“I’m really scared, they are doing the final Wood Street sweeps tomorrow, I have nowhere to go.”
Rocky, a disabled houseless elder RoofLessRadio reporter, spoke quietly on the phone from the last block on Wood Street, where houseless people have been pushed to after the violent evictions by the City of Oakland last year of their beautiful community known as Wood Street Commons.
She called me on Monday, as I stood in front of a line of hundreds of 20-foot-tall steel barricades, placed on public streets and sidewalks all over the stolen Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi lands known as Chicago.
Just beyond those barricades were hundreds more barricades of the same height and size, essentially incarcerating public sidewalks, streets, and blocks for the Democratic National Convention.
“You need to move back ma’am.” The order was mechanically barked to Cheri Honkala, formerly houseless mama, grandmama, organizer and founder of the Poor Peoples’ Army/Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign as she peacefully, humbly tried to deliver a citizens arrest warrant to the people leading the DNC. Heavily armed officers blocked her ability to walk down a public street.
Not ironically, the 20-foot-steel barricades that were placed all over Chicago were the exact same barriers used to block and destroy Aetna Street, a houseless peoples’ community in occupied Tovaangar territory, so-called Los Angeles.
They are as high and as prevalent as the barbed wire fencing being placed all over public streets to destroy and contain houseless communities on Wood Street Commons in West Oakland, in Sacramento at Camp Resolution, in Fresno, in San Francisco and on almost every corner that houseless people try to humbly survive, and in almost every settler town from Turtle Island to Palestine.
These terrifying connections of removal, erasure, arrest, and destruction were frighteningly evident. These are being documented by our houseless RoofLessRadio reporters across the Bay Area in our recent WeSearch release report: Sweeping us to Nowhere – While Silencing our Solutions
The violence being perpetrated against Rocky and all of our houseless bodies was why sister warrior Cheri and me and all of the Poor People’s Army were peacefully attempting to bring a citizens’ arrest warrant to the DNC.
“If you aren’t going to arrest me then let me pass,” Cheri repeated quietly to the military agents of the state increasing with every second around us.
“Why are you trying to arrest one peaceful mama, a grandmother, a woman alone walking on a public street and why are you even here threatening us poor people when the real criminals, the perpetrators and the wealth hoarders are in there?” I shouted at them, pointing to the looming red, white and blue letters spelling out DNC logo flashing in the background.
The first five officers increased to more than 300 officers lined up in military formation to surround Cheri, who refused to stand down. The frightening military-like officers descended on Cheri and handcuffed her as she continued to walk toward the so-called security perimeter near Damen Avenue and Washington Boulevard.
Cheri was charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, then released and picked up early Tuesday morning by members of the Poor People’s Army.
“Think of the amount of homes they could build from all the public money paid to police to arrest a peaceful woman standing up for humanity.” I continued to shout above the din of more and more police marching up to surround us.
This small part of public land which was part of the Chicago Housing Authority and the site of another RAD-destroyed housing project was a security checkpoint through which Harris and Biden motorcades had reportedly just passed through. After Cheri was put in a police wagon, she was held handcuffed for hours, before being taken to a police station for processing.
The Poor People’s Army won a permit, ordered by an administrative judge in February after a mistake by the city of Chicago for a missed deadline in response to the permit application. The original application, deemed granted by law, allowed them to march from Humboldt Park to the front steps of the United Center. But in the days and weeks leading up to the march, the city tried to get the group to change their route. As the group held their peaceful 48-hour vigil in Humboldt Park, they were harassed and threatened repeatedly by Chicago police, including threats to report families there to child protective services.
On the day of the march, police blocked some streets listed on the original permit application.
The Poor People’s Army struggle with the “permit” to march reminded me of our struggle to get permits to build and open a homeless peoples solution to homelessness we call Homefulness- —back and forth with lies and new requirements, and in the end arbitrarily rescinding it like it was never there.
The Poor People’s Army, of which I and all of POOR Magazine/Homefulness houseless, no-income folks are proud members of, is a national group, led by poor and homeless people. The Army arrived in Chicago after marching 91 miles from Milwaukee’s Republican National Convention in July, where they attempted to deliver a citizen’s arrest to the RNC .
“Poor men, women, and children are having their lives and limbs lost from expensive bombs provided by the Democratic Party while poor people’s lives are being lost to the preventable human rights violations here at home,” said Cheri at the press conference that proceeded the permitted march.
“Neither of these parties are parties of the people,” said ervolutionary Pastor Keith Collins, who also spoke on the mic at the press conference. “Jesus would not be down with the gentrification and removal of our people. He was not part of the Prosperity Gospel and taught and spoke on the necessity for the massive redistribution of wealth.”
In addition to revolutionary pastors like Pastor Collins, poor and houseless youth and elders explained the impossibility of trying to survive, much less ever thrive, as working poor mamas or houseless residents of any of these settler colonial towns, the connection of the genocide here to houseless people’s bodies and the genocide happening to our relatives in Gaza, Sudan, Haiti, and the Congo, to name a few.
“My baby was born in a tent. I have three generations of family in the Poor People’s Army and we are not giving up until there is justice for us poor,” said Tara Colon, organizer, mama and grandmother.
“I am a formerly houseless mom and managed to get a small home and now can barely pay my mortgage, I have three jobs and struggle to make ends meet,” Anne Honkala, a single mama in struggle with Poor People’s Army, said the conference.
Our march with all of these warriors was peaceful, prayerful and beautiful, until we realized the police were kettling us into a giant square, with no intention of letting us anywhere even remotely near to the convention center. So disrespectful. Every street had more than 50 lined up to block our entrance and keep us going around in a useless circle.
Back in Oakland, Thanks to some revolutionary legal work by Andrea Henson, lawyer and organizer with Where Do We Go, and the ongoing resistance by hundreds of housed and houseless warriors and advocates at Love and Justice in the Streets, the Anti-Police Terror Project, POOR Magazine and many more, there was a temporary restraining order issued to stave off the last violent Wood Street Commons Sweep. “I heard they not coming today, Tiny, at least maybe I have a little time to rest, but I still have nowhere to go.”
