by James Glaser
December 13, 2004

On August 5th of this year, 22 year-old Michael Larson and a couple dozen other volunteers were drawing outlines of people's bodies on the sidewalks of Duluth, Minnesota, to as Larsen said, "Memorialize the victims of the Hiroshima Bombings."

On August 6th 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan and three days later another on Nagasaki. Reports differ on the death toll from these bombings, but most agree that 70,000 were instantly killed at Hiroshima and that by 1950, about 350,000 were dead from the effects of these two bombings.

For years people all over the world have been drawing out the shapes of bodies with chalk on the anniversary of these two bombings to graphically illustrate those deaths. This year in Duluth, Michael Larson was arrested, hand cuffed, and given a citation for doing just that.

Judge Gerald C. Martin dismissed the charge of property damage against Larson on November 17th

The whole thing started with a group of volunteers from a local peace organization named Loaves and Fishes. According to a report written by Dan Meyer for the Duluth, Reader Weekly, "Starting about 10 p.m. on Aug.5, 2004, and into the early morning of Aug.6, volunteers from Loaves and Fishes walked the streets of downtown Duluth, drawing outlines of each other on the sidewalks to represent the 'shadows' that still exist in Hiroshima." They also wrote slogans calling for the end of nuclear weapons; anti-war slogans were also drawn in chalk, on the sidewalk, as they passed the Bush campaign office.

Larson and a friend were continuing their memorial at the Minnesota Power Plaza when a Duluth Police car pulled up. Larson said the officer told him and his friend that they couldn't be drawing on public property, and gave them a warning. Immediately afterwards two more squad cars arrived, and a "very angry" officer approached them "yelling about Iraq" Larson said.

Larson tried explaining to the officer that the chalk outlines had nothing to do with Iraq, but "he wouldn't listen." The officer told Larson to clean up the outlines, and he refused. He was handcuffed and brought to the squad car, but he was released 20 minutes later, after Larson's friend had washed off the chalk. The officer gave Larson a ticket for Damage to Property.

At the trial Larson defended himself and he objected to the prosecutor's call for a dismissal, saying that the real defendant should be the U.S. government for possessing nuclear weapons.

Outside the courtroom a handful of volunteers from Loaves and Fishes, showed up before the trial to play hopscotch in front of the St. Louis County Courthouse. Using chalk, they started playing hopscotch while others had signs calling for disarmament of U.S. nuclear weapons, an issue Loaves and Fishes has been working on for 12 years.

One protester, Joel Kilgour said, the hopscotch was "a great way to highlight how utterly absurd it is to charge somebody with damage to property for using sidewalk chalk. He went on to say, "It was not intended to be an act of civil disobedience at all." The Shadow Project is in remembrance of the outlines on buildings and streets from the people who were vaporized by the atomic bombs. No hopscotchers were arrested.