When she saw the gas masks, she realized she'd need help. Denver squad cars had blocked off Broadway, and soon police officers — more than a hundred of them — were pulling black body armor, batons, clear plastic face masks and those gas masks from their trunks. Trouble was coming, and Zoe Williams was the only street medic in Civic Center Park.
Mark Manger
Zoe Williams joined Colorado Street Medics as a preteen — and heads the group today.
Occupy Denver inspired both Bobby Guerrero and Liz Kitchen to train as street medics.
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A Denver Health EMS team was on its way through downtown but had not yet arrived. Even then, though, the city workers would be prohibited from moving through the crowd until the police confirmed that the area was secure. And that wouldn't be for a while.
So the 26-year-old Williams reached for her cell phone, called for backup and hastily steered her five-foot-one-inch frame toward the Occupy Denver protesters. They'd erected tents in the trees and on the grass, but a month and a half of history indicated that those structures would not be allowed to last for long, and the demonstrators wouldn't let them come down without a fight. Williams pulled her respirator out of her bag and tied it to her neck, letting it hang a few inches from her face on top of a cold metal stethoscope. As head of the Colorado Street Medics, she knew the rules: Cover your face too early, and protesters start to panic; wait until too late, and you're of no use to anyone.
Keep your cool, and you can try to help everyone.
By the time the police action was over on October 29, the most violent day of Occupy Denver, Williams and one other medic had treated 45 people in an hour, for everything from chemical-induced tears to bloody cuts to quarter-sized dents caused by pepper balls.
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In the fall of 2011, the international street-medic community — a widespread group of mobile collectives — experienced a resurgence at a series of trial-by-fire actions connected to Occupy Wall Street.
The street-medic concept got its start in June 1964. As the civil-rights movement gained speed, the Medical Committee for Human Rights created the Medical Presence Project, enlisting American doctors, nurses and med students to care for activists participating in Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Back then, segregated hospitals could not always be counted on to treat protesters fairly, if at all. The medical volunteers continued to come together in the years that followed, organizing coverage whenever activism was accompanied by the threat of violence — whether the action was over civil rights or the Vietnam War. But there were rarely enough professionals to handle the work, so they began teaching protesters the skills even as they treated them. Here, do this. Never, ever do that. Pull it tighter. Pay attention.
Organizers crafted courses at which laypeople could learn rough medical triage tactics in just two to three days, or roughly twenty hours. The lessons were adapted depending on the police response. If the cops brought in a shipment of batons, the instruction covered surface wounds. If someone spotted a canister, chemicals. Videotapes of the lessons traveled from state to state, though they were often confiscated by local authorities. (In 2008, one of the tapes resurfaced in Vietnam Vets Against the War records that were made public when John Kerry ran for president.)
Ann Hirschman, now 65, was a nurse in New York when she started offering classes to everyone from members of the National Lawyers Guild to the Black Panther Defense Committee. One day a loud-talking, kung-fu-fighting acupuncturist named Ron Rosen, who taught self-defense for activists at a studio he named Woo Ping Wuen Kwoon, or Peaceful Harmonious Fist School, signed up for one of Hirschman's training sessions, offering to teach her his moves in exchange. It was Rosen, who went by the name "Doc," who introduced "street medics," and he and Hirschman would continue to work together on the front lines at various actions for decades.
Scruffy and irreverent, Rosen was larger than life — if not his oversized ego. He'd been raised by his grandfather, Joseph Greenstein, or "The Mighty Atom," a strongman of such mythical proportions that he once dragged an airplane by his hair. In 1963, Rosen helped organize the March on Washington, and he joined the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Selma in 1965. Rosen would perform magic tricks for children, pulling endless handkerchiefs and tiny foam rabbits out of his kit and blowing bubbles for them while their parents marched. His personality made him easy to relate to, if occasionally tough to tolerate, and the utilitarian hierarchy he created for his street medics offended more radically open volunteers. "Structure was extremely important to him, because without one he felt like he had no control in a world already out of control," says his widow, Carol Garlington. "Any behavior that was inefficient or could place someone in danger really upset him. Stupidity drove him crazy."
"You either loved Doc or hated Doc," says Hirschman, who loved him, "but nobody was ever neutral about Doc."
In 1973, Rosen traveled to South Dakota, where hundreds of supporters of the American Indian Movement took over the town of Wounded Knee from February to May. For 71 days, United States marshals traded fire with the Oglala Lakota — and Rosen was there the entire time. Other street medics, including Hirschman, rotated in and out. In the most challenging case of her career, Hirschman had to operate on an unconscious patient without anesthesia, stabilizing the airway of a man whose skull had been partially destroyed by a bullet to the back of the head. He survived for four days.
