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| Palestine had a strong ally in Dorli |
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| Dorli knew how to enjoy life |
Pics are from my personal Dorli archive.
We didn't agree on strategies, but the many times I shared the street or meetings with Dorli, I couldn't help but marvel at her stamina and willingness to speak her truth to the powers that be. She was also a friend whom I will always miss. Below is David Gutman's SEATTLE TIMES remembrance of her. Linda
There’s a photo of an old woman, scarf bound snugly around her neck. She looks dressed for church, or the market. But her eyes and lips are red, burning. A thin, milky liquid drips off her face in white rivulets.
Two men, both much younger, one wearing safety goggles, help guide her. One holds her head, as he gazes solemnly down. The other puts his arms around her. Their passivity frames her intensity.
She stares dead at the camera, unbowed.
Dorli Rainey, the woman in the photo, briefly became the face of the Occupy Wall Street movement after Seattle police pepper-sprayed her at a protest in 2011. Rainey, a longtime Seattle political activist, died Aug. 12. She was 95.
Rainey was a fixture in local progressive protest movements for decades. Anti-war, pro-housing, racial justice, public transit, anti-drone strikes, anti-big banks — the list of causes Rainey fought for is almost too long and too myriad to catalog.
“She was so active because she loved this country, and she wanted to make sure that the country was good to its people,” said her daughter, Gabriele Rainey. “Anything that needed fixing to make the world a better place, she was involved in it.”
Rainey protested at the naval base on Whidbey Island, she rode the bus to Olympia to protest weapons shipments, she protested the nuclear missiles at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, she went to Nevada to protest a drone-testing facility.
She served on the Issaquah School Board and ran for King County Council a half-century ago and ran for Seattle mayor a decade ago. She was arrested in South Park, protesting evictions. She was arrested downtown, protesting Wells Fargo.
But she gained national headlines for her role in a downtown Seattle protest in the early days of the Occupy movement. On Nov. 15, 2011, Rainey, then 84, joined protesters in blocking downtown intersections.
When Seattle police used pepper spray to clear the crowd, Rainey was hit. Fellow protesters poured milk over her face to ease the sting.
A seattlepi.com photographer, Joshua Trujillo, captured the stunning image.
The photo become a worldwide symbol for the fledgling movement. She was profiled by The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Associated Press, The Guardian. She was interviewed by The New York Times and Keith Olbermann. She went on Dori Monson’s local right-wing radio show and hung up on him.
Then-Mayor Mike McGinn apologized and ordered a review of the incident.
Rainey was back out protesting downtown a couple of days later.
“This has been a wonderful week,” she said at the time. “I think we have accomplished something that we have been trying to get, and that is attention.”
“You only get real attention when you block a few streets.”
McGinn said that when he called her to apologize, she gave him a list of her concerns with the Police Department. He said the incident did cause Seattle police to modify its policy on use of pepper spray, a change that did not stick.
“Dorli is legendary, and deservedly so, for her activism,” McGinn said Friday. “She was just omnipresent and a conscience and a voice for change, and I deeply, deeply, deeply respected her.”
Seattle City Councilmember Lisa Herbold called Rainey “a special kind of social change warrior.”
“She always centered the inherent humanity of others in her activism,” Herbold said.
Rainey was active with groups such as Veterans For Peace, and the local homelessness advocates Women in Black and Nickelsville.
Peggy Hotes, a friend and fellow activist, remembers meeting her for the first time at an Iraq War protest at a church in Ballard. Rainey had sent several emails to organize in advance.
The morning of the event, she sent one last one, saying the organizers still needed help.
Hotes listened to a speaker, and then a short, white-haired woman walked up to her.
“She said, ‘You’re Peggy Hotes,'” Hotes recalled. ” ‘You didn’t answer my email.’ “
“She was involved in just anything and everything.”
Rainey wrote on politics and activism at her blog, entitled Old Lady in Combat Boots. It is, alas, now lost to the attics of the internet.
Rainey was born in Austria in 1926.
Hotes remembers Rainey telling a story about the uniforms schoolchildren were required to wear, which she hated.
One day she folded together a paper hat and wore it to school in silent protest. She was called to the headmaster’s office.
“She was always able to stand up when an injustice confronted her,” Hotes said.
Austria, Rainey said, was a great country, but a very bureaucratic country.
“I used to really argue and fight against it when I was growing up,” she said in an interview for public access TV in 2010.
She was a Red Cross nurse and then worked in Europe as a technical translator for the U.S. Army for 10 years. She married Max Rainey, a civil engineer who got a job with Boeing, and they moved to the Seattle area in 1956.
“What I really was interested in was the freedom of speech, the Constitution,” she said of her new country.
She worked as a court-appointed special advocate, representing children who have experienced abuse or neglect. She worked as a real estate agent for Coldwell Banker for decades.
She had three children, Gabriele, of Asheville, North Carolina; Michael, of Boston; and Andrea, who died in 2014. She was also preceded in death by her husband, Max.
In retirement, she moved to a senior living facility in Queen Anne. Parking was an issue, so from then on she commuted by bus to all her activism.
In 2009, she launched a brief campaign for mayor. But one rainy night in May, after a late meeting, as she was standing waiting for her bus, she decided it was too much.
She withdrew from the race and, in a letter to supporters, wrote: “I am old and should learn to be old, stay home, watch TV and sit still.”
But she did no such thing.
Two years later, she would describe riding the bus home after being pepper-sprayed: “I must have looked a fright.”
“The bus driver said, ‘Hey, what happened to you?’ I said I got pepper-sprayed by Seattle’s finest,” she recalled.
“And the wonderful thing that happened was this bus full of people started talking about Occupy,” she said. “It became a really wonderful educational opportunity for me to convert a bus load full of people to our way of thinking.”
News researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.
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