Undeterred by snow and sleet, the Stop Mass Incarceration Network continued to bolster the Weekof Outrage with ongoing actions across New York City on Wednesday. On Wednesday, the network helped to galvanize and support a slew of activist activity as more and more organizations continued to stand up by lying down, staging mass die-ins across the city as well as the nation.
The non-violent civil disobedience kicked off for the day in Herald Square, where the Stop Mass Incarceration Network led a die-in on the ground floor of Macy’s [photo by Alex Seel here]. After marching through the historic department chanting “this stops today!” forcing shoppers to peruse more than just the rails of retail, the group then headed out into the first snowfall of the season. They first marched to 52 Vanderbilt Avenue where they linked up with the grassroots organization Picture the Homeless in peaceful protest outside the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research where Police Commissioner William Bratton was being lauded with an award for his advocacy of “Broken Windows” policing. The entire group then marched back down 7th Avenue to Penn Station where they disrupted Amtrak travelers, dying-in yet again, this time in front of the station’s Christmas Tree.
Their efforts were matched by students of every age all over the city. At the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, over 100 faculty and medical students took part in the nationwide die-in effort, #whitecoats4blacklives. Organized by medical students from New York to Los Angeles, the aspiring doctors declared by the thousands that racial violence and police brutality is a “public health crisis…bias kills, sickens, and provides inadequate care.” And finally, downtown at NYU, over 300 NYU students laid down to die-in on famous trompe-l’oeil atrium floor of the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. They chanted “black lives matter” for nearly an hour, attracting a lot of attention because, as one undergraduate confessed, “we annoyed a lot of people because we were making a lot of noise and it’s finals.”
#WeekOfOutrage
