The women behind Occupy Asheville are not who you were expecting. But now that campers across the country are dispersing, what do these protesters want?

by Jess McCuan . photos by Matt Rose

In Occupy movements far and wide, some sort of tide has turned. In mid-November, police arrested and evicted hundreds of Occupy campers, busting up tent cities in public spaces in Oakland and Portland, and then—the movement’s birthplace—New York City.

Demonstrators in Asheville and cities around the world have been taking to the streets for months to show support for Occupy Wall Street, a protest that began on September 17 in Manhattan’s Zucotti Park. Carrying signs that said, “We are the 99 percent,” and “Wall Street is our street!” some 2,000 original “occupiers” planted themselves (and their tents) in the middle of New York’s financial district. Solidarity occupiers elsewhere started camping in public parks and plazas, too.

Their cause? Roughly speaking, it’s economic injustice. Their enemies? Wall Street titans, big banks and the top sliver of the world’s population that holds most of its wealth. But from the beginning, Occupy Wall Streeters and related Occupy groups have been criticized as fragmented and leaderless, inconsistent in their actions and lacking clear demands. So far, unjust arrests and rough treatment by police seem to have made the biggest headlines. Thousands have been arrested, and some injured, as they fiercely defend their political freedoms. And yet a snarky New York magazine poll of 100 protesters in October found that more than half of them didn’t vote in 2010.

Ashevilleans started marching and camping in late September, carrying signs through downtown streets with messages like, “Overthrow the rich and uproot the system!” On its Facebook page, the local group set out 15 demands that mostly involve shifts in financial accountability from large corporations, the government and the wealthy. One demand: raise taxes on people with higher incomes. Others: repeal corporate personhood and use military funding to create green jobs.

The controversies surrounding Occupy Asheville have mainly involved the group’s constitutional rights of assembly and free speech. Occupiers started holding meetings and rallies in Pritchard Park, and, then, in October, camping under the Lexington Avenue I-240 overpass. A late-October vote by Asheville City Council forced campers to move, so they set up a long line of tents on a prominent Patton Avenue corner in front of the Federal Building. Many protesters feel they should be allowed to gather anywhere, at any time, including in downtown parks. Dozens of locals have been arrested (and most quickly released) in recent weeks for violating curfews and resisting arrest. At presstime, a dozen or so protesters had set up tarps and tables in front of the Merrill Lynch building in Pack Square.

One of the most contentious moments in the Occupy Asheville timeline involved the November 2 arrest of 27-year-old Helen Roberts, who was cited for handing out illegal “advertisements” at a rally that day. In fact, they were political flyers with charts showing the distribution of wealth in the United States. Roberts, who lives in West Asheville with her fiancé, EMT Caleb Shaw, has been arrested twice since Occupy Asheville began—once for pamphleting, another for trespassing at the Vance monument. “I’m disappointed in the city,” says Roberts, explaining that she and her beau grew up in small-town Kentucky and moved to Asheville thinking it was more progressive. “The people who represent us in city government are just not as forward thinking.”

Another flashpoint started with an Asheville Police Department employee’s Facebook page. In early November, APD forensics specialist Lynn Fraser called Occupy Asheville protesters a profane term on Facebook. She described them as “nasty” for, among other things, defecating in public, and made reference to lynching when she said members of the group “just need a hug… around the neck… with a rope.” Melissa Williams, the city’s public information officer and social media specialist, responded to Fraser’s Facebook post suggesting that she was amused by it. Both employees were placed on paid administrative leave as the city investigated, and, at presstime, Williams had resigned over the matter. Asheville-area residents have chimed in on Facebook and elsewhere, both supporting and criticizing Fraser.

The most visible in the Occupy Asheville movement spend their days hanging out on downtown streets. But the invisible supporters are perhaps more intriguing. Take 41-year-old Kindra Phillips, for example, a working mother and military veteran. Phillips delivers fruit to area convenience stores and sells Celtic hand-fasting cords for weddings through her website, gaiashandfasting.com. After a brief stint in the Army, Phillips moved to Asheville in 1992. She met her husband while both worked at the Grove Park Inn, and though she participated in a demonstration involving tarot card readings in 1999, she wasn’t particularly politically active. But then, in 2007, she and her husband watched a Live Earth rock show in downtown Asheville. When a group called Veterans for Peace showed up, Phillips says, “It was like—Oh, we’re not alone.” She started helping with Veterans’ Voices, a radio show on Asheville’s MainFM, and then she and her husband protested whenever they could, supporting causes like calling for George Bush’s impeachment.

Occupy Asheville appealed to Phillips for many reasons. “Obviously, going to the polls is not enough any more,” she says, repeating a theme that has shown up on Occupy signs nationwide. “So many of our politicians are bought and paid for.” She feels that the movement is not for the right or the left, but for anyone who is tired of banks having such big influence. Or corporate interests and lobbyists shaping laws. “Regular people have lost all of their power,” she says.

Roberts, who has never protested before, says she connected the Asheville movement to a documentary she saw, The Inside Job. Directed by Charles Ferguson, the movie explains changes in government policy and banking practices that helped fuel the 2008 financial crisis. Roberts says she watched it at home with her family in Kentucky a year ago, and when it finished, “we all just looked at each other and shook our heads,” she says. “It’s like, we’re just too small, and they’re too big… Then, when Occupy Wall Street happened, I was like—How can I not get up? I’ve never been an activist. I’ve never been involved in any protest. This got me off the couch and downtown.”

Lindsey Miguelez, a 36-year-old A-B Tech student and mother of three, is also new to protesting. Online and on TV, she followed Arab Spring, the pro-democracy rallies in the Middle East earlier this year. Then, when she heard about Occupy Wall Street (many call the movement American Autumn), she bundled up her three kids, ages 3, 6 and 17, and went to an Occupy General Assembly at Pritchard Park. “My kids really got into the groove,” she says. “They told their teachers and friends they were out protesting and how excited they were about it.” But the West Asheville homeowner didn’t necessarily like how she and fellow protesters showed up in local media. “I am just sick to death with the way they’ve portrayed us,” she says, referring to local TV stations’ coverage of Occupy Asheville. “They’re eager to capture our scruffiest members… They don’t want to show people like me, or people with gray hair. They want to portray us as young angry males.”

To be sure, the movement does involve many males. It also includes a few of Asheville’s “usual suspects.” Clare Hanrahan, now 62, marched with garbage workers in Memphis after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. She’s been protesting various causes in the Asheville area since 1989. Now an ACLU board member, Hanrahan has been acting mainly as a legal observer at Occupy protests. She’s teaching Occupiers about “nonviolent direct action,” and has held several training sessions. On November 2, while acting as a legal observer at an Occupy protest at UNCA, Hanrahan says she was startled to be served three warrants. All were for previous trespassing and street-blocking offenses, which police had captured on video. “I said, ‘Why was I picked out of the crowd?,’” she recalls asking the arresting officers. “They said it was because they recognized me. I thought, what should I do? Wear a mask? I believe transparency is part of the power.”

Lisa Landis, aka GloLady, has also protested several causes over the years, including the shuttering of Asheville’s URTV public TV station, where she had a long-running show. Landis is homeless and designs glow-in-the-dark (and other) clothing. She joined Occupy as a citizen journalist, she says, and has been arrested twice in the fracas. Though she frequently sleeps in the woods, she’s noted the challenges of dealing with the homeless in Occupy Asheville’s round-the-clock operation. “There are homeless people who are thrust upon the occupiers,” Landis says. Helen Roberts agrees it’s a predicament. “Some of the people who are camping—they really don’t want anything to do with Occupy,” she says. “They don’t show up to General Assemblies, they’re not in working groups. We can’t forcibly remove them, so we learn more and more every night about how to do damage control. We’ve had to kick some people out.”

There’s also plenty of dissension among the ranks of people who seem committed to Occupy principles. Jennifer Foster, an Asheville attorney who launched a write-in campaign for Buncombe County District Attorney last year and has publicly supported legalizing marijuana, was one of Asheville’s earliest Occupiers. For two weeks in October, she spoke at rallies and helped organize. But then, “they attacked me for being a leader,” she says of a few Occupy Ashevilleans, who wanted the local group, like the national one, to remain leaderless. So she stopped going to assemblies.

Still, after getting word that protesters were being unfairly arrested, Foster walked into the Buncombe County magistrate’s office on November 5 and started asking questions. After using profanity inside the office, the judge had Foster arrested and sentenced her to five days in jail for contempt of court. “I was just frustrated because the magistrate wasn’t cooperative at all,” says Foster. “The magistrate abused her discretion.” Foster says she was treated inhumanely while in jail as well and plans to pursue the matter in federal court.

As winter sets in, the movement faces a fork in the road. Camping on city streets presents a variety of obstacles, and some Occupiers don’t believe camping is necessary. Phillips, for her part, frequently attends meetings, but she simply can’t hang out. “It’s just not practical—we have jobs, and bills to pay,” she says. There’s a plan afoot to support people who want to occupy city streets through the winter, and perhaps even rent an Occupy Asheville house. But Phillips and others have longer-term goals, like raising funds that would help send delegates from Occupy Asheville to a national General Assembly in Philadelphia next July. Rosetta Star, owner of Rosetta’s Kitchen in downtown Asheville, is dedicating hours of her time to electing Occupy delegates. Like several women we interviewed, Star doesn’t have time to protest, but she’s supported the movement in other ways, like sending food and supplies. “A lot of people are feeling like there’s no real way to petition our government anymore. The amount of money that goes into campaigns and toward lobbyists has basically silenced us,” says the mother of five. “It’s time for a silent, peaceful revolution.”

Occupy’s thought leaders, both local and national, claim the movement will usher in a new progressive era in America. “The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal,” Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs wrote in a November New York Times op-ed. But the whole range of necessary next steps, “shareholder and consumer activism, policy formulation, and running of candidates—will not happen in the park,” he warned. In Asheville, activists seem pleased that they’ve started a conversation about economic disparities. “The word is getting out,” says Star. “People care.”

Kim Kubicke, who runs Asheville LETS (Local Exchange Trading System), a community barter program, says she’s pleased to see locals considering financial alternatives. In the run-up to Facebook-organized Bank Transfer Day on November 5, WLOS reported that North Carolina’s State Employees Credit Unions saw a 30 percent increase in new accounts statewide. Starting in September, the organization had more than 23,000 people join, presumably a response to Occupy’s calls to boycott big banks. “It’s about maintaining good relationships with your neighbors, rather than your credit card company,” says Kubicke. “As Asheville continues to grow and build fancy hotels and parking decks, we’re losing sight of the people who actually live here,” she says. “It’s time to start creating good jobs for them. We have to use all this creativity we have here to problem-solve.”