A quarter century ago.
It was right after grad school, in 1991, during my first year at Wayne State in Detroit.
Daddy Bush was amassing troops for Desert Storm.
On Jan 15, MLK's birthday, lots of folks were gathering downtown for a protest, so I grabbed a magic marker and a posterboard and wrote "Another Mathematician Against the War" on it, and went downtown to the advertised intersection and waited.
At first, there were only a couple of us, since I was a little early, but the crowd gathered and got pretty big as time went on.
I didn't know anybody there, since I was new to town, and my only real contacts in Detroit prior to that was a small group of folks who were meeting periodically to plan some sort of nonviolent direct action against the war.
At some point somebody started burning a flag, and the cops arrested them.
The crowd started chanting "Fvck the police!" after that.
Things started to deteriorate.
That particular chant was not one that I was comfortable with, so I started shouting out, "Freedom of speech! Freedom of Expression!" at the top of my lungs.
The crowd picked up my chant.
I was way back in the middle of the crowd, with about 5 or 6 rows or people between me and the edge of the crowd at the time.
Suddenly, I felt myself being grabbed and dragged into the street.
(I later learned from my cellmates that some bigshot in a light blue shirt was walking along and pointing at individual protestors in the crowd, and the cops were snatching them the singled out protestors out of the crowd. It was bizarre.)
Anyway, I didn't know what else to do, so reflexes took over and I just say down in the street.
The cops eventually carried me onto the bus with the others who had been singled out for arrest.
To this day, I can still remember being summoned from our jail cells by an African American guard, in the middle of the night.
We followed him through the day room and into the office, where the guards were gathered around a small portable TV.
We all stood there and watched in silence as the initial reports of Desert Storm came in.
We knew then that the world would never be the same.
The African America guard who had summoned us, a big fellow, told us softy, "This is the only place for you to be tonight".
Daddy Bush had decided to celebrate the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday with a bang.
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