While in the car running errands today, I got an excited call from my 16-year-old daughter. She said a large number of kids in her school, Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD, had planned a walk-out today to protest Trump. The principal (a really excellent person) decided it would be better and safer to have it as an in-school event and arranged for the kids to rally in the stadium. But that’s not what they wanted and hundreds of them walked out. They walked a mile up the road (shutting down traffic) to another high school, Northwood, and got other kids to join them there, then the group moved on to other schools. All told, 5 high schools joined in the protest, walked down one of the main roads in our county (I kept getting traffic alerts that the road was totally closed off), and ending up in the downtown section of our community.
My community is very diverse racially and ethnically. The 5 schools that joined this protest all have a large percentage (30-40%) of children from immigrant families, mainly Latino but also from other countries. The kids in these schools have reason to be angry and worried about having someone in the presidency who talks about deporting all the undocumented, about building a wall, someone who talks about immigrants and POC with contempt, someone who aligns himself with white supremacists. The girls in these schools have strong views on their own potential, future, and bodily integrity and have no patience for the views of a man who rates women on looks and his own sexual agenda, brags about assaulting women sexually, and threatens to punish women who get an abortion.
And they spoke up, they acted, they made themselves heard, and they’re planning on organizing more events. One of the kids who was interviewed by a reporter talked about how they are the future of this country, and he was right.
I am proud to be part of a community that has encouraged this kind of activism in our students.
(I should also note that we live in the high minority part of our county. I haven’t heard of protests like this from the part of the county that is mainly white even though that’s a very liberal area also. I hope the high schools there follow the lead of the kids in these schools!).
(p.s. didn’t see this in any articles but my daughter told me that a representative from the NAACP joined and helped lead the protest about an hour after it started. Also I gathered from my daughter and what I read that the protest was a mixture of issues we all care about: the popular vote being for Hillary, Black Lives Matter, and the bigotry, misogyny, and sexual assault history of Trump).
Here’s a link to coverage by the award-winning Blair newspaper, Silver Chips (full disclosure, both my oldest daughter and I were feature editor of that paper, but that was years ago).
There was a fair amount of coverage from local media also.