SIDEWALK TALK: Marchers, escorted by Portland parking-enforcement trucks and journalists, head up Forest Avenue
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The controversial art of Thomas Manning, a man branded a cop killer by his detractors and a political prisoner by his supporters, returned to the USM campus that had sent it packing one week earlier when some seventy supporters gathered there last Friday to stage a rush-hour “moving art show” protest.
On the night that was supposed to have been the opening reception of the show “Can’t Jail The Spirit: Art by Political Prisoner Thomas Manning and Others,” the art that had been taken off the walls took to the streets. Several of the larger paintings, wrapped in cellophane to protect them from possible bad weather, were held up by the crowd for all to see, while many others carried smaller representations of the censored work.
Not everyone was there in support. When a small cadre of grim-faced Teamsters arrived to let their silent, glowering presence serve as a counter-protest, older marchers could be forgiven for feeling a moment of trepidation watching their approach. They perhaps remembered the Hardhat Riots in New York City after the May 1970 Kent State massacre, when construction workers, outraged that Mayor John Lindsay had ordered flags to half-mast in remembrance of the four Ohio dead, tore through the campus of Pace University, beating up hippies while cops watched. Thankfully, these are different times. The Teamsters present at Friday’s protest seemed quietly disgusted, but not enraged. And they were unfailingly polite.
“We don’t think it’s an appropriate subject,” said Jim Carson, whose union represents about 600 Maine police officers.
After demonstrating on campus, the protestors began marching to Congress Square, where there would be speakers, music, and a chance for the public to comment. The large group slowed traffic as it moved through Deering Oaks Park, with traffic stopped by police officers whose union had objected to the display of the art at USM. As they approached the gathered television news crews, their truck antennas visible all the way down on Park Avenue, the numbers swelled to over a hundred, not including media. Most of the passersby who acknowledged the crowd honked in support, but one guy who screamed “murderer” at the marchers did so while leaning out of a red Hummer, which drew a pretty big laugh.
“I’m just glad one of my kids isn’t walking down the street carrying one of that asshole’s pictures,” said a Portland police officer who parked his cruiser at the corner of State Street and Forest Avenue to watch them go by.
At Congress Square the speeches began. Paulette d’Auteuil, the wife of Bob Robideau, a man who was acquitted of charges from the same 1975 Pine Ridge Indian Reservation shootout that American Indian activist Leonard Peltier was sent to jail for, read a statement calling for the release of American political prisoners by Raymond Luc Levasseur, a one-time codefendant of Manning’s who, as a member of the Portland Victory Gardens Project, helped organize the USM show. (Levasseur had been cautioned against attending by his parole board.)
WORDSMITH TALKS: Maine novelist and activist Carolyn Chute gets attention
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Next to speak was Carolyn Chute, a leader of the Second Maine Militia (an anti-business, pro-gun group) and Maine’s greatest living novelist, who delivered a fiery speech in defense of art from a wheelchair, her husband Michael standing stoically behind her. The crowd warmed to Chute’s speech immediately as she defined art as “the pulse of life, the recreation of life’s moving shadow,” before stating “artistic giftedness is not given up by the heavens only to those who lawmakers or law enforcement deems worthy. Art is not a talent of the righteous and pure, not even of the most generous of spirit.” As proof she cited “Louis Ferdinand Celine, the angry one; Jean Genet, the criminal; George Orwell, the anarchist; Beethoven, the crank.”
Lynn Williams, a legal observer from the National Lawyers Guild, started with a quote from former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” There were a few people with opposing views in Congress Square, but none of them took the opportunity to use the microphone. Instead, only supporters lent their voices, preaching to the choir as the Portland Victory Garden Project began distributing food. The police kept watch from nearby, flashing peace signs, and then, oddly, gang signs, as the crowd chanted.
An hour after everyone arrived, when the cameras had gone, Jonah Fertig, another Portland Victory Gardens Project organizer, reflected on how USM’s decision to cancel the show might have been a stroke of luck. “I definitely feel like we reached more people” than they would have had the exhibit been allowed to remain. “And I would imagine that there are people in the State Troopers Association wishing they had just ignored it. Then it probably would not have been on the front page of the paper, and in the media for a week.” And it’s not over yet, Fertig added: “We will bring the show to a gallery, and we will continue to show that you can’t jail the spirit.”