Protests, demonstrations boast a long history in Greenwich
GREENWICH — The town of Greenwich projects an aura of calm and staid tranquility, seemingly untroubled by the distant turmoil that has rocked other parts of the nation.
But over the past week, the town has experienced demonstrations and marches touched off by the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis — and those protests were hardly a precedent.
There is a long history of protests, both homegrown or involving outsiders, in Greenwich. There were anti-war demonstrations and hostility to local law-enforcement in the Vietnam era in particular. As a symbol of wealth and privilege, Greenwich has frequently become an irresistible target for provocateurs and tricksters through the years.
The spring of 1970 was a turbulent time across the United States, and Greenwich also saw a protest among high school students and an upsurge in political activity directed against the war in South Asia. That spring, the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University caused uproars around the state and the nation.
The Connecticut National Guard deployed 2,500 guardsmen on the streets of New Haven in early May 1970, the first time in the state’s history that guardsmen had been deployed as a result of civil unrest. University campuses around the country saw clashes with local law enforcement in that time period.
On May 5, 1970, students staged a walkout at Greenwich High School. About 300 to 400 students left the building (now Town Hall on Field Point Road), many carrying anti-war signs. They chanted “peace” outside the building, according to a local newspaper account.
Also that spring, writing tables were set out all over the Greenwich community — in central Greenwich, Cos Cob, Riverside and Old Greenwich — that collected “Postcards for Peace” and mailed them to elected representatives in Washington. Greenwich churches also cooperated in the postcard-writing campaign.
There was also some hostility to local law enforcement in the tumultuous period of 1970. A group of about 30 teenagers was congregating in Binney Park in Old Greenwich one night at 10:30 p.m. When police arrived to roust them, the youngsters made hostile remarks and called them “pigs,” as a newspaper summary described the encounter. Five young people were charged with trespassing.
The restriction that allowed only Greenwich residents to use the beachfront was a regular source of friction and protest through the years.
Ned Coll, an activist from Hartford who strongly believes in the principle that nature should be open to all, led a major campaign across Connecticut shore towns to “free the beaches” in the 1970s. Coll and his supporters also made a stop in Greenwich, showing up the downtown train station in 1975, getting their message out to local commuters. They chanted slogans like “Share the Summer,” “Cocktail Bigots” and “Money Without Class.” Coll was arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy to trespass, but the case was later dropped.
Coll also staged an “amphibious landing” at Greenwich Point in July 1975, with a CBS News camera crew in tow, and the event was the lead story on the “CBS Evening News” that day.
Michael Moore, the filmmaker and activist, hosted a television show in the mid-1990s called “TV Nation,” and Greenwich’s residents-only beach policy became a target for his populist brand of humor. He enlisted the comedian Janeane Garofalo for a stunt that poked fun of Greenwich and its perceived hostility to outsiders. A busload of New York City young people recruited by Garofalo was turned away at Greenwich Point, which was duly captured on film. Later, Garofalo and a handful of coconspirators swam to Greenwich Point, where they were escorted out by town police. A court decision later struck down the residents’ only policy that same summer.
Leftist protesters have often visited Greenwich to stage protests and demonstrations. Activists in 2017 ran buses into Greenwich though a unionbacked protest called the “Lifestyles of the Rich & Shameless” tour. A similar venture, jokingly dubbed “Money Bags and Body Bags,” ran a caravan of some 40 cars through Greenwich in late May of this year.
There have been numerous labor pickets in Greenwich through the years, and a “teachin” organized by peace activists was held at Greenwich Common in April 2018.
In a more distant era, in the early 20th century, there was also turmoil, protests and agitation over race and labor in Greenwich.
A rock quarry along the water’s edge in Byram was the workplace of scores of mostly Italian laborers, where they toiled for low pay. In May 1906, some 500 laborers went on strike and marched through Greenwich, carrying a makeshift red banner at one point. A pistol was fired by a striker, before the protest dissipated, according to a contemporary account.
The presence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, during a time when the Klan gained new membership and political power, also caused agitation in Greenwich. A large cross some 25-foot tall blazed for an hour on Round Hill Road in June 1924, and a Klan rally was held at Bruce Park on Aug. 11, 1928, that drew Klansmen from around the region as a well as a smaller local contingent.
According to press accounts, there was the threat of violence when some of the club-wielding Klan security personnel clashed with “townsmen” observing the event from the perimeter, but police intervened. A few young people yelled insults at the Klansmen and women attending the rally, about several hundred people, according to an account in The Greenwich Press. No arrests were made.
The community has never been rocked by rioting or mass arrests that other communities have experienced through the years, but demonstrations and disturbances roiling from the wider currents of American history have long been a presence in Greenwich.