Recreate '68 Plans to Do Just That

Spagnuolo's first formal training in protest activism came when he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in the late '80s. Through friends in the gay and lesbian community, he got involved with the radical AIDS awareness organization Act Up, which used theatrical direct-action tactics — such as mass takeovers of government and corporate offices, even churches — that would be picked up by the anti-globalization movement years later. Spagnuolo spent his twenties in various parts of the country, only marginally involved in activism. But his interest in direct-action protest was invigorated in 1999, when demonstrators successfully shut down a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. By then, Spagnuolo was living in Colorado, and though he helped organize caravans to the event, he didn't go himself. "I honestly didn't think it was going to be as big as it was," he says. "And it is one of my bigger regrets."

Though many people describe Spagnuolo as an anarchist, he says his political beliefs are closer to those of a democratic socialist. But he tries not to pigeonhole himself, because sectarianism and dogma is often the undoing of leftist movements. "I'll work with anybody who wants to make a positive change in this country," he insists. "Once this government's gone, then we can sort out how to fix this country. Too many people get sucked into 'I'm a communist, so I don't work with socialists who don't work with anarchists.'"

At the DU demonstration, he kept the energy of the seventy or so protesters high. But Spagnuolo himself was tired. He and Morris, who spent much of the protest beating a drum in a circle of Colorado AIM activists, had been up most of the night discussing Woodbine. A week before, Stavropoulos had told the group that his family in Greece — his mother, technically — was no longer confident that Woodbine would be financially viable in its current incarnation. The original estimates to bring the infrastructure up to code had been low, and as the project progressed, substantial problems with the wiring and plumbing had surfaced. Money was flying out the door, and the Stavropoulos family was afraid it would be left holding the bag. Stavropoulos had told the Glenns that the family was going to accept proposals from other organizations to operate the property.

And then, at a meeting just the night before, Stavropoulos had told Spagnuolo that he was out of the project.

The timing could not have been worse. A month after the Newmont protest came the much larger Columbus Day Parade protest. Since this would be the hundredth anniversary of the holiday getting its start in Colorado, plans called for making the protest bigger and more noisy than in previous years — maybe even stopping the parade altogether, as Morris and others had done in 1992, when they amassed 2,500 demonstrators. But the group had to be careful: Spagnuolo speculated that the powers-that-be would like nothing more than to lock up the town's top political troublemakers on Columbus Day, then tie them up in legal actions for months when they needed to move on to planning the DNC events.

That he could handle, though. But the end of his involvement with Woodbine was tougher. "It's been very difficult for myself to try to reconcile what the hell happened," Spagnuolo said. "I went through a lot of shit at the City of Longmont with lawsuits and stuff. And they even treated me in a more respectful way when I walked away from the project there."

This latest blow came from within his own community. "Are we so far into a colonized world that we can't break out of it?" he wondered. "The most depressing thing to me is you've been spending your whole life on this and here's your chance to do it, and can we actually do it? Am I just bullshitting myself?"

He rubbed his face and took a breath, then grabbed his bullhorn. He had a protest to lead.

Larry Hales wasn't alive in 1968. But the thirty-year-old R-68 organizer sees the protests at that convention as a good motivator for today's protest movements. "It was a year when a lot of things came together. The Black liberation circle. Anti-war," he says. "All these ideologies came together and were willing to confront the state and were doing so in a lot of different ways. But it was a spirit, the idea behind it, that has been missing since 1968." And so he likes the name of the group.