November 2, 2011—Several hundred students and faculty rally and march from Laney College through downtown to Occupy Oakland in the city center.  Along the way the marchers were joined by others engaged in the Alameda Central Labor Council-sanctioned "Day of Action" activities, including shutting down several banks, dancing in the streets, and giving and listening to speeches about the need for the top 1% of income earners to pay their fair share so that the other 99% can have decent schools, services, jobs, and a future. By the time the marchers got to Broadway, chanting "We are the 99%,", there were more than 5,000 of them, and more coming all day long.  

That was just the beginning of what middle school teacher Andrea Prichett of Berkeley called "one of the best days of my life." Her sentiments were not unusual.  Everywhere you went in downtown Oakland on the second day of November, 2011, you could hear people saying things like "Isn't this incredible?" and "This gives me hope that the people can take power." What they were referring to was tens of thousands of teachers, college students, parents and their children, union workers, homeless people, professionals, unemployed, activists, and people who had never been to a demonstration in their lives, taking over the streets of an American city for a day:  no permits, no permission, none asked for, none needed.  And although the labor movement decided to make it a "Day of Action," instead of the "general strike" called for by Occupy Oakland, there was more than a little of the spirit of the 1946 Oakland General Strike in the air—an event that the Alameda County Central Labor Council, in that moment right after World War II, likewise declined to term a "general strike," and instead called "a work holiday."

Dana Blanchard, 32, has taught in Berkeley Unified for five years.  After teaching fifth grade until this year, Blanchard now works as an intervention specialist with at risk kids.  She took a personal leave day to attend the events that began in Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Square in front of City Hall.  In the morning she marched on a major bank, known for its discriminatory lending practices and refusal to pay its fair share of taxes.  It closed.  Then she went to a rally at Laney College, where she joined hundreds of faculty, staff, students and friends, their ranks increased by a steady influx of teachers from Oakland Unified, in a fiery rally on behalf the 99% who have been shut out of their future by the 1% who pay less than half the tax rates that they did in 1960, but who now take home double their former share of the national income at our expense. 

Blanchard left with the swelling crowd to join another rally in progress in front of the Oakland Unified School District offices.  Following that, the march—taking over the streets as it moved, and picking up marchers every step of the way—moved on the banks.  Wells Fargo, Citibank, B of A—one after another, branches of these giant institutions were shut down.  The crowd unkindly pointed out to each bank that "You got bailed out, we got sold out."  By the time the march left Bank of America, it was accompanied by the sounds of the Brass Liberation Orchestra, and led by a pair of gigantic blue and red balloons holding up a banner that read, "Defend human dignity; challenge corporate power."  And the march was still getting bigger, gaining nurses, technicians, communications workers. It poured onto Broadway, back toward Ogawa/Grant Square, and rolled past the Rotunda building (formerly Kahn's Department store, the epicenter of the 1946 General Strike).  And here the crowd stopped, occupying a half dozen blocks of downtown city boulevard, in what one young participant called "a protest carnival."

Many businesses sported signs in their windows, "Closed in solidarity with the General Strike."  Others put tables with water out on the sidewalks.  Old friends met and embraced.  New ones were made, chanting "We are the 99 per cent" together.  The multiracial crowd danced to blasting music in front of the stores and even more loudly, by the square.

Unlike the events of last week that sparked this demonstration, the march was peaceful, and the city of Oakland, having learned a hard lesson about police overreaction captured on video splashed across the planet,  ordered the city's cops to keep a low profile.  The strategy worked almost perfectly.  The large roving march behaved completely peacefully, policing itself.  (The one exception during the day occurred when an anarchist contingent held its own separate march, and smashed the windows out of a Wells Fargo bank. After midnight, after almost everybody had gone home, a small band of people attempted to occupy a building, started vandalizing and set a dumpster fire, drawing a predictable police response.)

After a quick lunch and breather, there were more marches, more dances, singing, more demonstrations, including a picket line by machinists outside a Mercedes Benz showroom protesting nasty bargaining by the company, an event which the IAM dubbed "Occupy Mercedes Benz."  But the most spectacular moment of a spectacular day began at 4 pm.  Hundreds of teachers arrived by BART from Berkeley and hundreds more from Oakland, joining Blanchard a few blocks away from the Square.  CFT and CTA members from San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley Unified districts assembled alongside community college faculty and students from both sides of the Bay.  People left all types of work early from across the East Bay to mass for the big show:  shutting down the Oakland docks.  A solid mass of people streamed out of the Occupy Oakland encampment for the entire two miles to the port.  It was easily fifteen or twenty thousand, row after row, banners and chants, and everywhere the numbers:  1% and 99%.  A second wave left at 5 o'clock, almost as continuous, almost as large as the first.  

The people flowed across the bridge over the train yards, large tractor trailers stranded like islands in the ocean of protesters.  The word spread:  we need a couple thousand people at each gate for the shift change at the docks, so that the longshore workers would have to call in an arbitrator to declare the docks "unsafe."  The people distributed themselves.  The docks were closed. I saw Dana Blanchard in one of those picket lines.

At the end of the evening, back at Ogawa/Grant Square, the Alameda Central Labor Council organized dinner for thousands of people.  Volunteer firefighters, teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers members, Unite Here, SEIU members and more:  they stood for hours behind the grills, flipping burgers and hot dogs, handing out bottles of water, and ladling rice and beans onto the plates of union members, non-union members, Occupiers, and everyone else who had come out to demonstrate their determination that this country has to change.  
—Fred Glass

Betty Olson-Jones, left, stands with Alisa Messer in front of one of the giant picket lines set up at the gates of the Port of Oakland.  They had marched over to the docks from Ogawa/Grant Square.  Betty is the president of the Oakland Education Association; Alisa is president of the San Francisco Community College Federation of Teachers.  Fred Glass photos