Майские протесты в Вашингтоне против войны во Вьетнаме (1971)

The 1971 May Day protests were a series of large scale civil disobedience actions in Washington, D. C., in protest against the United States' participation in the Vietnam War. The protests began on Monday morning, May 3 and ended on May 5. Over 12,000 people were arrested, the largest mass arrest in U. S. history. Members of the Nixon administration would come to view the events as damaging because the government's response was perceived as violating citizens' civil rights.

By the middle of 1970, many anti war movement leaders had come to believe that tactics of mass marches that had been used during the past six years would not end the war and that more aggressive actions were needed. Rennie Davis and David Dellinger of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice and Jerry Coffin of the War Resisters League began planning the actions; later in 1970, Michael Lerner joined them. A group known as the "May Day Tribe"

The Nixon administration secretly canceled the protesters' camping permit. U. S. Park Police and Washington Metropolitan Police, dressed in riot gear, raided the encampment. The police gave the campers until noon to clear out. Some protesters abandoned the demonstration and left the city. The remaining protesters, estimated at 12,000, regrouped at various churches and college campuses in the area.

The U. S. government had put into effect Operation Garden Plot, a plan it had developed during the 1960s to combat major civil disorder. Over the weekend, while protesters listened to music, planned their actions, or slept, 10,000 federal troops were moved to various locations in the Washington metropolitan area. At one point, so many soldiers and Marines were being moved into the area from bases along the East Coast that troop transports were landing at the rate of one every three minutes at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland, about 15 miles east of the White House. Among these troops were 4,000 paratroopers from the U. S. 82nd Airborne Division. Troops from the Marine Barracks lined both sides of the 14th St bridge. These troops were to back up the 5,100 officers of the D. C. Metropolitan Police, 2,000 members of the D. C. National Guard, and federal agents that were already in place. Every monument, park, and traffic circle in the nation's capital had troops protecting its perimeters. Paratroopers and Marines deployed via helicopter to the grounds of the
Washington Monument. Protesters announced that because the government had not stopped the Vietnam War, they would stop the government Most commuters who tried arrived at their jobs, despite being delayed somewhat. Federal Employees for Peace held a rally the following day in Lafayette Park. During the riots, the military accidentally shot a tear gas canister into the President's Dining Room during a lunch between the President's daughter Julie Nixon and her mother in law, former First Lady Mamie Eisenhower.

On Tuesday, May 4, another 2,000 people were arrested at a sit in outside the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, where the United States Army had deployed machine gun nests. On Wednesday, May 5, 1,200 more people were arrested at a legal rally on the steps of the U. S. Capitol, bringing the total to 12,614 people, making this the largest mass arrest in U. S. history. The American Civil Liberties Union pursued a class action suit on behalf of thousands of detained protesters and ultimately the federal courts, recognizing the illegal nature of the arrests, ordered the government to pay a settlement to those arrested, making them some of the only citizens in US history to receive financial compensation for violation of the constitutional rights of free assembly and due process. Richard Helms, who was Central Intelligence Agency director at the time, said, "It was obviously viewed by everybody in the administration, particularly with all the arrests and the howling about civil rights and human rights and all the rest of it as a very damaging kind of event. I don't think there was any doubt about that."