If you only looked at the ways the University of Michigan and the press covered the encampments on the Diag, you would probably think of them as fortresses, rigidly divided from the campus community, both physically and politically. That was the justification for campus police attacking protestors and destroying the site on the morning of May 21st after all: the encampment was such an enclosed space that it posed a fire hazard to the people trapped inside. It was dangerous, we are told, because it was violently and self-destructively setting itself apart from the community.
But for people who frequented the encampment – especially those of us who did so without actually pitching a tent and hunkering down for the night – that line of argument is maybe the most insidious slander the University has leveled against any of the protests that have sprung up in the past year to demand divestment from the genocidal projects supported financially and politically by the institution. It’s insidious, not only because it’s not true – members of the university and broader community moved in and out of the encampment fluidly at almost all points of the day and night – but because it is a targeted lie, intentionally misrepresenting exactly how enmeshed in the community the encampment was.
Walking in from my bus commute many mornings, I passed through the encampment to say hello to friends, colleagues, students, and strangers. I stopped for a cup of coffee most days because I was sure to find someone to talk to: about events of the past day at the encampment so I could write pieces on the movement, but also to talk about broader news, things folks had been reading, people they’d talked to, and projects they were excited about diving into. It was a stark contrast with the department coffee pot sitting inside an empty room in Angell Hall, where the community has been slow to rebuild itself in the past few years since COVID.
One morning, I chatted on the walk from the bus with one of the unhomed guys I frequently buy a copy of Groundcover News from, and we stopped at the encampment for coffee together. When it was time for me to head off to meet with students, he was still there listening to one of the morning meeting group discussions. By the time I was heading back to the bus at the end of the day, I would regularly see people sitting on the concrete benches just north of the encampment, sharing food together and watching kids play in the grassy areas nearby.
This broad connection to the community expanded beyond the physical space of the encampment, though. The food and coffee shared freely with anyone who wanted some was sometimes provided by area restaurants, but more often was paid for with financial donations from across the community. The “Liberation Library” was built on donations, many from people who weren’t actively participating in the encampment on the day-to-day but who wanted to show support nonetheless. Other less-visible lines of community support were maybe the most heartening, as folks quietly volunteered their time and resources. Three times, for example, I volunteered to pick up and clean laundry for the encampment, only to find that someone else had shown up to take on the task before I could get there! Later, I found out that a local laundromat volunteered their services to support the encampment and to show solidarity with demands for an end to the genocide in Gaza.
That connection between the encampment, the community, and the support for Gaza was something that struck me time and time again. Even when faced with the logistics of running the encampment, participants and their community supporters never lost sight of their primary clear goal of divesting from genocide. Clearly, the encampment was not a dangerous blight on the fringes of the University, but a unified demand, voiced from across the community, for an end to complicity in the occupation and murder of tens of thousands of people.
But the encampment also created space for other possibilities that the University and its capitalist logics obviously found even more reprehensible and dangerous.
People feeding each other without question, sourcing supplies through sharing and mutual aid networks? Community businesses quietly ignoring the profit motive to meet folks’ needs? Alternative living situations built from piecemeal collections of tents, donations, and determination? All of these things are – like the demand to divest from genocidal projects – supposedly impossible. You just can’t make them work, we’re told, because that’s just not how things go.
Like John P. Clarke points out, though, “the actual existence of a phenomenon is a powerful argument in favor of its possibility.” The encampment loudly proclaimed that what we are told is impossible is not only possible, but already exists. We can have an anti-war community that supports its demands through mutual aid networks, bypassing capitalist explanations of what is feasible.
And that’s exactly why the cops had to show up, telling folks they had ten minutes to disperse, then starting to pepper spray at nine. But, looking back on the encampment and the community it nurtured, we have proof of a very different set of possibilities.
Ryan McCarty is a writer and teacher.
