Editor’s note: This is an interview with Marian Kramer, one of the Homrich 9 water warriors in Detroit, MI, arrested for disorderly conduct while blocking city trucks setting out to do mass turn offs of people’s water. Marian and defendant Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellerman requested a jury trial. Marian explains what happened.
People’s Tribune: What strange things occurred in this trial?
Marian Kramer: We weren’t allowed to say the words civil disobedience, civil rights, or the name, Martin Luther King, or the fact that I’ve been part of the movement for 50 years. We weren’t even allowed to mention the name Nicole Cannon, a plaintiff in a suit against the city of Detroit who died as a result of fighting her water shut off. And these were all the reasons we were out there protesting.
PT: So things were getting political?
MK: Yeah, just as the jury was about to deliberate, City lawyers said that testimony from the victims of the water shut offs had tainted the jury, so they had a judge from a higher court come in and shutdown the trial. Lawyers, court clerks, even police said they never saw anything like this before.
PT: What is the significance of all this?
MK: They have us in legal limbo. We are charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. But it’s bigger than that. It’s about the Emergency Manager system denying water to the poor and then privatizing it for the corporations. Look at what they did to Rev. Pinkney in Benton Harbor. He was also charged with misdemeanors for protesting this sort of thing but now sits in prison. This is fascism creeping in. These corporations aren’t going to let anything stand in their way, not the public health, not dead bodies not even the law. I think one possible outcome of this is going to be anyone who protests against corporate power using civil disobedience will be denied trial by jury. If they can get away with this in Detroit, then it won’t be long before they can go anywhere in America and get away with it.
