Sit-in, then sleep-in at Capitol
February 14, 2011
FRANKFORT, Ky. — Wendell Berry slowly walked from the corridor of the empty Capitol Building into the governor’s reception room, where 13 fellow activists were scattered among the chairs and desks, eating, playing card games, and laying out pillows and coats to be used as makeshift beds.
The protesters had been in Gov. Steve Beshear’s outer office protesting for nearly 36 hours and still had two nights ahead of them. They were in good spirits, and Berry hoped to keep them that way. In his left hand was a copy of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and in his right were his glasses, which he put on as he told everyone he had something to share with them.
“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” Berry read, as his face turned bright red with laughter. The room roared as they recounted their efforts to sleep 14 people in a jigsaw puzzle-pattern on the royal red carpet of the governor’s office the night before.
But it wasn’t all fun and games. The group, which had dubbed itself “Kentucky Rising,” was there for a reason.
The Beginning
For activist Wendell Berry and other environmentalists across Kentucky, enough was enough.
Berry and fellow writers Jason Howard, Silas House and Erik Reece, a UK writer in residence, were among a handful who met with the governor Friday morning, and they weren’t pleased with the result. Howard, House and Reece left Friday evening, but made sure the group knew it had their support.
After the unsatisfactory meeting with the governor in his Capitol office, the group of writers, environmentalists, former coal miners and other activists staged a sit-in in hopes that Beshear would return to finish the conversation they had started Friday.
The sit-in was meant to protest Gov. Beshear’s lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act and his lack of support for efforts calling for a halt to mountaintop removal and strip mining.
Mountaintop removal involves the mining of a mountain’s summit in order to extract coal.
On Feb. 1, Beshear said in his State of the Commonwealth speech that he wanted the EPA to “get off our (Kentuckians) backs.”
The group felt that the meeting with the governor was a start, but much more needs to be done.
“I think we had a little start of a conversation today,” UK graduate and nurse practitioner Beverly May of Floyd County said Friday. “I think we need a lot more conversation, and it gives me hope.”
Originally the protesters planned on staying until they were arrested, but Beshear instead invited them to spend the weekend. Protester and Morehead State University history professor John Hennen thought the governor had many reasons for his decision to let them stay.
“I think it was an astute decision by his staff and his campaign staff,” Hennen said. “It let him avoid a potentially embarrassing situation. You don’t want to see Wendell Berry handcuffed and taken out of your office.”
Regardless of his intent, the group took him up on his offer to stay.
Setting up camp
“I hope we love each other in the morning, that’s all I’ve got to say,” said Berea resident and activist Teri Blanton.
Judging by the circle of laughing friends that formed in the rotunda just outside the office each morning, the subpar sleeping conditions hadn’t dampened anyone’s mood.
“I can’t think of a better thing I’d rather be doing on a Friday night,” said retired schoolteacher and Inez, Ky., resident Mickey McCoy on Friday.
The governor’s spokesperson, Kerri Richardson, said the Capitol building in Frankfort was secured at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, but the group’s members were allowed to stay as long as they wanted.
Anyone who left the building over the weekend, however, was not allowed to re-enter until Monday morning, Richardson said. The group never saw leaving as an option. Instead, donated blankets and pillows found their way in before the doors were locked for the weekend.
“It’s like being in camp,” Hennen said. “You have to go down and brush your teeth in communal bathrooms and wake up sore.”
McCoy had a different sentiment.
“Man, I got to sleep in until 8:15 a.m.,” he said. “I might start coming down and sleeping here a lot.”
Sleeping wasn’t the only arrangement protesters had to sort through. Finding ways to stay entertained became just as important.
Former Mining Safety and Health Association employee Stanley Sturgill sang in the Capitol’s rotunda as the group broadcast his performance live from their UStream account. Berry and the 12 others who watched Sturgill couldn’t help but sing along with his operatic voice.
The camaraderie and passion for protecting their home state pervaded conversation, and the unity only grew as the weekend wore on.
“I’m here with the best group of people I’ve been with since the last time we got out of jail in Hazard,” Sturgill joked before he began to sing.
The protesters held regular meetings over the course of the weekend to identify their goals, the ones that had been met by the governor and what they had yet to accomplish. They drafted press releases, editorial statements and a letter inviting the governor back to finish the conversation, and each was edited communally.
Hygiene was the one obstacle the group never fully tackled, but McCoy found a way to stay clean, taking his shirt off in the bathroom and scrubbing with hand soap.
“It’s a pour bath,” he laughed, rubbing soap on his underarms.
But to this group, the cause was more important than their living conditions.
Beliefs behind the action
Seventy-six-year-old Berry was the quiet, yet deliberate, leader of the group.
In December 2009, he wrote a letter to UK, saying he wanted his writings from the university’s archives removed, in protest of the controversial naming of Wildcat Coal Lodge, a dorm for UK basketball players.
“Every sentence he says is just poetry, man,” Hennen said of Berry.
Berry has been fighting what he said is abusive mining for more than 50 years and saw the sit-in as an opportunity to further his cause.
“I don’t believe there is a justification for permanently damaging the world, and I’m here to say that and to be a part of this effort,” Berry said.
“Kentucky Rising” is made up of activists that participate in a number of groups, and they all agree there is one common misconception.
“We are not anti-coal or anti-coal communities. We are against certain types of mining,” Hennen said. “We just want to move Kentucky away from destructive practices.”
McCoy too was disappointed that some misunderstood the group’s intentions.
“I’m not here to take miners’ jobs away,” McCoy said. “I’m here to take cancer away from the central Appalachians’ area.”
Martin Mudd, an environmentalist and physics graduate student at UK, thinks the sit-in was an opportunity to act on an ideology that is shared by many Kentuckians.
“This action is one part of a historical struggle and an Appalachian struggle,” Mudd said. “Also, really important to me is that we exercise our democracy — true democracy in my mind is participatory and representative. That’s not the way it is right now.”
Many of the protesters have strong feelings about UK’s role in the future of energy and think the university has failed so far.
“I understand the economics of it,” Hennen said. “But what’s actually happened is UK, as the flagship university of the state, is the most visible participant and victim of the domination of a single industry shaping the political culture of the state.”
The protesters came to the governor with nine demands, and after Friday’s meeting they said he had agreed to two — he took them up on their longstanding invitation to visit eastern Kentucky to see the damage of abusive mining, and he agreed there needs to be an end to aggressive speech toward those who oppose abusive mining.
Protester and carpenter Doug Doerrfeld tried to put the group’s action into perspective.
“The coal industry is so powerful,” Doerrfeld said. “But when you do something like this, it’s like a dam breaking.”
One thing was for sure — the 14 on the inside didn’t stand alone.
Support from the outside
A guard skeptically looked at the six pizza boxes that sat on his desk next to the Capitol entrance. He finally agreed they could be delivered.
The pizzas were ordered by Carl and Danielle Root, of Tampa, Fla., former Kentucky residents who wanted to show support.
“We settled in last evening to watch the live feed, enjoy the stories and bask in history being made,” Danielle Root said. “Unsure of how we could show our support and appreciation from Tampa, we decided they must surely be hungry. We would have preferred to deliver a few thousand concerned Kentuckians to the Capitol on Monday (for the “I Love Mountains Day” rally), but since we didn’t have the know-how, or the means, to make that happen, we figured pizza would suffice.”
The pizza was just the first of many meals that would make their way to the Capitol over the course of the weekend. As it turned out, the protesters found a way to eat three square meals a day and saw a constant stream of coffee delivered to the hall outside the governor’s office.
Eventually the stockpile grew so large that it couldn’t be contained to the governor’s office, and they moved their food into the hall and their lounge to the rotunda, as the camp slowly spread throughout the Capitol like a game of “Risk.”
McCoy is a veteran of political activism, but he said he never could have predicted the treatment he received over the weekend. The treatment only escalated Sunday morning.
Food came in such large amounts that the protesters donated some to a local shelter, and two massage therapists offered free massages to the protesters, who were stiff from sleeping on the floor.
The outside support culminated with an impromptu rally held on the steps of the Capitol Sunday afternoon. The protesters inside piled onto chairs in the front lobby of the building, peering through the six tiny windows of the Capitol’s front doors to the supporters on the outside. “Kentucky Rising” members would rest their hands on the glass and stand on their tip-toes for a better view, collectively yelling some form of “we love you,” reminding everyone that they weren’t sleeping here for the few inside, but to be the voice of the many across the state that shared their beliefs.
The protesters have yet to determine exactly when their protest will end, but think the continuous sit-in will conclude with the “I Love Mountains Day” rally in Frankfort Monday at 11 a.m.
“Let’s just remember, whatever happens, we’ve already won this particular battle,” McCoy said.
Keeping up with their leader
The group had just finished a meeting attempting to decide when, or even if, its protest would end when activist Herb E. Smith, Berry and Hennen gathered in the governor’s outer office to organize their belongings.
Smith paused for a moment.
“Look at all these young people following behind you Wendell,” he said to Berry with a laugh.
Hennen thought a moment.
“Trying to keep up is what we’re doing.”
More coverage:
Protesters enter fourth day in the Capitol