I spent Saturday photographing and videotaping an anti-war protest in downtown Ann Arbor this weekend that marked the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion last year. I’ve got hundreds of pictures and quite a bit of video to go through, so I’ll be posting images and video from the protest all week (including the closest thing to a music video this site is ever going to host).
There were somewhere between 1,000-3,000 people who showed up. The protest was sponsored by Ann Arbor Area Committee for Peace, U-M Anti-War Action, and Veterans for Peace. Police had to shut down quite a bit of downtown Ann Arbor for about an hour until the protest wound its way to the campus of the University of Michigan. But pretty much the defining image of the protest occurred at the very beginning which I captured on video on my digital camera.
A gentleman with one of the three groups sponsoring the protest got hold of a bullhorn and gave a mini-speech about the horrors inflicted on the world by the United States. Specifically, he said that people in the crowd neeeded to work to stop the United States from continuing to oppressively threaten countries such as North Korea and Syria.
1.5 megabyte AVI can be seen here or 600K MP3 can be heard here.