JOHNSON: Standing up for a cause - and then going to jail

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Saturday, January 26, 2008

I have an abiding respect for - and quite frankly, a curiosity about - people who willingly go to jail for one cause or another.

It is why I found myself late Friday afternoon in Denver County Courtroom 117M, Judge James Breese presiding. The remaining 75 defendants in the Columbus Day Parade protests were filing in, awaiting their legal fate.

I took a seat next to Marilyn Robinson, a 61-year-old, soft-spoken medical office worker, not a person you'd immediately expect to find facing charges.

Ah, but there she was last October being handcuffed in the middle of 15th Street downtown and led slowly to a sheriff's bus. She would spend more than 12 hours in what she called the "cripple" cell at City Jail. "That's what they really call it," Marilyn Robinson said.

She was on a cane when she wobbled out onto the street with the other protesters to delay the parade. She was badly injured in a car accident 20 years ago, resulting in 16 screws and two rods being placed in her back, and four surgeries to put her hips back together.

"We spent the night together in the cripple cell," she said, pointing to a woman seated in a wheelchair next to her. "They wouldn't let us post bail."

This is the part I wanted to understand. Here was this sweet, angelic-faced, badly hobbled, quite clearly non-Native American woman on a cane, who went to jail to protest Christopher Columbus' treatment of this continent's native peoples.

"Once you know the truth of something," Marilyn Robinson said earnestly, "you can never be silent. It sounds so trite, but it's true."

I expected such talk from Glenn Morris, the CU assistant professor of political science, who was convicted earlier this week along with two others on a single count of interfering with the parade.

He was in the courtroom Friday, patiently shepherding the various defendants between the two courtrooms set up to handle the protest defendants.

"People think this is about Columbus and a parade," Glenn Morris, 52, said in a wide-ranging interview. "But there is so much more to it."

The Marilyn Robinsons, he said, have come to understand that Columbus is "a symbol of the legalized destruction of our people. Too many people think we're just picking on Italian-Americans, but our protests are not an Indian-Italian American thing."

Glenn Morris, the teacher that he is, will give you a long lesson on the plight of native peoples in this country at the hands of colonists. If the truth is told, I did learn a lot.

I also learned that Glenn Morris, who has been protesting the Columbus Day Parade in this town for 20 years, has been arrested four times and stood trial three times, and that he doesn't care as much about Columbus as he does about using the holiday to highlight the problems of Native Americans.

Those include some of the nation's highest diabetes, teenage suicide, infant mortality and cervical cancer rates.

"We protest to educate people that the lands they are on are a result of the loss of native lands and our culture," Glenn Morris said. "This parade is a deliberate, state-sponsored and hateful celebration of devastating colonialism."

It is why he goes to jail every October.

He believes his method is working,

"There are teachers," Glenn Morris said, "who are teaching Columbus differently. I guarantee you nobody is teaching Columbus the way they did in 1989. I consider that a small victory. The Civil Rights Era in this country did not happen overnight."

It also helps explain people like Marilyn Robinson, he said, in that she recognizes she is a beneficiary of colonialism.

Marilyn Robinson does not dispute this. "Columbus never even made it to America," she says. "Accurate history is not being taught to our children. To honor him with a holiday is an abomination."

It was the first time she was ever arrested, Marilyn Robinson said. She had been to protests in previous years, she adds, but last year was the first time she went into the street.

"It wasn't planned. In a single moment, I made up my mind. I needed to stand with them, and I did. I felt honored."

Her three children were on the sidewalk. They pleaded with her not to go.

"I told them I needed to do this. I'm older, and with my health, I may not be able to do this again."

The officers who arrested her were nice, Marilyn Robinson said. And never once, she said, did she ever regret her decision.

"There is so much injustice in the world," she said. "We need to stand up against it. I am never going to be a person that says, 'Let someone else do it.' "

And then, I asked her the million-dollar question.

"I would be honored to do it again," she said.

I am still not sure I get this, but I do respect it.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763