Pigs Don’t Fly at Burk Protest Site

AUGUSTA, Ga. —  A protest almost nine months in the making took little more than an hour to play out.

Martha Burk and her National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) spent more time inflating and deflating a giant pink pig -- “Augusta National Corporate Pigs’ Club” was the porker’s message -- than it took for four speakers to earn scattered applause for a series of speeches against Augusta National Golf Course and its all-male membership.

As the second and third rounds of the Masters played out half a mile up Washington Road, while Tiger Woods scrambled to make the cut, about 100 protesters scrambled out of buses to support Burk in her campaign to force Augusta National to accept its first female member.

The afternoon seemed more like the worst picnic ever. No food, no drink, no badminton net, some fire ants and a lot of strangers milling around surrounded by 123 police officers.

There were no arrests, no injuries and not even much rhetoric.

Besides the pink pig, there was a mime who called himself “Sister Georgina Z. Bush,” and described himself as “the queer kissing cousin to George W. Bush.” He carried an umbrella with U.S. flags hanging from it and did a disjointed dance around the protesters.

There were giant puppets and a couple of dogs wearing “anti-Burk” buttons.

There was J.J. Harper of Cordele, Ga., the “One Man Klan Group,” as he called himself. Harper’s sign also read, “The American White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” He railed against Jesse Jackson, who, after saying he would attend the protest, did not. “Jesse, Please, Please, Please Boycott Georgia,” read another of Harper’s signs.

Harper, a 40-year-old Army veteran who said he was representing a “whole, invisible empire,” said he was advocating that “people need to start standing up for their rights. Get off your couch because our rights are being taken away.”

He was not, however, saying women had the right to join Augusta National.

Neither was Todd Manzi, an earnest father of two young daughters and husband of a wife who wished, he said, “that I’d get a job.” Manzi, from Tampa, Fla., said he has spent $35,000 of his own money -- “I’ve maxed out the credit cards and used my savings,” Manzi said -- to make and sell anti-Burk buttons.

Manzi has a Web site -- www.theburkstopshere.com -- but he’s leaving town with the realization that his crusade is over. “My wife wants me to come home and get a job,” Manzi said.

And there was The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson. Peterson, an African American minister and radio talk show host from Los Angeles, came with five members of his Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny. Peterson wanted to protest Jesse Jackson’s using his Rainbow Coalition/PUSH organization to back Burk’s cause. “We don’t need to be backing the agenda of a rich, white woman trying to get another rich, white woman into a country club,” Peterson said.

Burk made the points she has been making for almost a year -- Augusta National, while legally in the right, is morally wrong to keep women from a place where high-powered CEOs can gather to make deals, entertain clients and conduct business.

Because Augusta National holds a golf tournament that invites the public to spend money, which uses resources such as police that are taxpayer-funded, Burk said, it is wrong for the club to exclude women. It is not enough that women can be spectators at the club or even that they can be invited to play golf.

“It is about the symbolism,” Burk said from her protest site down a hill from the front gates of the golf course, a field she referred to as “the pit.”

A family across the street sat in its front yard with signs saying “Go home Martha.” Two men paraded in front of Burk’s podium. One wore a T-shirt that said, “I will kiss Martha Burk for a ticket,” while the other wore a shirt that said, “I might hug Martha for a ticket.”

Enthusiasm for Burk’s issue seemed equally lukewarm.

Even when she made the point that U.S. District Judge Dudley H. Bowen Jr., who had issued the final ruling against Burk’s request to protest in front of August National, was hosting a party Saturday at his Augusta farm that included Augusta National members such as former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn and that maybe Bowen had not been the right person to have heard her case, more attention was being paid to Harper, the lone Ku Klux Klan member.

After 65 minutes of speeches by feminist activists, Burk climbed into a black SUV. While her driver stood at the door, Burk said through an open window, “I think it went great. I’m very pleased considering the local law enforcement tried to totally sabotage us.”

She added, “We turned out what we said we’d turn out. We showed up when we said we’d show up.”

Burk said she found the row after row of police cars parked in the field “threatening,” though she did credit the police with keeping Harper and other counter-protesters away from her group.

Just before Burk shut her window, she also gave a small opening to Augusta National Chairman Hootie Johnson.

“I’ll back off,” Burk said. “If he will announce a reasonable plan to accommodate women -- in months, not years -- if he would say something like that, I’d say we could give him some breathing room.”

But Johnson has given no indication that a woman will be admitted in either months or years.

“The pig likes to travel,” Burk said. “The pig could show up at some corporate headquarters. The pig might love New York.”

That was Burk’s way of saying she was continuing her campaign but in a different way. She said she plans to make the CEOs of companies such as IBM, Citicorp and Coca-Cola who are Augusta members be held publicly accountable and announce whether they support Augusta National’s membership policy. “Or,” Burk said, “they should resign. I don’t see a middle ground.”