1. On September 17, 2011, several dozen protestors began gathering in New York City’s Financial District under the name “Occupy Wall Street.” The group was small at first, but the protestors Claimed they represented millions of others, and they said they wouldn’t stop demonstrating until the powerful in the United States started listening to their concerns. Though they didn’t have specific demands, their central complaints were wealth inequality and the influence that money, through rich individuals and large businesses, has on politics.
2. The media ignored the demonstrations at first, because small protests form almost daily around the world. As the Occupy Wall Street protesters remained , however, and as their numbers grew into the hundreds, they started to attract attention—though not the kind they wished for. Much of the early media coverage of the event portrayed the protestors as wild, disorganized hippies who didn’t know what they wanted.
3. But soon after that, both the protests and the coverage of them changed. On September 24, a large protest march resulted in the arrests of 80 people, and a New York City police officer used pepper spray on several women. When videos of those incidents appeared on YouTube, people around the world began to take notice of the protests, and many began to sympathize. Soon, protestors and supporters adopted the slogan “We are the 99%.”
4. By early October, Occupy Wall Street had spawned the Occupy Movement, a loosely affiliated movement of hundreds of protests around the world. In New York, the largest demonstrations drew thousands of protestors. On October 15, coordinated protests in 900 cities showed the sentiments of the Occupy Wall Street protesters to be global, stretching far from Wall Street and across countries with very different political and financial systems.
5. As of late October, the protests continued in New York, and periodically came together in other cities. Some politicians and other influential public figures in the United States and elsewhere began to issue messages of support, but, given the movement’s deep grievances, there was no sign that the protests would end quickly.