A different kind of protest
So, yeah, many of the people at the No Kings demonstration in the small southern town were older, around our age. Maybe most of them. And most of them were definitely white.
So, yeah, pretty much just like all the previous anti-Trump demonstrations.
But this time, this No Kings demonstration, seemed different. There were lots of young people there as well, more than a sprinkling. There were families. There were teens and people in their twenties. There were some—not many, but some—people of color. And most of all, in this small southern town, where there were half a dozen similar demonstrations on No Kings Day within a half hour or so drive, the demonstration was huge.
The estimate was 1,200 people attended, which may not seem much to New York or LA. But the population of Pittsboro, North Carolina, is 4,839. “We’re sending a big message from a small southern town in central North Carolina,” one speaker said to cheers.
The crowded scene was replicated almost everywhere. Some estimates said up to five million people across the nation came out to protest. That’s almost two percent of the entire U.S. population.
In Pittsboro, the crowd jammed the plaza in front of the county justice center. They lined the streets. They sat under the shade of trees to get relief from the brutal sun.
They sported politicized t-shirts and carried home-made signs (my favorite: “No Faux-King Way”). They listened to recordings of Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful,” and, of course, Dylan doing “The Times They Are A-Changing” and Woody Guthrie doing “This Land is Your Land.”
They listened, naturally, to speeches, too, to the 27-year-old head of the state Democratic Party and to the 82-year-old former director general of the U.S. Foreign Service. They heard, as well, from a local teacher, who spoke mostly in Spanish.
The poem he recited ended with the recurring phrase, “They tried to bury us,” he said. “They didn’t know we were seeds.”
Maybe, possibly, finally, the times are indeed changing.