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As the Occupy Wall Street movement comes out of hibernation, a day of protests are planned around the nation. MSNBC’s Richard Lui reports.

Updated at 3 P.M. ET: Protesters across the world hit the streets Tuesday on May Day to rally against austerity measures and call for higher wages and more jobs. In the United States, the protests are seen as the biggest test for the Occupy movement since many of its camps were shuttered late last year.

Occupiers in more than 100 cities across the country were expected to protest on the day that traditionally celebrates workers’ rights.

Demonstrators in New York held a “free university” and a “Guitarmy” led a march; in Nashville, they will hold a torchlight procession to commemorate worker struggles and victories; and in Oakland, marchers pounded on bank windows and went face-to-face with a police line.

“We’ve got hundreds of people out already and I know a lot of people are going to be trickling in as the day goes along. We’ve had pickets at the Bank of America, Chase, Disney,” Mark Bray of the Occupy Wall Street PR team said as protesters chanted “We are the 99 percent” in the background. “(The) mood is very spirited, the rain is lightening up… .”

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About 1,000 Occupy protesters were based at New York’s Bryant Park. As about 250 protesters left to march on banks after noon, they chanted “Out of the stores, into the streets” and “Banks got bailed out; we got sold out.”

Robby McGeddon, 47, a tech worker carrying a maypole for May Day, said, “There’s too much fear for the general public to actually want to strike. They don’t want to lose their job … We haven’t reached that tipping point where people are more frightened for some place to live … it will  get to the tipping point but right now we’re just practicing.”

“We’re trying to find new, positive community-building ways to engage and protest and be a part of the burgeoning civil dialogue about what this country should be doing’ said Daphne Carr, 33, co-organizer of the Occupy Music Working Group.

About 300 musicians led a march of about 1,000 up Fifth Avenue to Union Square.

Carr said music making “has been eroded from our public sphere so we’re taking and re-claiming the right to play music publicly together in the streets, in the parks without permits, and that it’s a safe and natural part of being a part of the city.”

“Get a job,” one man said as he elbowed his way through the crowd of protesters.

Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia University, said he thought Tuesday would be the “biggest test since the fall of where Occupy is.”

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“I think it’s still alive and thriving. I don’t think it’s going anywhere soon,” he said. “But I think after [Tuesday] we’ll know whether or not they were hibernating all winter and now they’ve re-emerged, or if they’ve died out.”

Occupy held protests during the spring on student debt and worker rights. They also have been working on a rollout of new versions of outreach websites to facilitate coordination among different Occupy outfits. But a lot of effort has been focused on holding a May Day that will make a splash. 

“Many activists have been working toward May Day for months and so they’ve decided to make it a test of strength,” said Todd Gitlin, a former leader of the 1960s-era group, Students for a Democratic Society, who has just published a book on Occupy. He added: “A lot of people in the larger society don’t think the movement still exists, so there’s some need to prove to them that it does exist.”

Occupy Wall Street has struggled during the last months without a camp, with some members starting their own groups while keeping a loose affiliation to the movement.

“It’s become fractured over time and I think people point a lot to that to the breakup of Zuccotti Park, and the natural disagreements that people had came more to the fore when people were separated and people formed their own circles upon which they continued. But it wasn’t the circle of great diversity that was right there at Zuccotti Park and people could grow from,” said William Johnsen, a 63-year-old veteran activist from Staten Island, N.Y. “It’s obviously a long-term process right now which will ultimately change into something else.”

Lefteris Pitarakis / AP

Workers and activists rally on May Day.

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But Konrad Cukla, a 23-year-old graduate student who has been helping with Occupy May Day planning, said that since the park shut, occupiers have been engaging in key coalition building work, such as with immigrant rights groups in the city.

“All the labor unions have come together and for the first time are going to have a unified march with immigrant rights groups and Occupy,” he said as he walked with other a musical band of occupiers — the Rude Mechanical Orchestra — dressed in green and black on Manhattan’s 5^th Avenue. “I think the movement is evolving, it’s taking on more concrete allies and issues, engaging more with labor struggles — also just expanding its horizons and bringing more people into the movement.”

Elsewhere:

Jim Seida / msnbc.com

Rain City Superheroes Midnight Jack, left, El Caballero, center, and Phoenix Jones relax Tuesday at a downtown Seattle Starbucks. Each “superhero” carries a digital camera to record the events they witness. “We’re here to document if the police get out of control and to stop the people if they get out of control,” Jones says.

San Francisco: Golden Gate ferry workers picketed ferry terminals in the North Bay, but union organizers canceled a protest on the Golden Gate Bridge to give support to the ferry workers, the Oakland Tribune reported. However, scores of California Highway Patrol officers with helmets and batons lined the bridge and gathered around the toll plaza just in case. Bridge traffic was not disrupted.

Oakland, Calif.: Protesters playing cat-and-mouse with police, pounded on windows of banks and other businesses, SFGate.com reported. After surrounding a downtown Bank of America branch, protesters chanted, “Oakland is the people’s town, strike occupy, shut it down.” they also gathered at a Wells Fargo bank branch. Police later confronted demonstrators marching through downtown. Video by NBCBayArea.com showed at least one protester being dragged away by police.

Seattle: Windows were broken and police arrested a handful of protesters as about 100 marched, NBC station KING reported. Many were dressed in dark clothes, wearing face makeup and carrying sticks, live TV video showed.

Albany, N.Y.: State police arrested two men who set up a table without a permit in Lafayette Park, where Occupy protesters assembled Tuesday, the Times Union newspaper reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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