When you think of protests in Washington, D.C., what comes to mind? Demonstrators in front of the White House? A rally on Capitol Hill? A march down Constitution Avenue? Well, on March 17, 2003 a North Carolina tobacco farmer took a very different tactic.
Around noon that day, 50-year old Dwight Watson drove his Jeep into D.C., towing his John Deere tractor on a flat bed trailer. Heading up Constitution Avenue, he suddenly jumped the curb and drove straight into the pond at Constitution Gardens between the Vietnam Memorial and the Washington Monument. Watson began playing patriotic music and then climbed onto the tractor, which he adorned with an upside-down American flag – a traditional sign of distress – and a yellow flag with a tobacco leaf on it.
In was a odd scene and authorities were perplexed. But, in the post 9/11 world they weren’t about to take any chances. Officers from the Park Police, D.C. Police and the FBI closed off the streets around the pond and made contact with Watson.
The farmer claimed to have bombs made of ammonium nitrate, an ingredient used in fertilizer and explosives like the one that Timothy McVeigh used to attack the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
