Dowbrigade

At the hearing
Thursday in Federal Court asking for an injuntion against
the City of Boston’s construction of a steel-enclosed protest space,
the Party of the First Part, aka the Plaintiff, represented by Boston
attourney Jonathan Shapiro, was the somewhat enigmatically named Bl(A)ck
Tea Society (et al). Who were these mysterious activists? They called
themselves "anti-authoritian" – was that a euphanism for "anarchist"?
Were they a 21st century version of the Weatherpeople? How dumb was
naming a revolutionary movement after the most ridiculed and derided
group of on-air personalities?

Anyway, a front page article in today’s Boston Globe answers many of
our questions. As to the photo, it was the Number One result when we
used Google’s Image Search to look for "Black Tea Society", so we are
assuming that it is their World Headquarters…..

Last summer, long before the Democratic National Convention had triggered
even a single road closure, a small group of left-leaning activists
gathered in Cambridge and came to a unanimous decision: The convention
needed to be opposed, and its opponents would need all the support
they could get.

The meeting included some anarchists, a handful of Green Party members,
even a high school student. Some of them had never been to a political
protest in their lives. But in the year since then, the organization
they hatched, the Bl(A)ck Tea Society, has grown into a high-profile
nerve center for the thousands of protesters expected to descend on Boston
in the next five days.

article from the Boston Globe