Last week, 25-year-old Cecily McMillan became one of the only Occupy Wall Street protestors to face serious jail time when a jury convicted her of assaulting a police officer. Her conviction has sparked outrage amongst progressives because McMillan alleges she involuntarily elbowed NYPD officer Grantley Bovell after he grabbed her breast, and because the judge refused to admit as evidence in the trial certain accusations of police brutality against Bovell and other cops the night of the incident. Assaulting an officer, a felony offense, carries a sentence of between two and seven years prison time. McMillan is currently locked up in Rikers Island jail in New York City, awaiting her sentencing on Monday. Though the judge, Ronald Zweibel, could end up giving her a sentence as mild as a stint of community service, when I chatted with her Friday in a sterile cement room at Rikers, she seemed prepared to do serious time. She was wearing prison-issued Velcro sneakers, her own hipster-ish long johns, and horn-rimmed glasses. Ive had two years to think about [the] decision to go to trial instead of accept a plea deal, the 25 year-old said, surprisingly upbeat. What kind of activist would I be if I wouldnt go to jail? McMillan, a graduate student in liberal studies at the New School in New York City says she was raised in a trailer park in the all white, racist town of Beaumont, Texas, where she says her mother supported her and her brother on $12,000 a year. She saw her brother and many of her friends thrown in jail. McMillan spent her summers in Atlanta with her grandparents, who had been heavily involved in the civil rights movement. From a young age, she noticed racial and economic differences between the two worlds in which she was raised. She was inspired to follow in her grandparents footsteps. To me [activism] isnt political so much as personal, she says. Its whatever I can do to make life better for her family and friends—and now her fellow inmates. -Erika
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 18:45:00 +0000
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