Anti-violence protest march lands at Wrigley Field

> march Thursday afternoon along Chicago's picturesque Lake Shore Drive bordering Lake Michigan to one of the most historic baseball stadiums is the latest chapter in the nation's long history of protesters targeting places where they believe their anger goes unnoticed.

Organizers wanted to bring the movement to fight the violence that is typically centered on the South and West sides of the city to the more affluent North Side.

Police closed the southbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive between Irving Park and Fullerton Avenue shortly before 4 p.m., then reopened the lanes about 5 p.m. when the protesters walked up Belmont Avenue to head to Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs will be playing the San Diego Padres, arriving about 5:45 p.m., ABC 7 said.

The protest grew to about 150 people, reports said. Several hundred police officers were deployed, but no arrests were reported.

“It's not a requirement to get arrested to be part of the march, but we are willing to,” the Rev. Greg Livingston, co-organizer, told ABC 7. “In the Kingsian, Ghandi mode, if you fill the jails up what do you do with the rest of us?”

Barricades surrounded the ballpark. Police said they would not stand in the way of the protest, as long as it's peaceful. The Cubs kept the ballpark grounds off Clark Avenue clear to allow fans easy access to the park, and they let fans into the stands early, ABC 7 reported.

One of the demonstrators, Antionio Brown, marched with a picture of his son.

“My son was killed in 2015 on the Fourth of July. He was 7 year old,” he told ABC 7. “So I'm really just tired of the senseless violence. I'm trying to do everything that I can do to keep his name alive.”

“It makes no sense, with all the money being spent, why is it that we can't reduce homicides by 75 percent in Chicago?” asked co-organizer Tio Hardiman. “Why is it that we can't have one year with under 100 homicides in Chicago?”

The protest's strategy, made famous during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, has gained steam lately as protesters speak out on such issues as police brutality, racism, immigration, and even Confederate monuments.

More than a half century after police attacked protesters as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, massive crowds are marching in such cities as St. Louis, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, blocking traffic and shutting down businesses.

“In the last few years, yes, more of these are definitely happening,” said Stefan Bradley, who chairs the African American Studies department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “The biggest ally of the civil rights movement was the press, the media, and these younger activists are savvy with regards to garnering the kind of attention from the media that make local issues national issues.”

In Chicago, weeks after protesters shut down traffic on an interstate on the city's South Side to draw attention to gun violence in poor neighborhoods, the protesters planned to do the same with the march along Lake Shore Drive to Wrigley Field.

“I'm hoping we have enough to...block traffic, to be a disruptive force” Livingston said. “This is an act of civil disobedience.”

WHY HERE? WHY NOW?

As in many major cities, much of the violence that plagues Chicago happens in pockets of the city where both tourists and many residents rarely venture. So, to reach those people, organizers figured that there was no better place to bring their message than a road that brings people to the city's beaches, gleaming skyscrapers trendy restaurants and famed baseball stadium.

“Where can we make people most uncomfortable?” asked Livingston. “You want to go where they chill out and relax.”

It is a playbook followed by countless protests, including the one staged last fall in St. Louis when demonstrators angry over the acquittal of a former police officer in the fatal shooting of a black suspect descended on the downtown area. Within hours, they'd blocked traffic, prompted restaurants and bars to shut down, and even forced the rock band U2 to call off a concert that would have drawn 50,000 fans to the area.

CHANGING MINDS

Timuel Black, a prominent Chicago historian, said such marches are designed to change minds of people who watch them on television or witness them on the streets.

“The point is to carry themselves to where the more fortunate people are and hope they will sympathize with the reasons for that disruption,” Black said.

The Rev. Michael Pfleger, one of the organizers of last month's march that shut down traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway on the city's South Side, agreed. “You are always saying, 'How do we express our anger and our outrage but still bring more people in,'” he said.

THE RISK

It would be hard in San Francisco to find anyone who would argue about the importance of protecting the majestic redwoods of Northern California. And yet, when protesters, including actor Woody Harrelson, scaled the Golden Gate Bridge to protest logging of redwoods, the overwhelming feeling was anger toward the activists for snarling traffic for hours.

Motorists were furious amid reports of that at least one family missed a funeral and a father missed the birth of his son. A local newspaper concluded that the “bridge-scaling antics certainly did more harm than good to the image of environmentalism.”

“The danger is that you are alienating (people) rather than draw them into the circle,” Pfleger said.

A protest's goal should be both worthy and attainable, he said. Pfleger declined to participate in Thursday's action in part because organizers are demanding the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson, something he says is “just not going to happen.”

Livingston isn't so sure.

“Everything is impossible until somebody does it,” he said.

And fellow organizer, the Rev. Ira Acree, said it doesn't matter if the march makes people angry at the marchers.

“This is a righteous cause,” he said.