The May Day Melee
Nearly 20 years ago, a peaceful protest in LA was declared an "unlawful assembly" and turned violent.
Note: Today’s post is about an event in California’s history.
For Writers: A couple of weeks ago, I shared my research or “B material” about the location where a short story I’m writing took place: MacArthur Park. This follow-up piece is about a historical event that took place in MacArthur Park in 2007. This event serves as the backdrop for that same story. One of the themes of my novel California Is an Earthquake (coming fall 2027 from Sibylline Press) is that history repeats itself. I first started researching MacArthur Park and the May Day Riots while I was finalizing my debut manuscript in 2022. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen MacArthur Park back in the news, as well as peaceful protests escalated into “unlawful assemblies” by contrived and/or outsized response.
On May 1, 2007, thirty-five years to the day after MacArthur Park was designated LAHCM No. 100, people gathered peacefully in MacArthur Park to ask for amnesty and U.S. citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It was a Tuesday. They gathered in the morning and marched: the Multiethnic Workers Coalition, several hundred families with small children, senior citizens, college students, teenagers, allies. They gathered again in the afternoon and rallied: street vendors, Azteca dancers, ceremonial drummers, journalists, and the transients who made the park their home, many of them disabled. Many of the undocumented immigrants had lived in the United States most of their lives, crossing the border from Mexico with their parents as children, as toddlers, as infants. The United States was the only home they’d ever known. Statistically, about 11% of the attendees would have been descendants of the Californios—the Mexican people who had lived in what is now California long before it became a part of the United States.
The people gathered on May 1, 2007, as they had in years past—peacefully, with love and jubilation. The proper permits had been issued. With permission granted, the people met at MacArthur Park on the morning of May 1, 2007, and marched in the streets, led by a front line of mothers pushing children in strollers. In the afternoon, they gathered in the park to listen to speakers, to rally, and to celebrate—the annual gathering was always a joyous celebration filled with food, music, and dancing. The permit allowed the people to gather until nine o’clock that night, nine minutes before the end of astronomical twilight, the last twilight, which follows sunset, civil twilight, and nautical twilight.
The afternoon rally was best described as a cultural event and peaceful protest. The event consisted overwhelmingly of people socializing, eating, listening to speakers and to music, participating in ceremonial processions, watching cultural dancers and drum performances, and engaging in community activities.
At a quarter past five o’clock that afternoon, a small group of young people reportedly caused a disturbance in an intersection at one far corner of the park. The LAPD used this disturbance by “young anarchists” as justification to declare the rally an “unlawful assembly.” The crowd of more than half a million people was ordered to disperse, but the order was delivered to a largely Spanish-speaking crowd only in English and only at the southeast corner of the park, nowhere near the main crowd.
The LAPD then force entered the park at 7th and Alvarado. There was already a heavy police presence on Alvarado Street, and they began the march into the park, shoulder-to-shoulder, in riot gear. Other law enforcement drove in on motorcycles and bicycles. SWAT teams arrived armed with rifles. The officers marched forward, pushing people out of the way and to the ground, including the elderly, the disabled, and children. At first, they used batons to hit people, people who hadn’t heard the order to disperse and who had no idea what was happening. Then they shot tear gas into the crowd and started shooting people with rubber bullets. They hit and pushed journalists and broke their cameras. People were unable to get out of the park, unable to move as quickly as the police demanded, unable to gather their belongings or locate their loved ones. The police proceeded relentlessly and mercilessly, hitting and shooting anyone in their path. They arrested five people. Twenty-seven marchers were injured. Nine journalists were injured—eye-witness accounts indicate that officers targeted journalists and damaged or destroyed their cameras.
On May 17, 2007, several thousand people met at the park again to march in protest of what had happened on May 1st. Four separate entities investigated the incident: a special task force established by the City of Los Angeles, the FBI, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the LAPD’s own internal investigation. The results consisted of departmental reorganizations, a new “Incident Management and Training Bureau,” lawsuits and settlements, and the punishment of nineteen members of the LAPD—the nature of the punishment was not disclosed and only officers whose misconduct had been captured on camera were disciplined.
The violence and the atrocities that are happening in our beloved state of California and across the nation are nothing new, unfortunately. Until we learn from the past, we are destined to repeat it, over and over again.
“Those who make peaceful protest impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”
—John F. Kennedy
NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
The new issue of Kelp Journal is out! The summer 2025 issue features lots of new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, an interview with acclaimed novelist Ivy Pochoda, and book reviews, including my friend and fellow novelist Trey Burnette’s review of Memories that Smell Like Gasoline, by David Wojnarowicz, with a foreword by Ocean Vuong. The long out of print memoir-in-essays-and-drawings by Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992, is being re-released on July 22nd by Nightboat Books.
SOME THINGS FOR READERS
The Luxury of Despair: How you can hold up hope
(Jordan Rosenfeld for Writing in the Pause)
On Public Vulnerability or 6 Months of the Eaton Fire
(Tarra Stevenson for Heavy Meta)
Would You Drive Six Hours for a Salad?
(Maggie Downs for Be Back By Dinner)
10 Things Bookworms Do: Because they’re true and because we all need a laugh
(Gabino Iglesias for Gabino’s Substack)
I Dreamed About the Breakup of the United States
(Deanne Stillman for Journal of the Plague Years)
“To protest against injustice is the foundation of all our American democracy.”
—Thurgood Marshall
SOME THINGS FOR WRITERS
Time, Language, and Gender (and a Journal Prompt!)
(Tarra Stevenson for Heavy Meta)
The Marketing Collaboration Your Trad Book Publisher Expects: The funnel framework that changes everything
(Virtually Annie)
What Happens at an Editorial Meeting
(Mandira Pattnaik for Lit Mag News)
They’re Not Your Ideal Reader And That’s the Point
(Stuart Wakefield for Stuart Wakefield the Book Coach)
editing a mouth … and a manuscript
(Suzy Vitello for Let’s Talk About Writing)
“We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about progress and prosperity for our community. Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others, for their sakes and for our own.”
—Cesar Chavez
Leanne Phillips
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
leannephillips.com
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