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This story, a follow-up to the photo gallery posted last week, didn’t make it into this week’s Creative Loafing, but we thought it was worth a read.

A group of about 70 local activists gathered at Pioneer Park last week on May 1, the International Workers’ Day, with plans to march downtown and hold an unauthorized street party. Their main thrust was anti-war, but they also had a meta-message – assembling to assert their right to assemble.

“These May Day celebrations kind of have a tradition where you realize that it’s not about getting a permit, and it’s not about free speech zones, and it’s not about this kind of bourgeois idea of rights,” said New College student Andrea Ortiz, a main mouthpiece of the group, “It’s about a communal life where the streets are ours.”

And so the group skipped and stomped and sang their way down to Orange Avenue. When they arrived they moved the orange barricades, which had been planted there earlier by some of the activists, from the side of the road to the middle of the street.

A young man who identified himself as J Fraz, with skeleton ribs drawn onto his bare chest, jumped up and down on an overturned barricade yelling “Road closed! road closed!”

The others began to chant, “Whose streets? Our streets!”

It was only a matter of time before the first Sarasota Police Department officers arrived. Amy, a second-year student at New College who asked her last name to be withheld, was one of the group’s designated police liaisons.

“We just want to make sure that it remains peaceful,” she told Sgt. Mark Opitz.

Opitz replied that in that case, they shouldn’t be in the street.

“I think that everybody here feels that they have a right to –

“Be in the street,” Opitz finished. “You know, 3-year-olds can figure out whether to stay in the street.”

Police called in a transport van, apparently expecting a lot of arrests. When Chief Peter Abbott arrived, he went for a more diplomatic approach.

“It’s a protest of the war,” Amy said to him, “and I think the group believes that business as usual shouldn’t continue as long as the war goes on.”

Abbott nodded. “I don’t want to have anybody arrested,” he said. “I want to protect your right to peaceably assemble, but you can’t obstruct traffic.”

About 10 minutes later, police ordered everyone to the sidewalk. A local high-school student stayed put, and he was arrested and charged with unlawful assembly and resisting arrest without violence.

As things seemed to be winding down, Abbott walked by his fellow officers, smiling a Mr. Rogers smile, and said, “Only had one arrest – that’s great, huh?”

Soon enough, Mark Forsyth, 24, climbed a traffic pole and held his “NO MORE WAR” sign. He was taken away on a charge of disorderly conduct.

This led to another spat, this one between New College freshman Juliana Nalerio and officer Kelvin Williams, who said he was supposed to be home watching Good Times.

Nalerio told Williams about the protesters’ message and their right to assemble.

“We’re not stopping you from doing that,” he said. “We’re just stopping you from doing crazy stuff, like climbin’ on light poles, blockin’ the street.”

“If I wrote a narrative of everything that happened today,” said Nalerio, “everything would be symbolic of something,” Your account, she told him, was completely superficial.

“A police officer is a symbol,” she continued. “So you are enacting a symbol, and we are trying to enact our own symbols.

“You practice that speech at home?” Williams asked.

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