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So last night at the University of California at Berkeley, seventeen people were arrested at Wheeler Hall after refusing to leave when the building was scheduled to close. Wheeler has been the site of two previous mass arrests in recent months, arrests that have been heavily criticized by civil libertarians.

Today, a smaller group of protesters found a new tactic, one that seems to have at least temporarily stymied the administration.

According to the student newspaper The Daily Cal, nine protesters — identified as students by witnesses — made their way to a fourth-floor outside ledge on the Wheeler facade early this afternoon. Six of them have apparently chained themselves together, and they have reportedly linked arms inside PVC pipes, making it logistically difficult for campus police to bring them down from the ledge against their will. (One student has apparently been dragged through a window and arrested. Eight remain on the ledge.)

This action would appear to place Berkeley in a difficult position. If they negotiate with the protesters — who are currently demanding, among other things, that charges against previous Wheeler occupiers be dropped — they break from their recent hardline stance, and in doing so encourage future similar actions. If they do not, they allow what the administration has already called a campus “health and safety issue” to continue.

Students at UC Santa Cruz and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee spent last night occupying campus buildings without police involvement, disciplinary action, or other incident. Such non-disruptive student occupations have recently been met with a reflexive punitive response at Berkeley.

There’s a lot that’s still murky about today’s events and their possible consequences, but it seems clear that in choosing to arrest students who have been demonstrating peacefully and non-disruptively on their own campus, the Berkeley administration has created the conditions which have now led several of those students to take up positions chained together on a high, narrow ledge on the face of an iconic campus building, demanding a change of course.

Oof.

6:10 pm Pacific Time | UC Berkeley police have declared the group of supporters and gawkers outside Wheeler Hall an “unlawful assembly,” and are clearing the area. Reports on Twitter suggest they’re using batons and pepper spray.

6:30 pm | I’ve created a Twitter list of folks tweeting about the ledge occupation.

6:35 pm | The blogs Occupy CA and Those Who Use It have a list of the occupiers’ demands:

1. Roll back the fee hikes, both the 8 % increase of 2010 and the 32 % of 2009.
2. End police repression on campus.  Hands off student protesters!
3. Democratize the Regents.
4. Put a stop to Operational Excellence, our campus’ incarnation of structural adjustment programs.

The occupiers are also reportedly demanding amnesty for themselves and other recent Berkeley student demonstrators.

6:50 pm | As I just posted on Twitter, UC cops have taken one of two approaches to campus occupiers since 2009: Arrest or wait them out. Neither seems like a viable option here. It seems pretty obvious that the Berkeley administration doesn’t want eight chained-together students falling asleep on a ledge tonight. So now what?

7:30 pm | According to tweeter (and Berkeley grad student) @callie_hoo, the ledge occupiers are willing to “consider coming down” if four conditions are met:

1. That all student conduct charges against participants in previous demonstrators be dropped.
2. That they be given a meeting with Berkeley’s chancellor.
3. That two students, and one union worker, elected by a general assembly be added to the university’s “Operational Excellence” committee.
4. That they themselves face no criminal or student conduct charges.

8:00 pm | Some background on Operational Excellence from the Daily Cal, the UC Berkeley Faculty Association, Those Who Use It, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

8:05 pm | From photos, it looks to me like the ledge the protesters are on is about five feet deep, shallower where there are columns. It’s about fifty feet in the air, maybe a bit more. There’s no railing whatsoever.

8:40 pm | Multiple reports on Twitter that the eight students are coming down from the ledge, having won concrete concessions from the Berkeley administration. If true, this marks the first tactically successful Berkeley occupation since the current movement began in 2009.

8:45 pm | The Daily Cal is reporting that the students from the ledge will not be arrested when they come down, and that all “protesters facing student conduct charges from the last year and a half – including those from the Nov. 20, 2009 Wheeler occupation” will be offered probation through the end of this semester as a resolution to their cases.

9:15 pm | Daily Cal now saying that all 17 protesters detained yesterday will have their charges dropped completely, while others from previous protests will either have charges dropped or be offered probation through the end of this semester.

9:20 pm | As I said on Twitter a few minutes ago, I have a hunch that today’s events could prompt a dramatic scaling back of the use of mass arrests as a disciplinary tool in Berkeley — and perhaps throughout the UC and CSU systems. Students have found a form of protest that gives them leverage over administrators, and until the administration finds a way to neutralize this new tactic, they won’t want to risk a replay of this evening. Students, faculty, alumni, staff, politicians, the public — none would ever forgive Berkeley if a student fell to his or her death while pressing the university to drop charges against friends who had been arrested in a peaceful, non-disruptive campus protest.

If tonight’s protest had ended badly, it could have been — without exaggeration — another Kent State. To their credit, the Berkeley administration recognized the gravity of the situation, and responded appropriately. But where they go from here remains an open question.

9:28 pm | The demonstrators have left Wheeler Hall, and have been met by a cheering crowd below.

There’s a lot to report from yesterday’s national Day of Action, including arrests at two California campuses and building occupations in two states that appear to have continued into this morning, but I didn’t want to let this smaller story go.

About five hundred UCSC students gathered on an athletic field yesterday to spell out the words FREE EDUCATION with their bodies. Butcher paper was hung nearby to let participants voice their opinions on educational issues, snacks were provided, and someone even arranged for a plane to buzz the event and take pictures from the sky.

And then there’s this, from the fourteenth paragraph of the student newspaper’s story on the action:

“‘[It went] amazingly,’ Miska said. ‘People felt comfortable enough to get naked and there are thoughtful responses [to the questions posed] on banners. I think everything happened as it should have.'”

Way to bury the lede, guys.

Yesterday was the fifty-sixth anniversary of the day that Claudette Colvin was asked to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama city bus, and refused. When Rosa Parks did the same thing nine months later, she sparked a movement that would change America.

But Claudette Colvin is worth remembering too.

In the spring of 1955, Claudette Colvin was a junior at Booker T. Washington High School in Montgomery. On March 2 of that year, on her way home from school, she was told to move to the back of the bus to allow a white person to take her seat.

Like Rosa Parks, she refused. Like Rosa Parks, she was arrested.

So why do we know Parks’ name and not Colvin’s?

Because where Parks was a 42-year-old civil rights activist, Colvin was a 15-year-old schoolkid.

Because where Parks was a respectable married woman with a good job, Colvin was poor … and would shortly become pregnant by an older, married man.

Because where Parks responded to injustice with quiet dignity, Colvin responded with noisy anger.

(When the bus driver told Rosa Parks that he would have to call the police if she didn’t get up, Parks replied, with extraordinary self-possession, “You may do that.” When the police arrived, she went without resistance. When the cops came for Claudette Colvin, she yelled at them that they were violating her rights, and refused to move. They dragged her from the bus. When they kicked her, she kicked them back.)

Rosa Parks is one of my heroes. Claudette Colvin is another.

And there’s another part of the Claudette Colvin story that’s worth telling. I first discovered it in Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose, and it’s stuck with me.

In November 1952, a black Montgomery high school student named Jeremiah Reeves was arrested and charged with the rape of a married white teenager four months earlier.

It was widely believed in Montgomery’s black community that the two had been having an affair. Reeves himself said that she had gone to the authorities only because she feared she was pregnant with his baby. But the police were able to extract a confession from him by threatening him with the death penalty if he pled not guilty — they even forced him to sit in the electric chair where they said he’d be executed.

After the confession Reeves was quickly charged with raping or attempting to rape six white women, and brought to trial just weeks later. He was convicted by an all-white jury that included one of the police officers who had participated in the investigation. The jury deliberated for just 38 minutes, and — despite the police’s promises — sentenced him to death.

Jeremiah Reeves was a classmate of Claudette Colvin’s at Booker T. Washington High School, and a neighbor. He was a senior, she was a first-year. He was handsome, popular, a talented drummer, a friend. Colvin rallied in his support, raised money for his defense, wrote him letters in jail. His arrest was, she later said, “the turning point in my life,” the moment when she really began to think critically about racism and injustice.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered that Reeves be given a new trial on the grounds that his confession should not have been admitted into evidence. (He was retried, with the confession excluded, but the result was the same — and the jury’s verdict came even quicker.) In March of 1955, Claudette Colvin sat down on a Montgomery bus and refused to give up her seat.

In 1958 Jeremiah Reeves was executed in the same electric chair in which he had been threatened with death six years earlier.

Updated with additional information December 1, 2011.

So it’s here — the kickoff to 2011’s Month of Action. I’ve started a Google Map to track what goes on today and throughout the month, and I’ll be updating it over the course of the day. The United States Student Association has actions listed in eleven states, most of which I haven’t had the chance to add yet, while the good folks at Defend Public Education have a lot of info on what’s going on in California.

If you know of something I haven’t put up, post a comment, and be sure to follow #March2 on Twitter for all the latest from around the country.

Update | As of 2:00 pm ET, I’ve got twenty-nine actions in thirteen states (and DC) on the map, with more to come.

Second Update | It’s 7:30 pm in the East now, and there’s all sorts of stuff going on. California had a bunch of actions that haven’t made it onto the map yet, several of which are still going on. There’s been one arrest at Laney College, a community college not far from Berkeley. There’s a sit-in happening at UC Santa Cruz, and a building is under occupation at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. (Those occupiers already have a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter account, by the way. Nicely done!)

The standoff in Wisconsin continues this morning, two weeks after it began, and all the weekend news is good for the opponents of Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill.

The Democrats in the state senate remain united in their determination to block passage of the bill, and widespread rumors Sunday claimed that they’d picked up their first defection from the other side. Twitter was abuzz yesterday evening with claims that Republican state senator Dale Schultz was planning to vote against the bill, though reporters were unable to reach Schultz or anyone from his office last night.

A dramatic showdown was averted yesterday afternoon as police withdrew an order for protesters camped out in the capitol building to vacate the premises. State officials had declared a 4 pm deadline for the building to be cleared, but after that deadline came and went with hundreds of people still peacefully occupying the space, Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs announced that there would be no arrests that night.

The New York Times this morning reported that it was unclear who had given the order to allow the demonstrators to stay, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel indicated that Tubbs himself had made the decision “after he saw how they moved aside while work crews went about cleaning the Capitol, including mopping and polishing floors.”

“People are very cooperative,” the paper quoted Tubbs as saying. “I appreciate that.”

This week is looking to be a big one in Wisconsin, and I’ll keep updating the story as news comes in.