GRAND RAPIDS -- President George W. Bush was greeted by hundreds of protestors outside of his July 30 appearance at Grand Rapids Community College's Ford Fieldhouse.
A number of different groups called for protests outside of President Bush's visit including Clean Water Action and the Grand Rapids Chapter of the Sierra Club, the West Michigan Justice and Peace Coalition, the Grand Rapids Republicrat (un)Welcoming Committee, and the Grand Rapids chapter of the Michigan Democrats. As a consequence of many groups calling for their own meeting points and rallies, there ended up being four different meeting places for the protests, resulting in a crowd that was often split into two or three parts.
The West Michigan Justice and Peace Coalition had a rally in Veterans Park that attracted a few dozen people around 2:00pm, while organizers put the number at 50-60 people at its largest point. The Democrats' 1:00pm rally, which was called for at Lyon and Ransom (an area which was known as early as Monday to be a restricted area), attracted about 100 people who yelled anti-Bush slogans across Fountain Street at the police and a few Bush supporters selling buttons. The 2:00pm Bush (un)Welcoming at Lyon and Division, probably the most widely advertised of all the protests with wheatpasted posters all over the downtown area and hundreds of leaflets distributed about the event, had over 150 people before it moved east up Fountain in an attempt to get the different groups together into a single mass.
A large mass was achieved near the corner of Fountain and Ransom, an area with little traffic and nobody other than police and protestors. The group eventually moved down to Division, a major road where the group was visible to large numbers of passing cars. After this point the group moved around the downtown area, pausing at major intersections, cutting up through the GRCC campus to try to get close to the Bush Speech, and eventually stopping along Michigan Street where Bush's motorcade was greeted by signs, chants, and middle-fingers.
While the protestors were obviously anti-Bush, there were relatively few signs that supported the reactionary election of the Democratic Party candidate John Kerry who supports many of the policies most hated by anti-Bush people, specifically his support of the invasion of Iraq and ongoing support for the occupation as well as his ties to large corporations like CitiGroup. This was dramatically different than the June 4, 2004 protest against Dick Cheney when the majority of "protestors" simply waved Kerry signs.
Despite a call for “creative and autonomous actions" made by the Grand Rapids Republicrat (un)Welcoming Committee, no such actions materialized during the protest and only a few happened before the event. While none of these actions were particularly serious, there are reports that a Homeland Security billboard was defaced with Bush protest flyers, a number of tickets to the Bush speech were obtained from the Michigan GOP using fake names resulting in empty seats, anti-Bush messages were spray painted around town, and according to a Kinkos employee, a number of copy machines were rigged so that they would print anti-Bush slogans onto everything people copied. This was a stark contrast Bush's visit on January 29, 2003, when a large march took over the streets of downtown Grand Rapids and blocked major intersections eventually resulting in 13 arrests.
At the previous Bush visit, the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD) was clearly caught off guard, as they seemed to neither expect over one thousand protestors or a large-scale breakaway march that was able to effectively disrupt the downtown area. At Friday's protest, 200 officers were on hand (many deployed with tear gas), in addition to a number of undercover officers present within the crowd. In addition, the barricades blocking access to the security area were much stronger than the yellow tape and small metal barricades used last time Bush came to town, likely in response to an unsuccessful attempt to rush a relatively unprotected point at the 2003 protest. The GRPD used dump trucks as barricades, making an attempt to penetrate the barricades quite difficult. There were only a few reported incidents with the GRPD at the protest, they made a protestor remove a bandana covering his face, threatened to arrest people for standing on the wrong part of the sidewalk as Bush's motorcade passed, and pushed a few people for not moving fast enough on the sidewalk.
The Grand Rapids Republicrat (un)Welcoming Group also plans to welcome Kerry to Grand Rapids with an August 2 demonstration urging Kerry to end the occupation of Iraq, not to sign any more trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and to cut ties with his corporate backers.
