With the march down Michigan Avenue to protest the Iraq war just a week away, Andy Thayer was still arguing with the Chicago Police Department over logistics. The police had already agreed to let the march begin at 7 PM on Saturday, March 18, but now they were telling him to change the start time to 6:30. Thayer says they didn’t say why, but he told them all the participants–4,000 to 6,000 people from more than 100 organizations are expected to show up–had already been told it started at 7. At press time the police hadn’t responded, but Thayer says he has a permit for 7 and he’s sticking to it.
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Thayer, an office manager for a law firm and head of the coordinating committee for the ad hoc coalition pulling together the march, helped organize the 2003 march against the Iraq war that wound up on Lake Shore Drive. He was arrested and jailed overnight along with 500 other people. The following spring he and other activists asked the police for a permit to march down Michigan. The request was denied, and 3,000 or so people marched down Clark Street instead. Thayer calls Clark a dead zone. “Nobody hears your message,” he says. Last spring he again applied for a Michigan Avenue permit and was again turned down. Police directed people who tried to march on Michigan over to Dearborn or Clark. Thayer held a press conference at Michigan and Oak and got arrested.
Thayer let the issue drop, but he was annoyed: “If the city had just decided to be halfway reasonable and make a scintilla of the sort of concessions to us that they routinely make to the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, then we wouldn’t have this kind of drama.”
