Two banners promoting its environmental activism got the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater sidelined from the parade of tall ships July 4 on the river in New York City.
At around 11 a.m. Saturday, as Clearwater was set to escort NRP Sagres, a Portuguese naval ship, up the river it was approached by the U.S. Coast Guard and directed to leave the Sail 4th 250 procession.
The two banners read “Save the Clean Water Act” and “Indigenous Rights Racial Justice Climate Solutions,” typical of the advocacy messages Clearwater promotes from its sails.
According to a statement from the Coast Guard, the banners violated the conditions set by Sail 4th that prohibited “political or politically charged messages/statements” and when Clearwater was given the opportunity to remove them and declined, the ship was ordered out of the procession.
Clearwater officials disputed that they were told they could remove the banners. Jen Benson, the director of advocacy and communications who was on the ship, said they asked if the banners could be removed but were told they had to leave the procession.
When they reached out to a Sail 4th 250 representative they were told the decision was above the organization’s control.
The Clearwater also sailed in the Class B tall ships procession on the East River on Friday. The banners were not affixed to the sails that day.
Benson acknowledged on Sunday there might have been a miscommunication with the Coast Guard and that while they disagreed with the decision they respected it.
She said Clearwater does “not believe speaking out about clean water and climate change is inherently political.”
She pointed to last week’s heat-related power outage at the Yonkers Wastewater Recovery Facility that dumped untreated water into the Hudson as a non-political example of climate change impacting water quality for miles.
“People have been fighting on both sides of the aisle for clean water,” she said.
Clearwater, based in Beacon, was founded in 1966 when activists including folk singer Pete Seeger decided to “build a boat to save a river” to combat the industrial pollution damaging the Hudson.
It set sail three years later intent on restoring and protecting the river through education and advocacy and a decade later participated in Operation Sail 1976, the tall ships parade marking the nation’s bicentennial.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Banners force Clearwater out of Sail 4th 250 tall ships procession
Reporting by Jonathan Bandler, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jonathan Bandler, Rockland/Westchester Journal News | USA TODAY Network
