On May 1, a half dozen U.S. Senators from both major parties read aloud Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, a yearly ritual celebrating the power of dissent in U.S. history. Meanwhile, the night before, the NYPD had used riot gear, military equipment, and hundreds of officers to dismantle nonviolent Gaza solidarity encampments at Columbia University and then at City College of the City University of New York (CUNY).