My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
By the time I was 23 years old, I had multiple arrests.
I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then.
Initially charged with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest I was held for 36 hours, was beaten by cops and made to stand spread eagled against the cell wall for 12 hours with no food or water, until I collapsed. Everyone was strip searched on the way in.
I've never been arrested. I've been stopped, searched and had a gun put to my head by the Chicago cops.
I see people detained for simple INS violations.
In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state's failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.
I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.
I studied the philosophy and the discipline of non-violence in Nashville as a student. And I staged a sitting-in in the fall of 1959 and got arrested the first time in February 1960.
I was involved in some peaceful protests.
I was never jailed. The fact is that I was arrested, but I went into a diversion programme, and by that time I'd already begun working in what was called anger management. It was a painful and awful moment.