In the summer of 1981 a small group of women marched from Cardiff to the US airforce base in Greenham Common. They walked for nine days to protest at the locating of US cruise missiles there. Those women began what was to become one of the biggest acts of civil resistance ever to occur in the UK. The women stood together to block roads and to transform the space around the base in an act of defiance that would last for over twenty years. These women physically blocked roads, their bodies were peaceful symbols against the violence contained within the base. In both the Indian nationalist movements demands for the end of imperialism and the call for civil rights in America, blocking roads and reclaiming space acted as a means for disempowered people to symbolically mark the inequality and injustice they faced at the hands of unjust governments and ruling authorities. On the 9 March 1965 in defiance of authorities Martin Luther King led a March to a site where just days earlier protestors had been beaten and attacked. At the site of the attack over 2000 protestors knelt and prayed. This act of defiance was both part of a wider demand for African American calls for the vote and a show of peace – a counter to the brutality of an undemocratic ruling authority. ukuncut.org.uk/blog/why-block-a-road
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 20:13:59 +0000
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