What Will Become of Occupy Wall Street: A Protest Historian’s Guide

When even a Fox News readers' poll puts support for the Occupy Wall Street protests at more than 60 percent, it's safe to say we have something of a movement on our hands. The demonstrations are approaching the one-month mark stronger than ever, expanding beyond New York to cities across the world. With no end in sight (but with winter on its way), one question keeps coming up: "How is this going to end?"

Mark Naison knows a few things about protest movements. A political activist and professor in Fordham's Urban and African-American Studies programs, Naison attended Columbia University in the sixties, where he joined the Congress of Racial Equality and Students for a Democratic Society. In 1968, he was part of a group that occupied Columbia buildings in opposition to the construction of a gym in Morningside Park. (It was never built.)

And yet upon his first visit to Zuccotti Park, Naison was confused. "It was the first time in my life that I had been at a demonstration that I didn't recognize a single person. It was very different — overwhelmingly white, countercultural, educated, and unconnected to the major movements in New York City," he noticed. But since, he salutes the group's exponential growth: "This now has catalyzed a huge variety of people who are dissatisfied with the way things are going politically, rampant unemployment, the increasing concentration of wealth at the top, and with the Obama administration. What I see here is a coalition of a variety of different forces concerned with social and economic justice issues that I haven't seen since the sixties. And it caught everybody by surprise!"...