Black Bloc gained attention in the United States in 1999 after violent protests at a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, according to a 2001 history of the tactic on the anarchist news website, A-Infos. The reason for the dress, wrote the history’s author Daniel Dylan Young, was to “fend off police attacks, without being singled out as individuals for arrest and harassment later on.”
Hundreds of people were arrested in the Seattle riots, which involved anarchists vandalizing businesses.
