Tens of Thousands Rally, Urge Bush to ‘Wage Peace’

Tens of thousands of protesting Americans marched in the streets and hundreds were arrested Tuesday as anti-war demonstrators shut down the San Francisco Bay Bridge, rallied on college and high school campuses and invoked the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta.

Their common message, as one protester’s sign at a Los Angeles rally put it, was for President Bush to “wage peace” even as the clock ticked past the United Nations deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

Despite the many arrests, demonstrations were largely peaceful. Organizers seized upon the irony that the deadline had fallen on the birth date of King, the slain civil rights leader who advocated civil disobedience as a means of protest.

The dramatic wave of protests, both organized and spontaneous, reflected the nation’s anxiety over the prospect of war with Iraq.

The outpouring of anti-war sentiment was expressed in boisterous demonstrations and quiet prayers. Protesters ranged from students who simply skipped class to anti-war leaders who railed over loudspeakers against what they called belligerence by the Bush Administration. The largest demonstrations since the Vietnam era also left some wondering whether the nonviolent mood would prevail if war begins.

At 9 p.m. in Los Angeles--midnight at the White House--several thousand noisy protesters rallying at the downtown Federal Building observed 60 seconds of silence. Most sat or knelt on the packed sidewalks on both sides of Los Angeles Street. Some held candles. Others stood with their hands stretched to the dark sky, their fingers forming the peace sign.

As midnight approached on the West Coast, however, several hundred protesters downtown and at a second rally in Westwood--where the crowd had peaked at an estimated 1,000--began sitting in the streets, refusing orders by police to move. A handful of arrests were made.

Earlier a band of protesters had ventured onto the nearby Los Angeles Street Bridge over the Hollywood Freeway, snarling traffic as motorists slowed to honk and gawk.

In San Francisco, protesters seized a bigger bridge.

After first blockading the downtown Federal Building, San Francisco activists marched a mile onto the lower deck of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, closing the bridge for two hours.

When it appeared they might cross the bridge to the Navy base on Treasure Island, three squads of U.S. Marine Corps military police were dispatched. But the Marines proved unnecessary as demonstrators turned and headed back to San Francisco.

Beyond pushing, shoving and some vandalism, there were few altercations as police there arrested more than 500.

Protesters included more than 850 people who signed pledges saying they would allow themselves to be arrested Tuesday in the spirit of civil disobedience.

“Getting arrested is one of the strongest messages,” said Sister Mary Kay Hunyady, a Roman Catholic nun who helped organize the demonstration. “It’s saying I’m willing to be put in one of those lousy cells for what I believe.” She said she was especially proud of a nun in her order who at age 62 was arrested for the first time on Tuesday.

“If this is social unrest today, social unrest will geometrically increase (if shooting breaks out),” Hunyady said. “People will go--I don’t want to say wild. People are really mad.”

The boldness of the bridge takeover was evident to the entire crowd, which at one point chanted, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

San Francisco’s protests stood out among scores, probably hundreds, of sometimes theatrical demonstrations across the nation. More arrests were made in demonstrations outside the White House and the United Nations, where protesters numbered 5,000 and the rally featured the burning of an American flag.

The outpouring of anti-war sentiment could be witnessed in smaller locales as well.

In Eugene, Ore., marchers carried a 10-year-old girl inside a body bag to the front door of the federal building there as a symbol of war’s innocent deaths. At Stanford University, protesters laid a symbolic grave for the 100 American service personnel who have already died while deployed in Operation Desert Shield.

In Missoula, Mont., more than 1,500 people braved freezing rain and ankle-deep slush for a anti-war rally at the University of Montana. In Des Moines, Iowa, two demonstrators disrupted Gov. Terry Branstad’s state-of-the-state address. “It’s a desperate time. We did what we can,” said Brian Terrell.

At San Bernardino City Hall, auto upholsterer Antonio Mora waged a lonely, solemn protest of his own while 100 anti-war activists rallied near a statue of King. Mora held a cardboard sign aloft at the edge of the crowd. It read: “Stop Saddam the Nuclear Madman.”

“This crazy has committed genocide on his own people, so how can anyone think he will not drop a bomb on us?” Mora asked. His 22-year-old son, Mario, is a Marine corporal from El Toro now deployed near the Kuwaiti border. “It’s hard for me to say we should attack, because my son is there. But you’ve got to evict the non-paying tenant. Time’s up.”

Protesters everywhere advanced an array of social agendas. The money that would be spent on war, they said, would be better used for education, health care, housing, AIDS research and other concerns.

The broad scope of demonstrations in part represented months of organizing by national anti-war coalitions.

In Atlanta, the home of King and his birthplace and grave, more than 1,000 protesters marched in a driving rainstorm for a religious service at the church of the fallen civil rights leader.

“We call upon President Bush to give peace a chance,” said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Lowery said demonstrators gathered in Atlanta “to resist the insensitivity of the Bush Administration to minorities . . . in failing to recognize the inappropriateness of utilizing Jan. 15, the birth date of the advocate of peace as the deadline in the sand.”

In tone and style, the march resembled a cross between the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and the civil rights rallies of the early ‘60s. Most demonstrators were college students too young to have participated in either of the earlier protests, but the singing (“We Shall Overcome”) and chanting (“Peace Now”) echoed the past.

Protesters across the country included activists from a wide array of political and social groups, as well as many newcomers to activism.

In Los Angeles, Steve Meyer, 69, said he was attending his first protest ever. This war, he said, would be “useless. It’s a needless thing.”

Heather Morris, Tracy Wood and Yvette Yang, all 14, skipped their ninth-grade classes at Pasadena High to protest in T-shirts painted with the peace symbol. Heather said her parents approved; Tracy and Yvette said their parents thought they were in school.

Harris reported from Los Angeles and Stein from San Francisco. Also contributing were Times staff writers Sam Fulwood III in Atlanta, Dan Morain in San Francisco, Jenifer Warren in San Bernardino, Amy Wallace in San Diego, Miles Corwin in Santa Barbara, Tina Anima, John Hurst and John Mitchell in Los Angeles, Mark Landsbaum in Orange County, researcher Tracy Shyrer in Chicago and correspondent Dan Baum in Missoula, Mont.