Organizers of Wednesday’s anti-Wall Street protest in San Francisco got what they wanted after surrounding the Wells Fargo Bank corporate headquarters and blocking its entrances: 11 demonstrators arrested and plenty of headlines.

In New York, police arrested four people outside JP Morgan Chase offices, where protesters called in vain for a meeting with Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon.

But on the same day in San Jose, a different kind of protest was getting real — and permanent — results.

The Occupy Wall Street movement that began almost four weeks ago in Manhattan has spilled across the country, with outposts growing daily around the Bay Area to fight corporate greed and rampant unemployment.

At the heart of their argument are the banks that helped create the nation’s economic crisis — in particular banks that received federal bailouts while foreclosing on homeowners, many of whom had lost their jobs. Some of those same banks have recently announced plans to charge monthly fees for debit card users.

It’s why demonstrators in Berkeley and Walnut Creek on Wednesday targeted a Wells Fargo or a Bank of America during separate protests. While the San Francisco protest was not officially part of Occupy San Francisco, the group surfaced to show its solidarity and disdain of the bank’s role in the economy’s troubles.

As Max Bell Alter, 31, who was arrested outside the Wells Fargo headquarters in San Francisco, put it: The more people who join the movement, the more “banks will have to be accountable.”

In San Jose on Wednesday, unhappy customers were striking back at bank bottom lines.

Standing near the altar of the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Father Eduardo Samaniego announced that the East Side parish is moving its $3 million account with Bank of America, where the church has done business for at least 20 years, to a community credit union.

“We are in a holy place to do holy work,” the Jesuit priest told 17 others members affiliated with People Acting In Community Together who stood alongside him. Some held posters that read “Keep Families In Their Homes” or “Stop Corporate Greed,” and several made similar announcements about divesting their own personal bank accounts from big banks involved in foreclosures into community banks or credit unions that were not.

PACT is a multiethnic, interfaith organization that seeks to empower people to create a more just community; it represents 25 congregations and 50,000 people in Santa Clara County. The nonprofit announced Wednesday that it is pulling over $1 million from its accounts with Wells Fargo and transferring the money to a local San Jose bank.

“We stand in solidarity with thousands of families in San Jose and millions in our nation who have been unfairly forced out of their homes,” PACT Co-Chairman David Gonzales told a few dozen followers sitting in the church’s pews. “We say to Wells Fargo: No more foreclosures. You will not have our money anymore.”

Peggy Bryan, an associate pastor at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Saratoga, echoed that sentiment from the church’s altar, saying she was ending her 15-year-long relationship with Wells Fargo and taking her $150,000 in savings to a local credit union.

“We’re saying, ‘Not one more home stolen from our community by any bank,’ ” said Bryan, 60, who added that she was acting as a private citizen and not representing her church.

To outsiders, PACT members’ actions may appear timely because of the headlines that Occupy Wall Street outposts have garnered in the past few weeks.

But Samaniego and others said their decisions come after working unsuccessfully for the past few years to hold banks accountable for actions the nonprofit describes as unethical and unfair against homeowners, especially those in lower socio-economic groups.

The priest pointed to his 7,200 parishioners — 95 percent of whom are immigrant Vietnamese, Latino or Samoan, among the worst affected since the Wall Street meltdown in 2008, he said. In three ZIP codes in the church’s area, he said, one out of nine homes have been foreclosed on since 2008.

But can his action really have any effect?

“I’m one church and just one part of the diocese,” Samaniego said afterward. “So if our other churches can make this kind of move, we can show that enough is enough.”

Alerted to the development, a Bank of America spokeswoman said the bank is “both sorry and surprised to hear this longtime customer is unhappy, as they have not raised any concerns with our banking center in the past.”

Colleen Haggerty said Bank of America has made more loan modifications than any other lender and had modified more than 193,000 mortgages in California since the housing crisis began in 2008.

“We are happy to meet with church officials personally to discuss their concerns,” she said.

Meanwhile, Wells Fargo spokeswoman Holly Rockwood said Wells Fargo “strives” to help customers sustain homeownership.

“While we can’t prevent a customer from moving their money, we can use this as an opportunity to educate them about our home preservation efforts,” she said, adding that “93 percent of our customers are current in their payments, and since 2009, we have conducted more than 716,000 active trial or completed mortgage modifications.”

But for PACT members, it’s too little too late.

“We started this process to get them to make changes in their policies and practices,” but received little response, said a PACT member. “Now we’re taking action through divestment.”

Staff writers Cecily Burt, Angela Woodall and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact Tracy Seipel at 408 275-0140.