XRDC: OUR HISTORY
Extinction Rebellion DC was founded in November of 2018 as the very first XR chapter in the US. On December 2, within three weeks of our first meeting, we took our first direct action, holding a People’s Assembly in the street in front of the US Capitol.
A small but mighty start.
Things were slow to get started, with a handful of volunteers working diligently through the winter to build up numbers. In April of 2019, as part of the first international XR Week of Rebellion, we had our first arrests. We had planned to take the street in front of the Republican National Committee and perform a street theater piece called “The Climate Games” to highlight the absurdity of the Republican Party’s denial of the climate crisis. Unfortunately, we were arrested within 5 minutes of arriving - the Capitol Police are always quick to arrest protestors in the streets. In total, we had 8 people arrested, and got our first ever media coverage.
The first time the police have ever done anything about Corporate Greed.
In July of 2019, Extinction Rebellion DC took things to the next level. We were in the progress of planning a major disruptive action at Congress demanding that the House of Representatives formally declare a climate emergency. The date was set: July 9. All of our plans were set. All of our roles were filled. We had been heavily promoting the action for weeks. But days before the action, we got some incredible news - Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Earl Blumenauer were planning to introduce a climate emergency bill into the House and Senate! And they were going to introduce it on July 9, the same day as our action!
We didn’t want to disrupt Congress while they were in the process of introducing a resolution that meets our first demand, so we decided to call an audible. We planned a rally that was half a celebration for a major step forward for the climate movement, and half a warning to Congress that we would be back if the resolution didn’t gain traction.
Marching near the Capitol.
As soon as the rally ended, we went right back to planning our disruptive action, confident that Congress would continue the pattern of the past 40 years and utterly fail to make any progress on the climate crisis. Unfortunately, we were right - Nancy Pelosi sent the bill to committee, where it was left to die. Congress could not even commit to telling the truth and calling climate change an emergency in a nonbinding resolution, a truly shameful reflection of the cowardice of our leaders.
On July 23, two weeks after the bill was introduced, XRDC took action. We decided that if the House wasn’t going to work on the climate crisis, we were going to keep it from working at all. We felt we had no other options available if we wanted to force the House to take the climate crisis seriously and treat it like an existential threat.
We sent 17 brave rebels into the very bowels of the US Capitol Complex. Once inside, they superglued themselves onto the tunnels that connect the House Office Buildings to the US Capitol. There was a vote scheduled for the house floor in the US Capitol at 6:00pm; our blockades went up at 5:45pm. Almost every member of Congress uses these tunnels to travel between their offices and the Capitol. Our superglued rebels delayed the first vote on the house floor by more than half an hour.
Our action caused a massive disruption to business-as-usual in the halls of power. Every single member of Congress had their daily routine disrupted by our protestors, forcing each and every one of them to think about the climate crisis. For some members, that may have been the first time they thought about it all year. We also garnered major media attention, and for the first time, one of our actions received national news coverage.
That’s a member of Congress! I wonder what he’s thinking about…
Our action not only caused major disruption and generated major media attention, it also provided a huge spark of momentum to the climate movement in DC. Less than two weeks after the action, we were already meeting with representatives from a multitude of different groups discussing a major disruption in support of the September school strikes. We settled on a date, September 23, and a strategy: we were going to try to shutdown all of DC by causing the biggest traffic jam the city had ever seen. The next six weeks were a whirlwind of organizing. Many people from many groups and many backgrounds came together, working at emergency speed to address an emergency situation.
On September 23, over a thousand people across the city took to the streets to disrupt business-as-usual and pressure our government to take real action on the climate crisis. XRDC, 350DC, Sunrise DC, CCAN, Black Lives Matter, Code Pink, and numerous other affinity groups took over sections of the city and performed their own creative actions. The result was a massive success - we brought traffic to a standstill all over the city.
This large-scale disruption created a massive media buzz. We had over 250 articles written about our protest, with three in the Washington Post alone. We were the number 3 trending hashtag on US Twitter, despite having to compete with (what was the thing going on at the time - there must have been something). And perhaps most importantly, virtually every inhabitant of the city heard about those protests, meaning that our message of climate emergency and direct action reached the consciousness of millions of people.
Since then, we have taken numerous smaller actions, described below:
So far, our actions have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that small groups of dedicated people engaging in disruptive civil resistance can command an unbelievable amount of attention and exert major pressure on our elected leaders. Now, the best thing we can do is keep growing and keep making our disruptions bigger and more powerful! Onward!!
Be a part of XRDC’s history - head over to our events page to learn about how you can plug in.
