WASHINGTON—Once again, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the nation’s streets, in 1,600 marches from coast to coast—this time for civil rights and voting rights, remembering icon John Lewis, and against Donald Trump’s policies.
Marchers commemorated the fifth anniversary of Lewis’s death. Lewis, a top aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was in the front line of the marchers for voting rights in the famous 1965 march from Selma, Ala., to the state capital of Montgomery.
White racist Selma police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor turned state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, high-pressure fire hoses, and vicious dogs loose on the peaceful unarmed marchers. The troopers beat Lewis so badly he was in critical condition for several days and wore the scars lifelong.
Later elected to the U.S. House as a Democratic representative from Atlanta, Lewis became “the conscience of the Congress” and his constant refrain to activists was to “make good trouble.”
Which is what the marchers vowed to do when they gathered around the nation and even in Oaxaca, Mexico, to commemorate Lewis and renew the fight for his causes, civil rights, and voting rights.
The violence in Selma led directly to congressional passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court emasculated 12 years later. A top Lewis cause was to revive and strengthen it, and with it voting protections for women, minorities, disabled, LBGTQ people, and others whom President Donald Trump wants to strip of their rights to vote.
Marchers had those same goals. But as signs and speakers made clear nationwide, Trump doesn’t. Comparisons of Trump to Southern racists were common. One in D.C. said a plurality of voters elected “a Confederate soldier” to the White House last year.
Union leaders who spoke to several of the nation’s marches were active participants. In Chicago, Teachers Union President Stacy Lewis Gates, National Education Association President Becky Pringle, and Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former CTU organizer and current member, were among the keynote speakers. It, plus a candlelight vigil, was one of the two leading marches of the day.
Johnson said Trump was making an “alarming and fast descent into authoritarianism.” Pringle slammed Trump’s destruction of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and his administration’s “intimidation of immigrant families.”
Members of the Communist Party USA participated in demonstrations in several cities around the nation. On Thursday morning, the CPUSA declared it was “making good trouble all over the country, challenging the MAGA offensive and its growing lawlessness.” The party urged the broadest possible unity in the effort to defend Lewis’ legacy, protect voting rights, and stop the Trump assault on democracy. “When we march, strike, struggle, and sing together, we lay the basis for winning,” the CPUSA said. “United we’re unbeatable.”
Cited Trump as a liar
Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, the Black congressman from Houston and a friend of Lewis, keynoted the D.C. march. Green had called out Trump as a liar during Trump’s so-called State of the Union address earlier this year. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had Green ejected.
“Stand with the Constitution,” Green declared at the march. “We want to make sure the Constitution protects” the U.S. people and their rights to vote. “We cannot tolerate injustice and hypocrisy.” Green, like Lewis and King, also emphasized the moral importance of non-violent protest, including against Trump. “Love, real love, is revolutionary,” he said. “But it is our solemn duty and obligation to respect the Constitution of the United States.”
Some signs in D.C. went beyond simple anti-Trump statements. One demanded a general strike. Another denounced Trump’s prisons and detention centers for migrants, citizen and non-citizen, whom ICE kidnaps, jails, and deports.
A “Free D.C.” speaker put Trump’s latest law, the so-called “big beautiful bill,” in the context of her city, since one demand of marchers there is to admit D.C. as the 51st state. The law, she said, “would deny food to 130,000” of the capital’s 713,000 residents, end federal education aid for 100,000 kids, and fire 40,000 D.C. residents who work for the federal government. “And he’d kidnap and deport one of every seven people” in the city, referring to its Latino/Latina numbers, whom Trump’s ICE agents are already pursuing.
Other events highlighted a range of connected issues. Tens of thousands marched in Los Angeles, and dozens even marched in the Ohio hometown of Trump’s vice president, J.D. Vance. Also in Ohio, there was a mass sit-in inside the state capitol building in Columbus.
USA Today reported Raquel Knecht, one of 250 people in the Nevada capital of Carson City, spoke up for immigrants, saying, “Just because you have brown skin doesn’t mean you are here illegally. He [Trump] is taking innocent people. It’s not America.”
Trump’s ICE troopers’ mass roundups and deportations of immigrants were on the minds of other marchers, as well. In New York, Sara Gasero and her husband carried homemade signs honoring Andry José Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan asylum seeker whom ICE deported to a prison in El Salvador. Signs in D.C. compared ICE to the German SS during the Nazi era.
Marchers also cited Trump’s authoritarian moves against federal workers whom he arbitrarily fired and against federal judges who stand up to him, even if the U.S. Supreme Court, with three Trump-named jurists, overrules them.
“He wants to impeach judges. We will impeach him,” said Jessica Denton, organizer of the downtown D.C. march, which drew more than 300 people, led by a pickup “protest band.” Rep. Green has already filed one impeachment resolution against Trump and is planning another.
The marches won’t stop, as more actions are planned later in the summer.
CONTRIBUTOR
