You could say dozens were arrested. But there were hundreds in the streets that day.
Protesters even took over a section of Washington Street in front of the Wells Fargo Tower, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio keeps his executive offices. Read the proverbial riot act, most dispersed to the sides, but several protesters refused to leave and were arrested by Phoenix police.
Stephen Lemons
See anyone "beating" on the bay door in the background of this pic from July 29, 2010? That's because it didn't happen.
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I was a witness to all this, as I was the arrest of the Fourth Avenue demonstrators, several of whom had locked their arms together with PVC pipe, in a move known in activist circles as a "sleeping dragon."
Some of the protesters were clergy with the Unitarian Universalist Association, including its president, Reverend Peter Morales, and Phoenix's Reverend Susan Frederick-Gray. All practiced non-violent civil disobedience in the finest tradition of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
That's why the AP's line describing the demonstrators as "massed outside one of Arpaio's jails, beating on a metal door and forcing sheriff's deputies to call for backup" is so ludicrous.
Heck, I was standing between that sleeping dragon and the metal doors, when the MCSO ordered everyone, including the press, away. The demonstrators, of course, remained.
Before the doors opened and deputies grabbed the demonstrators, along with some bystanders, no one was "beating" on those doors. Indeed, Sean Larkin and Antonio Bustamante, lawyers for some of the defendants in this case, told me that such a claim was never made in court by the prosecutors.
After the mass arrests, the MCSO deputies pushed the crowd back, away from the doors. Once the MCSO retreated, there may have been some door-banging or thrown water bottles, but the demonstrators arrested beforehand were not involved in that.
Since they received credit for time served, the protesters fulfilled their sentences by spending the night in Arpaio's main gulag on the evening of their arrests.
Ironically, when these protesters were found guilty, Arpaio gloated via Twitter, even though the sheriff is perhaps the most notorious unindicted criminal in the state.
Journalism is written in dust and lasts about as long. Though the AP story was reproduced in countless publications, history will make the final pronouncement.
So, when future generations study 1070 and its aftermath, they will know who stood up against 1070, Sheriff Arpaio and Sand Land's nativism, and how that defiance changed the present day.