NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER NOVEMBER 22, 1985 PEACE PARK

After Four Years of Working For a Nuclear-Free World, Washington Protesters Face Regulations They Say Will Assault Their First Amendment Rights.

by Susan Hanson
Political Affairs Reporter

HAND-PAINTED and built with whatever materials their park- dwelling makers could collect, the row of signs stands squarely before the White House. Some are wooden, some flimsy poster-board and some bear photo reminders of the Hiroshima blast. For more than four years, the signs have stood along Pennsylvania Avenue proclaiming -- to Midwestern tourists, Washington bureaucrats, White House guards and, most recently, Great Britain's Prince Charles and Princess Diana -- their assorted pleas for a weapons-free world. Now they and their makers are under siege.

"This is a disgrace," muttered one Lafayette Park pedestrian as She hurried past full-time peace activist Concepcion Picciotto and her now embattled "Live by the bomb die by the bomb" billboard. In mid-August, the National Park Service, with regulatory muscle and full White House support, muttered its own complaint. Citing safety hazards and visual blight, park officials proposed a dismantling of the protesters' self- proclaimed "Peace Park". Beginning in January, the previously unregulated antinuclear vigil is likely to he regulated. The now-towering signs will be limited to six feet; protesters will be limited to two four--by-four foot signs apiece, and, with what critics say is an impossible demand, demonstrators be required to remain within three feet of their signs.

The park-dwelling protesters, an unconventional lot, have not taken the proposed regulations lightly. They claim the new rules are an attempt to censor their- antinuclear message and an assault on their First Amendment rights. "With four-by-four signs, my message is no more likely to be noticed than if I was sitting on a park bench reading a newspaper," said William Thomas, who began his nonstop disarmament vigil on the White House sidewalk in 1981. In 1983, park service officials, citing a presidential security threat, forced Thomas and fellow vigiler Picciotto to take their protest across the street. "The government is pushing the line further and further, and if they keep pushing, there won't be a line," warned Thomas, who several years ago abandoned his New Mexico jewelry-making business for full-time peace-keeping and street-living.

He and other Vigil protesters (including his wife, Ellen; Picciotto; 68-year-old Winnie Gallant and vigil newcomer Prima Blakus have vowed to draw the line, "They're not going to drive us away," declared Ellen Thomas who in 1984 renounced worldly possessions and mainstream living and joined her then future husband on the streets. The small but determined band is now mobilized. A petition drive Is underway, and a lawsuit, charging high-ranking U.S. officials with conspiring to undermine their freedom of speech, is in the courts. The group recently organized an additional pressure point: "Friends of the First Amendment In Lafayette and other federal parks," a broad-based coalition of peace groups and community sympathizers. Their cause has also attracted the American Civil Liberties Union -- which may file suit.

For longtime vigilers, the new Park Service rules are only the latest difficulty in their four-year fight to communicate their antinuclear message. They have endured cold winters, hunger, insults. arrests and repeated vandalism. Last Fourth of July, a group of conservative collegians arrived on the scene, destroying signs and mounting their own "God Bless America" billboard. Still, vigilers insist their job is not without its satisfactions. "Some passers-by will insult you, but others will thank you and bless you," said Gallant, whose downtown Washington apartment serves as a support center for the homeless vigilers. "We've witnessed the growth of the peace movement, and we are a tiny part of this thing that has brought (President) Reagan and (Mikhail) Gorsbachev together."

Blakus, who arrived at the vigil in June, has a simple answer for those who suggest the cluttered "Peace Park" is an eyesore: "I tell them nuclear war is a greater blight."

Inaugural Articles - 1997 - 1993 - 1989 - 1985 - 1981 -

January 1997

In case you're looking for us (White House Peace Vigil - Peace Park anti-nuclear vigil - and friends) our signs have been moved across Lafayette Park to H Street, as has happened every four years since the vigil began in June, 1981.

Meanwhile a dozen large mobile homes rest on the grass of the southern half of Lafayette Park for the construction crews' comfort. Police patrol regularly, in part to make sure no homeless people crawl under the empty trailers in the icy dark of night. The bricks where office workers and tourists usually walk have been torn up, and huge - ugly - three-story bleachers rise in the space where our vigil normally stands, along the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue, so the press -- for one afternoon -- may stay warm and dry and near bathrooms while President Clinton has his second inaugural parade. The bathrooms on the north side of the park are locked, though construction workers again (as in past years) have for their use several porta-johns which are locked at night. Fences of every variety are intricately laid out to block demonstrators into the northeast corner of the park during the Big Event.

Ronald Reagan tried to have a second inaugural parade but it was so cold Inauguration Day 1985, the president had to call it off, and the quarter-million-dollar bleachers went unused. We were shivering and dancing in the northeast quadrant of the park, giving credit to God for a good sense of humor.

The vigil began five months after Reagan's first inauguration. At that time, people were allowed to demonstrate on the White House sidewalk. After a campaign by the Washington Times in 1983, new regulations were written banishing the vigil to Lafayette Park. During the wee hours of the morning, when tourists weren't about, police hovered and often arrested the vigilers. Department of Interior lawyers wrote a "camping" regulation which was used to criminalize (see CCNV case, U.S. Supreme Court, 1984) what was formerly protected behavior (see Abney case, U.S. Court of Appeals, 1976).

Since there are private citizens who insist on paying for this desecration of Lafayette Park every four years (via the Inaugural Committee), we're stuck with the bleachers again this year. So I'm writing President Clinton asking him, as I asked President Reagan in 1985, at least to leave the bleachers up for the rest of the winter, for homeless people to get out of the cold, wet, snowy, icy streets. I'm not asking for us -- we will remain at our signs with the minimal amount of protection necessary to survive. We are asking on behalf of the homeless sleeping on the DC streets (in spite of police harassment) ... still, after all these years.

Ellen Thomas
PEACE PARK ANTINUCLEAR VIGIL
PO Box 27217, Washington, DC 20038 USA
202-462-0757
prop1@prop1.org

Regulations | Personalities | Information Center
Proposition One | First Amendment