A protest march cut a solemn swath through crowds of Christmas shoppers and the joyous mood of the holiday season in Midtown Manhattan on Saturday in a rebuke to the police for the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in Queens on his wedding day last month.
Three weeks after Sean Bell was killed and two friends were wounded by 50 police bullets, a coalition of civil rights groups, elected officials, community leaders, clergymen and others marched down Fifth Avenue and across 34th Street in a "silent" protest that occasionally chanted but was largely devoid of shrieks and speeches.
Billed as a "Shopping for Justice" march and led by the Reverend Al Sharpton, the army of protesters, many carrying placards, moved grim-faced between hordes of holiday shoppers and carefree tourists clogging the sidewalks of two of the city's busiest commercial arteries on one of the heaviest shopping days of the year, nine days before Christmas.
The police had set up metal barricades to confine the marchers to a single traffic lane, but the throng quickly swelled and the barricades were shifted to widen the line of march to four of the five lanes on Fifth Avenue and five of the six on 34th Street, with one kept open for emergencies. Traffic on side streets leading to the march was halted as the protesters swept on.
Here and there, marchers shouted "No shopping, no justice."
Other protestors carried signs proclaiming: "Stop NYPD Racist Terror," and "Justice for Sean Bell." But most stared straight ahead, ignoring those on the other side of the barricades.
The size of the protest, strung out for 10 blocks, was anybody's guess. The organizers said thousands marched. The police, as is customary, gave no estimate.
In any case, there were no confrontations, arrests or untoward incidents during the march, the police said, and for several hours, a kind of anti-theater -- subdued militancy and bubbly holiday cheer -- managed to share the streets of New York.
"We're not coming to buy toys, we're not coming to buy trinkets -- we're coming to shop for justice," Sharpton, a man never at a loss for words, said at a morning rally in Harlem, explaining what could not be said in a nonverbal march.
"Our presence is a bigger statement than anything we could ever say with our mouths," he added.
In Midtown, shoppers gawked. Tourists snapped pictures and wondered what it was all about.
Salvation Army carolers sang on, and the protesters, who had been admonished by organizers to remain silent, kept discipline only in the front ranks, where members of Congress, the state legislature, the City Council and other VIPs marched alongside a stone-faced Sharpton.
"It's New York, you always see crazy things," Margaret Rajnik, a nurse from Atlantic City, New Jersey, said at Rockefeller Center, where mobs of shoppers jammed the plaza in front of the skating rink, the giant Christmas tree and the golden Prometheus.
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