I wrote this in November 2019 as the cover story for that month’s issue of the Daily of the University of Washington. Since then, the Daily has updated their website’s CMS and the article seems to have gotten swept up in the tides of change: it is no longer available online.
This is the article as it is preserved in my records. After a few rounds of edits from my editor, it passed from my hands into the Daily’s internal system and received a few more from highers-up. As such, it may not represent the final version as it went into print or was published online.
By Matthew Hipolito
Walking around Seattle on Nov. 29, 1999, you could easily believe that a festival was taking place. Beneath the cover of our city’s perennial overcast skies, thousands upon thousands of people roved about the streets. The sound of singing and dancing and drums and joyous, if irreverent chants both near and far wafted through the gentle rain.
In fact, the only indication that this was not a celebration was the message the people were sending, and the ferocity with which they were sending it. Those marching along the streets carried signs and shouted warnings of anger and upset and the ruination of livelihoods both in America and abroad.
These people were protesting the World Trade Organization (WTO), an organization dedicated to global free trade. The WTO’s meeting, or Ministerial, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3 at the Washington State Convention Center was to be — depending on whom you asked — a shining symbol of global cooperation to herald the 21st century, or the latest in a series of meetings and treaties that destroyed jobs, lifestyles, environments, and communities.
The WTO’s organizers hoped that the Ministerial would launch a new series of treaties and trade talks called the Millennium Round to further global free trade in the 21st century. Then-Mayor Paul Schell and other city officials hoped the Ministerial would be a celebration of globalism and a showcase of the beautiful emerald city that, through its port, was indelibly linked to the rest of the world.
And, throughout most of the planning and in the leadup to the Ministerial itself, the organizers and officials and planners were optimistic. For several days before the official start of the Ministerial, it seemed as if the entire weeklong conference, and the protests surrounding it, would be peaceful, with no major incidents. Police officers, standing guard throughout the city, reaffirmed their commitments to peace and expression.
Then, at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, November 30, 1999 — a date now so infamous within activist circles as to earn the moniker “N30” — at the intersection of 6th Avenue and Union Street, canisters of chemical gas fell from the sky, and all hell broke loose.
HOW TO BEAT THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION
The first inkling that John Sellers had that the WTO was coming to Seattle was about six months before the Ministerial. He had been at an “Action Camp” in Middleburg, Virginia, dedicated to teaching people how to conduct civil disobedience.
“Some folks who represented the Labor Movement in Washington, D.C. came out and told us that the WTO was going to convene a ministerial meeting in Seattle,” Sellers said. “That was late May of that year, and so we decided right then, during that camp, that we were going to spend the next six months throwing everything that we had at intervening with the WTO.”
Sellers is the director of the Ruckus Society, a “multi-racial network” that trains activists to engage in civil disobedience. Today, the Ruckus Society is a part of the BlackOUT collective, which was formed after the 2014 death of Michael Brown Jr. when young black activists attended a Ruckus Society training. Ruckus and BlackOUT practice a particular form of civil disobedience known as direct action.
Direct action, Sellers says, is about “taking action directly at the source of injustice.” For example, attendees of the Ruckus Society’s action camps learn to climb buildings, hang banners, form blockades, engage in political theater, write press releases, and more.
The months leading up to the Ministerial were a flurry of action. A few months before the Ministerial, the Ruckus Society helped to form the Direct Action Network (DAN), a loose coalition of activist groups that became one of the biggest players in the WTO protests. To support the DAN and to prepare for the planned protests required a lot of action in a comparatively short amount of time.
“We raised a couple hundred thousand dollars to help get the right people to Seattle,” Sellers said. “We secured the convergence space where everyone was organizing out of. We had an action warehouse that Ruckus opened north of the city to build lock boxes for blockades and to create the kind of giant puppets and things that we wanted for the parade and the blockade on November 30.”
“A EUROPEAN PHENOMENON”
On the other side of the protest line, planning seemed to be going just as well.
In 1999, the chief of the Seattle Police Department (SPD) was a 34-year veteran of the force named Norm Stamper. Born and raised in San Diego, Stamper was the “number two guy” at the San Diego Police Department when, in 1994, he was appointed by Mayor Norm Rice to be Seattle’s top cop.
“There will be a lot of people on the street, but my gosh, Seattle has a long history of handling political demonstrations, including civil disobedience, and occasionally, violence,” Stamper recalled telling his officers. “It dates back to the IWW days at the turn of the last century when the police were intervening on major labor issues. The Seattle Police Department has handled and oftentimes — usually — been praised for their restraint, for their professionalism in handling the demonstrations.”
Among the leadership of the SPD, Stamper said, the general consensus was one that “we had it handled.” Over eleven months of planning, the SPD engaged in 22,000 hours of meetings, doled out over 11,000 hours of training in plans and tactics outlined in “thousands upon thousands of documents”, crowned by a “voluminous” operations plan and backed by a contingency plan.
“We’d done research globally,” Stamper explained, “And had concluded that the violence that we have seen in other jurisdictions, whether it was IMF, original WTO, or any of these alphabet soup global organizations that are about international trade, that any violence associated with previous conferences in other parts of the world were essentially an European phenomenon.”
As the SPD would come to learn, it was not.
Stamper continued: “I believe that my naivete was on display during WTO.”
“A FESTIVAL OF RESISTANCE”
To direct action practitioners like Sellers, the selection of Seattle as the site of the WTO ministerial was like a dream come true.
“Seattle was pretty much the epicenter of the movements that were using creative direct action regularly,” Sellers said. “When the WTO chose Seattle, it was clear to a bunch of us that had been doing a lot of direct action that they were playing right into our hands because they were choosing to host themselves in a city where we could get thousands and thousands of direct action activists within a day’s drive.”
And those thousands turned out in force. Sellers, speaking at a live taping of the Crosscut Talks podcast, said that the DAN had 13 autonomous “affinity groups” that were assigned to blockade different streets around the convention center. He estimated that these groups consisted of 5,000 trained direct action practitioners that were later joined spontaneously by 5,000 more.
The blockades themselves were supplemented by displays of art in the streets. Sellers recalled fondly the political theater of the Free Tibet affinity group portraying children in prison uniforms surrounded by actors dressed as Chinese military.
“One of my favorite affinity groups was the Radical Cheerleaders,” Sellers continued. “That was a multi-gender; pan-gender squad of cheerleaders.” These cheerleaders, clad in the anarchist tones of black and red, gave sardonic calls for the end of corporate power and smashing the patriarchy. “They were awesome. They were really helpful in keeping spirits up.”
At one point, Sellers said, the Teamsters labor union arrived with a sound system mounted on a tractor-trailer and “just started blasting.” Between the music, the activism, and the dancing in the streets, he said, it seemed to be “a kind of a Woodstock. It was one of the best protest parties I’d ever been to, for a couple of hours.”
And an effective protest party it was. The SPD later wrote in its After-Action Report (AAR) that vehicular and pedestrian access to the Convention Center had been blocked by 8 o’clock, and protestors were ecstatic.
“We had completely surprised and overwhelmed them with the tactics that we had chosen, and we had peacefully shut down the biggest and most important business meeting to carry out the corporate agenda that had ever been planned,” Sellers said.
To observers like Mike Withey, the protests proceeded like clockwork. Withey, a human rights activist by trade, was a “legal observer” during the Ministerial, meaning he assisted in documenting the ongoing protests for independent media. Later, the evidence he collected would be used in a class-action lawsuit against the Seattle Police Department for violation of the protestors’ constitutional rights.
“I thought we did a great job of educating people before the protests about what this was about. It was an amazing mobilization and brought people from all over the world,” Withey said. “We had a huge seminar in Benaroya Hall downtown, and the whole concert hall was absolutely packed with people. It was very educational.”
Sellers’ affinity groups, Withey continued, were “very well-organized” after many trainings in the months leading up to November 30.
The largest and most visible protest was the Labor March, organized by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, was joined by at least 40,000 people, with Stamper estimating the number at 50,000 to 60,000 people.
ALL ACCORDING TO PLAN
Throughout the weekend, Stamper said, the SPD was largely “working the plan.” Stamper spent Monday “visible and conspicuous”, attending meetings and dealing with logistical issues like break time for officers.
By all indications, Stamper continued, the conference would continue to proceed as normal. “We’ve got mass demonstrations underway, and — not but, and — they are peaceful as forecast. We predicted peaceful demonstrations, so throughout Monday we’re thinking, ‘Sunday night, Monday, Monday night, it’s cool. We got it.’”
The protesters seemed to agree.
“I had people, many of whom were protestors, coming up to me, recognizing me as the chief and saying, ‘I just want to thank you for the professionalism and the restraint of your officers,’” Stamper said. “That was on the 29th.”
“ALL BETS ARE OFF”
Throughout the night of the Monday the 29th and the morning of Tuesday the 30th, it seemed that the plan would mostly hold. When protesters arrived at the intersection of 6th and Union that day, the plan was for police to conduct a televised mass arrest.
“A contingent — not all of them — a contingent of them wanted to be shown in flex cuffs, the white plastic handcuffs, and escorted to a bus, and put on that bus and driven away,” Stamper said. “Great TV. Here are anti-globalization protesters putting their money where their mouth is; putting their bodies where their mouths are, and submitting peacefully to a civil disobedience mass arrest.”
But that morning, at the intersection of 6th and Union, the plan failed.
“We couldn’t do it,” Stamper said. “We were outnumbered. Badly.”
The police, he continued, needed that intersection clear, in the event that an emergency vehicle needed to pass. The situation worsened as protestors from Myrtle Edwards Park, the Denny Regrade, and from the pre-planned and permitted Labor March, which had departed from Seattle Center, began to descend upon the space.
“The front end of that march got to downtown while the back end of it was still leaving,” Stamper said. “That gives you an idea of the scope of this thing.”
The SPD simply didn’t have the manpower to make arrests and police the intersection simultaneously.
“We would have been completely overwhelmed,” Stamper said. “We talked to them; we spoke to them; we spoke to the leaders with whom we had been meeting that week and said, ‘All bets are off. Sorry, but you can see we are overwhelmed.’”
The SPD was faced with a rapidly deteriorating situation in a strategically vital intersection.
“I made the biggest mistake of my career on Tuesday of that week,” Stamper said, “When I authorized the use of chemical agents against non-violent and indeed non-threatening protestors.”
“DEALING WITH STORMTROOPERS”
Sellers was there at 6th and Union, and watched the transformation of the police as they donned their riot gear.
“At first, the cops put on their riot helmet. And then they down their face shield. And each step in that process makes them less and less human, and takes away the cops’ humanity. And when I saw them starting to put their gas masks on, that was when I knew we were really in trouble.”
Prior to that moment, the interactions with the police had been friendly and cordial. Sellers had spent the previous night in jail for hanging up a banner over the city and had met the sergeant commanding the intersection that day.
“He was an African-American guy; I forget his name now,” Sellers said. “He seemed like a super solid guy, and he was super respectful of us, and likened us to the civil rights marchers back in the day.”
Sellers said that the police didn’t cherish their orders to clear the intersection with force.
“Seeing him commanding his guys, his squad, to put on their gas masks,” Sellers said. “I could tell he felt terrible about what he was going to have to do. And it was just really sad to see him have to accept these orders he was getting form above his head and pull that gas mask down over his eyes. And once those gas masks come down, it’s like you’re not dealing with humans anymore. It’s like you’re dealing with stormtroopers.”
Not long afterward, Sellers said, “the tear gas and pepper spray started flowing freely, and it just became a melee.”
CHAOS: “THEY FINALLY CRACKED US OPEN”
The use of tear gas at 6th and Union threw an already tense situation into chaos. By that time, the delegates had already been advised by the organizers to stay in their hotel rooms until peace could be restored. By 11:20, according to the SPD After Action Report (AAR), the police were forced to fall back from University Street. By noon, a press conference with American ambassador to the conference and U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky was cancelled. 45 minutes later, the Ministerial’s opening ceremonies were cancelled.
“[The protestors] tried to hold their ground and stand strong, but with tear gas, it’s incredibly difficult to hold your ground when you can’t breath,” Sellers said. “Your lungs are burning, and then the pepper spray in the eyes.”
The police then started moving in, dismantling blockades and detaining protestors physically. Although the protestors tried to hold out as long as they could, Sellers said, “when they’re using brute force and chemical weapons, you can only last so long. They finally cracked us open.”
THE MINISTERIAL
Despite the disruptions of N30, the ministerial opened at 9 a.m. on December 1 for the delegates’ scheduled first day of work. The SPD announced both a more aggressive stance and a no-protest zone around the convention center, enforced by the National Guard clad in brown-dominant ERDL camouflage.
Despite the new restrictions, protests continued. Contingents of people ranging in numbers from hundreds to over 1,000 roved about the city. A large group of them ended up at the Westlake Center shopping mall, inside the no-protest zone, where about 200 were arrested by police. These protestors later won a class-action lawsuit against the city, alleging that the arrests violated their constitutional rights by taking place without probable cause.
Another large group congregated along Pike Street and 2nd Avenue, causing property damage, blocking traffic and trapping citizens in cars, requiring dispersal using tear gas. Throughout the day, officers reported hostility and resistance from protestors.
By the end of the night, the East Police Precinct had come under siege by a group of about 400 protestors that steadily grew to a crowd of over 1,000 by 11:15 PM. The siege was eventually lifted through the use of tear gas, pepper spray, and less-lethal munitions such as rubber bullets.
The rest of the conference, the AAR reads, was mostly uneventful. A group of protestors who had encircled the King County Jail with permission from police failed to disperse after the agreed-upon dispersal time had elapsed, but eventually left after protest leaders ensured the wellbeing of protestors who were being held there.
The Seattle Ministerial ended quietly on December 3. The delegates, working overnight, had failed to reach consensus on many important issues, and there was too little time to continue the working process on the topics where progress had been made. “The conference,” the WTO’s website writes, “had simply run out of time.”
AFTERMATH
Although the events of the protests and the ensuing chaos were well-documented by journalists, police, citizens, and artists, the causes of the disorder and their effects are still, 20 years later, a subject of much debate.
For Stamper, the tumult and disruption can be traced back to one decision made at the intersection of 6th and Union on November 30. The violence and destruction was kicked off by, he said, “my failure to veto that decision on tear gas.” Twenty years later, he questioned his rationale at the time. “Did we really need that intersection?”
The question is rhetorical. For him, the answer is no.
“We could have avoided that [chaos] if I had said no to the tear gas,” he said. “If you tear gas nonviolent, non-threatening people, you’re going to make much more militant their response to the issues. You’re going to refocus from free trade, fair trade, economic policies, global issues of geopolitical importance and so forth to the police department. A great deal of the anger was redirected from globalization to the Seattle Police Department.”
That the SPD’s actions at 6th and Union turned the protest from peaceful to pandemonium is an assertion that seems to go unchallenged, even in spite of the ensuing media coverage.
“All the violence that was done was really done by the Seattle Police Department,” Sellers said. “It was hours later that the 20 or 30 Black Bloc anarchists; angry, young, white dudes showed up and started smashing up corporate property and stealing the whole narrative.”
Despite that, Sellers believes that Stamper doesn’t deserve all of the blame that the former chief places on his own shoulders.
“I can say that he’s the one who made the decision and gave the orders to his cops out in the street, but I think that he was under an inordinate amount of pressure from the Feds,” Sellers said, mentioning by name President Bill Clinton and Ambassador Barshefsky.
Withey nominally agreed. “It doesn’t justify anything, but, yeah, they were under pressure,” he said. “They were under pressure from the governor, Gary Locke. They were under pressure from Madeleine Albright and the Clinton Administration. It was a combination of, the ministerial meeting didn’t take place and the anarchists had their way that led to that pressure and [the response of] ‘Okay, well, let’s just arrest everybody we can.’ That’s not an appropriate police response. You can’t arrest people without probable cause.”
Just days after making one momentous decision, for better or for worse, Stamper decided to make another. The following Sunday, he resigned.
“I just absolutely believe that I am responsible for what happened on that morning,” Stamper said. “And what happened on that morning is what blew everything to smithereens.”
In the end, Stamper believes that Seattle should never have hosted the WTO in the first place. Even with more time to plan, there simply weren’t enough officers in the Seattle metropolitan area to control the protests effectively. According to the AAR, a total of about 1,700 officers were expected to police upwards of 40,000 protesters.
THE PAST AND THE PRESENT
Although it’s been 20 years since N30, the effects of the three-day “Battle in Seattle” continue to unfold.
To Dr. Eva Cherniavsky, a UW English professor who studies free trade, the WTO protests mainstreamed the idea that capitalism has failed in many ways and created the language we use today to discuss those failures.
“It was a really novel thing in American culture, which had always had, at most, a reformist relation to capitalism in terms of mainstream discourse,” Cherniavsky said.
According to labor historian and UW professor Dr. James Gregory, the protests also marked one of the first times that national labor groups, including the largest union organization in the United States, supported a progressive agenda. The WTO left indelible images of union workers alongside environmentalists clad in sea turtle costumes and the catchphrase, “Teamsters and turtles, together at last.”
After the WTO protests, human rights lawyer Michael Withey won a class-action lawsuit, arguing that the SPD violated the constitutional rights of the 200 people arrested inside the no-protest zone. Withey says that the inclusivity of the WTO protests foreshadowed the intersectionality that modern movements like the #MeToo movement, the immigrants’ rights marches, and the Women’s March demonstrated.
Stamper believes that the protests illustrated a deepening divide between police and the people they are sworn to protect. He believes that the police must be partnered with the community. Although the force may not be receptive to it, he said, citizens have the right to regulate their police.
“What’s wrong with citizens being involved in the investigation of citizen complaints? What’s wrong with legitimate citizen oversight, with teeth?” Stamper asked. “What’s wrong with citizens teaching in the academy, riding along with officers, being really involved in all aspects of police work?”
Dr. Michael McCann, a UW political science professor specializing in social movements, is “reluctant” to say that the WTO protests were the “first” of any kind, noting that protests that clash with law enforcement are as old as the country itself.
The most novel thing about the WTO protests, he said, was its effective use of emerging communications technologies like the internet, but even that misses the most important topic.
“The key question isn’t what they achieved,” McCann said. “The key question is not, ‘How do they do it?’ It’s whether they leave a legacy of inspiration for other people to pick up on and do it in a different way in a different time. And that’s what I think WTO left: an incredible image of activism and aspiration.”