print and design aspects of the Occupy material to older protests, such as the 1930s unemployed workers’ movement, in order to form a coherent historical thread. But while that earlier movement was focused on economic hardships, Occupy Wall Street expresses a mixed bag of malaise. The material in the society’s archive ranges from tirades against capitalism to frustration with hydrofracking. It, she says, is “an almost random collection of objects as they impinge upon the consciousness of the public,” and that it’s not her job to judge the content.

Murphy also speaks to the diversity of the collection. “In a way, it does our work for us,” he says. “It shows the zeitgeist of the movement.” He says they are leaving the collection of digital material to other groups, including NYU’s Tamiment Library and Moving Image Archive program and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. A number of groups are approaching the archive in different ways and Murphy says “it’s important to know best practices” to collaborate.

The Smithsonian’s Natural Museum of American History is also building an archive of Occupy Wall Street. But Valeska Hilbig, the museum’s deputy director for public affairs, said that staff would not be prepared to speak about the archival process beyond their official statement. “Historians like to take the long view and see how things play out. They wouldn’t feel comfortable to discuss it until they have had a chance to get the historic perspective,” Hilbig wrote in an e-mail.

The movement itself seems to see such institutional interest in the OWS story as a Catch-22. Only institutions have the expertise and money to create an archive with long-term viability. But the movement’s organizers say losing control of the archival process is akin to losing control of the movement’s narrative. “The last thing we want is the historical record of OWS controlled by people who aren’t in OWS,” says Molenda. There is also a fear that surrendering the archive to institutions will allow the movement’s story to be influenced by politics. Richard John concurs. “All archives are tainted by politics,” he says. “There is no such thing as a neutral, unmediated archive, no such thing as a perfect transcript of any event.”

Amy Roberts, 35, is a graduate student in library sciences and archiving at Queen’s College. She works with Bold in the movement’s archives group to make sense of all the material coming in. The concern about political influence, she says, is “part of why we’ve tried to keep this independent as long as possible.” Bold says he has been collecting “stuff” from the movement’s General Assembly prior to September 17. He has a copy of the Bill of Particulars from the June 14 Bloombergville protests, whose organizers are now key players in the Occupy movement.  He keeps signs at the office space on 50 Broadway and at his own apartment. He also pays $180 out of his own pocket to store some material at Manhattan Mini Storage. The archives group gets a provisional budget of $100 from the movement’s General Assembly and they have to account for the money spent before they can receive any more. They are designated as a “working group” within the movement. Other groups have “operational group” status and receive regular funding. The archive group’s request for $3,940 to cover storage, transportation and equipment costs was tabled at a budget meeting last month. This happened right after a $29,000 proposal to send protestors to Tahrir Square in Egypt was approved by the General Assembly, Roberts says.

The OWS Archives Group budget proposal was rejected by the General Assembly (Screenshot courtesy nycga.net)

“There are problems to maintaining an independent archive,” Bold admits. “Practicality may require us to cede control.” But he says he doesn’t know how to have that conversation with the General Assembly. “I can’t just say, ‘Do you want to ship it off to the Smithsonian?’” Roberts says that this is not an option but does see the pressing need for space. “We need somewhere to keep the stuff,” she says. “It can’t be a basement. It can’t be an office hall.” The movement is collaborating with Michael Nash, the director of NYU’s Tamiment Library, which is a center for research on labor history and radical political movements. Tamiment supplies the archive group with equipment and is helping the group develop a process for collection and cataloging material. The library has also offered its storage facilities to the movement. “We might end up trying to process everything, and then eventually deeding it to Tamiment,” Bold says. “But we won’t do that without the approval of the movement. The GA has to decide.”Still, Richard John believes that the movement’s own narrative is doomed unless it bands together with an institution that has the funds and the know-how to create an archive. He says that without an archive, no historian will try and make sense of the movement. He doesn’t give much credence to an independent archive. “It doesn’t have a prayer,” he says, as his voice rises. “The idea strikes me as a little naïve.” An archive is eventually framed by historians in relation to some other phenomenon that sheds light on it, he says.

But to get to that stage, the archive has to last. John says that there is roughly a 15 to 20 year lag between an event and serious historical analysis of that event. “We’re just getting to the 90s,” he says, and points to David Kirsch’s archive of the dot-com era, a database of firms that were created to commercialize the Internet beginning in the mid-1990s. “Archivists think in terms of shelf feet,” John says. “How much shelf feet would something like this require?” Without trained historians, he says, there is no way to establish provenance, information such as time, location, and the creator of an artifact. “It’s quixotic. I’m cheering for these guys. But over a long period of time, it’s unrealistic.”

Jean Ashton of the New York Historical Society says that the movement doesn’t have the knowledge to see the project through and that their refusal to accept help will hurt the archive. “This particular protest is,” she says, “I can’t say paranoid, but they are certainly concerned about using the information.” Although there are always value judgments involved in an archive, she says, the historical society isn’t presenting the Occupy story with a view, adding that the archive could have educational value. “Occupy Wall Street can use the archive to make sense of their own movement,” she says. People outside the movement, including high school students, could get involved to learn how history is organized and conserved, she says.

Matthew Murphy, with the New York Historical Society's OWS Archive (Photo: Hiten Samtani/The Brooklyn Ink)

 

A July 13 blog post from anti-consumerist Adbusters Foundation introduced the idea of Occupy Wall Street. The Internet group Anonymous encouraged “netizens” to take part. An Occupy Wall Street Facebook page chronicled the early protests. Protestors mobilized in large part through social media channels, and since then millions of photos, videos, statuses, and tweets have captured the emotional timbre of the movement. It’s fair to say that the Occupy movement has been propelled digitally.  But the movement’s own digital archive has yet to take off.

“It was clear to initially focus on the physical elements, as they are much more susceptible to disappearing,” Bold says, adding that the digital efforts so far include a compilation of the major Occupy websites and mailing lists and the beginnings of an oral history project. They’ve barely scratched the surface, he says, in archiving social media. “I can’t even figure out how to archive my own Facebook feed, much less a movement.” For now, initiatives such as the Occupy Wall Street Screenprinting Lab on flickr and the Occupy Wall St. Care Packages on tumblr are among the few attempts at capturing the movement’s zeitgeist through social media.

Samara Smith, 40, an assistant professor of media studies at SUNY, is doing the groundwork for collecting the oral histories. She describes herself as a “Thursday daytime occupier.” In the course of capturing material for the audio walking tour of Zuccotti Park, Smith made contact with several people who are willing to share their stories.

“I’m looking for as broad and diverse a representation as possible,” she says, “including people who may not necessarily be the first to tell their stories in video and the mainstream media.” The movement, she says, wants to ensure that people understand how their oral histories can be used. It has drafted consent forms that employ two different types of Creative Commons, a copyright license popular on the Internet. The first lets others remix, tweak and build upon content as long as credit is given to the original source. The second, more restrictive type of license allows people to share works, but not change them in any way. The third license–which Smith says is mainly for people concerned about the legal ramifications of sharing their stories — allows the content to be used for research and archive purposes only.

But Smith stresses that the oral history project is in its infancy. “History requires a certain distance and reflection,” she says. The oral history project, she says, lacks proper equipment and trained volunteers, and this will lead to a delay in getting it started. She is concerned that the delay will mean that she won’t be able to capture the experiences of some of the occupiers, especially out-of-towners who have been displaced by the eviction.

Anna Perricci is a new entrant to the Occupy movement and is a graduate of the University of  Michigan’s archives and records management program. She specializes in digital archiving and says the movement’s archive is still in the needs-assessment stage, the first stage of a digital archive. “We currently are considering nuts and bolts kinds of questions about how best to manage digital files within our financial means,” she says. “We are also examining more philosophical questions about why the work we are doing is important to the movement and how it might be represented in the future.”

These meaning-of-life questions might reek of self-importance to some, but others see them as vital to the archive’s eventual viability. Perricci began thinking about these questions after making contact with the Activist Archivists group. The group’s members are mostly students, faculty and alumni from NYU’s Moving Image Archive program. Howard Besser, 59, who directs the program, says the Activist Archivists group was formed roughly eight weeks ago in response to what he calls the “blunders, bad blunders” made by the movement’s archive group: “My students came to me and expressed their frustration with the way things were going down. We decided to form a group that would focus on the digital aspect of the archive.”

Howard Besser, Director, NYU's Moving Image Archive Program (Photo: Courtesy H. Besser)

 

Besser believes that the hurdles the movement’s archive group faces are largely of their own creation. “They made the assumption that everyone recognized the value of what they were doing,” he says. “They made no effort to say why it should be done. And they didn’t do their homework.” He is exasperated by the movement’s naiveté when it comes to issues such as budget, expectations and scope, and doesn’t understand their refusal to cooperate fully. “They are not trying to sound like they are qualified and thinking about the archive in a holistic way that serves the movement.”

The Activist Archivists, true to their name, have taken matters into their own hands. They’ve been creating best practices for archiving user-generated videos online. They’ve been in touch with Ashton and Murphy at the New York Historical Society, George Mason’s Center for New Media, Michael Nash at Tamiment, David Millman at NYU’s digital library, as well as Internet groups such as Witness and the Internet Archive. “Lot of the players involved are working on the boundaries of their institution, and they’ve taken a personal interest in this,” Besser says.

In the spirit of the movement itself, he says, the Activist Archivists group is non-hierarchal. There is no boss. Just a facilitator who takes it upon herself to coordinate discussion topics, setup Google groups, and document the process. Anna Perricci from the movement’s archive group is also involved, and Besser says she’s been “taking copious notes to take back to the movement.”

Besser uses the process behind audio recordings to explain the Activist Archivists’ methods. For example, one archive contains the recorded discussions of the Think Tank group, the movement’s working group that debates larger ideas that spin out of the movement. Multiple points of failure—things that could go wrong, such as forgetting to date the recordings—have been factored into the archive, he says. “All of the audio is dated, plus at the beginning of every recording, someone says the date. We’re also trying to write simple code to make the spoken audio at the beginning of the clip indexable. Following this process will ensure that the material they archive is identifiable, discoverable and preservable.”

In response to the challenge of archiving the vast collection of YouTube videos, Besser wants to crowdsource the selection process. This sounds like Bold’s “anarchive” concept, but in this case, there’s a method to the madness. Besser says that the Activist Archivists will give people a few pre-established categories, such as internal working process of the movement, celebrity visits to the protest and confrontations with authority. People can then vote on the five most important videos in each category, and these videos will make it into the archive.

Besser believes that many of the movement’s concerns are irrelevant to a digital archive. “Digital archives can live in many places simultaneously,” he says, on the issue of institutional control. He also says that the project is possible with limited resources. “Our time, and  $8 to register a domain. That’s been our cost.” Digital storage is shared among groups such as the Internet Archive and Tamiment, he says.

The real challenge, he explains, is to capture the complexities of OWS in a way that is accessible. He is a veteran of social movements including the anti-Vietnam war protests and the American anti-apartheid protests, and as an undergraduate he focused on the history of social movements. But he says this archive can take draw little from previous movements. “The residue that persists from these movements is low-bandwidth,” he says. “Cultural critic Greil Marcus called them ‘lipstick traces on a glass.’ They really don’t have the glass itself.”

 

Jeremy Bold, at the OWS archive (Photo: Hiten Samtani/The Brooklyn Ink)

 

But why bother archiving Occupy Wall Street, a movement that is only three months old and is yet to produce any significant systemic change?

Bold is convinced the message of Occupy Wall Street will last. “If I had any indication that this event could be important historically,” he says, “it was based on a commentary I had read on 9/11 by Jacques Derrida. In it, Derrida said that everyone that went through that experience on that day knew that this was a big deal. There were collectors and curators who went out and collected stuff in the first week. They knew that this was a memorable event and knew that they needed to help make it be that. To me, the events of September 17 (the first day of the Occupy protests) had within them the same kernel of historical fact.” It’s a rather bold comparison.

Kenneth Jackson is a Columbia University historian and the former director of the New York Historical Society. He says that while he was the director of the society he made the decision to collect material on 9/11. He says Occupy Wall Street’s unfocused nature and “ephemeral impact” means it does not rise to that level of significance. “My opinion is that the Occupy Wall Street archive is not that important and not worth the cost to house it for the next hundred years,” he says.

Richard John takes it a step further. He likens the archive project to the Works Progress Administration from the New Deal, which employed  millions of unskilled workers on public works projects. “They’re trying to find a way to keep them occupied,” he says.

Meanwhile, Ashton says that the historical society will watch where the movement goes. “If it goes under, we have what we have,” she says. “And if it explodes, we’ll allocate more resources to it.” She puts the archive into perspective by saying the society also collects Chinese restaurant menus and “girlie cards” from the 1980s Times Square red-light district. “The aim is to capture the tenure and feel of life in New York.”

And SUNY’s Samara Smith says that she sees threads of the anarchist movement and the civil rights movement in Occupy Wall Street. “I think social movements build up and then settle down,” she says. “Each time, ideally, they draw upon the lessons of the previous movements. The OWS archive will help line more threads.”

For Besser, the battle of the Occupy Wall Street narrative is not a battle at all. The dream scenario for him would be an archive designed in the spirit of the movement. He envisions an archive that would allow people to build things on top of it and thus craft multiple narratives. “Think of a museum exhibit,” he says. “Someone—in this case the curator—has created a context, threading a story through individual objects. The online museums, the museums of the future, will allow individuals to each tell a different story with the artifacts. Everyone should be able to be a player, find interesting objects and weave a narrative thread between them.”

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Andrew Katz / The Brooklyn Ink

It took mere hours on Nov. 15 for hundreds of New York Police Department officers, under the orders of Mayor Michael Bloomberg for what he claimed to be deteriorating health and safety concerns, to tear down the encampment that protestors spent eight weeks constructing in a privately owned public space that they called home.

But just a few days after more than 200 protestors were arrested during a “Day of Action” that marked Occupy Wall Street’s two-month anniversary, the question of how the movement became so vulnerable to an attack lingers.

Protestors were initially portrayed as a nascent movement that objected to what they deemed to be unfair bank regulations, but as the weeks passed and the spotlight turned to the voices of the radicals and clashes with the police, the occupiers were ever more characterized as a purposeless group. A Nov. 16 poll by Public Policy Polling showed support among voters was waning, too.

Man Bartlett, an artist and part-time occupier from Bushwick, said it was only natural that the public lost interest and the conversation grew stale. “Like with any new relationship, in the initial phase will be a lot of excitement and a lot of support. As the movement develops and continues to grow, that initial honeymoon period will be over,” he said. “Once the story wasn’t ‘What are the demands?’ the story became more about ‘What are the internal struggles that the movement was having?”

Occupiers survived their first, temporary expulsion by the park’s owner, Brookfield Properties, on Oct. 14, but issues larger than sanitation began to take precedence over the following weeks. Zuccotti Park had become a breeding ground for problems the protestors could have avoided without a physical location.

The General Assembly doubled in time but halved in efficiency and its consensus-based form of decision-making, led by a team of rotating facilitators who spoke loudly and used hand gestures to move through agendas, began drawing fewer occupiers. A drifter could attend the open meeting and have as much say as an occupier in how thousands of dollars were spent. This ultimately led to the creation of the Spokes Council, which is essentially a smaller assembly that deals primarily with finances and logistics. Other issues in the park, including a sexual assault and reported drug use, as well as infighting between some of the more than 80 working groups also flared.

Alec Vincent, a 21-year-old occupier and culinary school dropout from Bay Ridge who made his living at Zuccotti as a shoe shiner, attributed the squabbling to the park’s hippie-homeless vibe and a visible difference between occupiers’ backgrounds. “Even though we’re all on the same socioeconomic level, there’s a class distinction,” he said. “I’m more afraid of an outbreak of violence within the park than from police.”

Eight hours before being ousted, Vincent said eviction wasn’t likely but acknowledged that the emergence of a visible hierarchy had begun to elevate tensions between occupiers. “There’s always leaders. You can’t not have leaders,” he said. “They’re just not official.”

A member of the occupation’s security team, Freddy Cepeda, of Bushwick, saw a leadership core materializing but thought eviction was inevitable because the park had become too unstable. “There’s people that were there for the right reasons and there were people that were there for the wrong reasons,” said Cepeda, 26. “It was just too much.”

At its peak, Occupy Wall Street raised more than $500,000 and drew 10,000 protestors for a demonstration in Times Square in mid-October. Thousands more took the streets in, among other cities, London, Berlin, Tel Aviv and Rome.

But as winter has crept closer, the occupiers erected so many tents that it became difficult to walk through the one-block park. The protestors had outgrown a home they were never entitled to and the mayor wanted to act before the situation worsened. So less than two days after similar occupations in Portland and Oakland were dismantled and the press was largely barred from reporting the raids, he gave the orders to take Zuccotti.

Bartlett, 30, called the move “deeply problematic” but wasn’t shocked the eviction finally happened. For nearly two months, he watched the movement’s initial concern of the bank bailout ramifications erode due to escalating problems within the park and the meaning of the “We are the 99 percent” becoming largely misunderstood.

“The problem is that not just that the disparity exists, but that the percentage of that one percent that is really exploiting the system and exploiting a huge percentage of the American public,” said Bartlett, who was arrested during the Wall Street demonstrations last Thursday and later pleaded guilty to one count of disorderly conduct. “And it’s difficult to put that into a tagline.”

He added that the movement that began with a tweet from Adbusters had become more structured and self-regulated. Long gone are the days when one “mic check” would be echoed by all of Zuccotti Park and the nights when hundreds of occupiers attended a general assembly that took only one hour. The leaders that few would acknowledge even existed had enacted enough rules that the city within a city was slowly, and publicly, crumbling so that only Guy Fawkes masks and NYPD barricades would be left.

From all this, it’s clear that Occupy Wall Street is down but not out—at least not yet. The movement is sitting on nearly $450,000 and still has encampments in major cities and college campuses across the country. Occupiers lost their park, but they’re staying in the public eye through coverage of how police officers treat the press and students, social media and smaller events, like the recent drum circle outside the mayor’s residence.

The occupation’s immediate future in New York isn’t set in stone. It’s regrouping, analyzing the past two months and hashing out a next move. For one, protestors gathered Sunday night at Duarte Square and organizers announced both a new “tenting” initiative and a plan to eventually take the space.

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