The Women’s March on Washington is unprecedented in scale - in sheer volume of attendees, in the array of issues it encompasses, and in the diversity at all levels of leadership, from the national to the local level. “I don’t really have time to do it, but you know what? I’m so angry at the things that are around me that I’m going to take that anger and translate it into some productive work, which is what I’m doing now for this march,” she said. “There’s nothing more healing than a group of powerful women coming together and planning some radical stuff,” said Sarah Sophie Flicker, an activist and artist, creative director of Art Not War, and a member of the Women’s March national organizing committee. While many of the organizers have been working 16, 18, 20-hour days, juggling the march with their full-time jobs and other responsibilities, they agreed on this: The fervor of organizing the march, its breakneck pace, has served as a welcome antidote to the fear, anger, and malaise that have permeated the weeks since the Trump victory. “And it wasn’t because I’m not a feminist - I just didn’t really know what it meant.” (Now, she’s very much a feminist, and very much an activist: “I think I’ve at least earned that title out of this,” she said.) “Heck, I didn’t even consider myself a feminist,” she told me. Prior to that fateful Facebook post, Bland had participated in Get Out the Vote efforts across Brooklyn in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and growing up just outside Washington, D.C., she recalled occasionally protesting and canvassing alongside her mother, a volunteer for local Democratic candidates, but she didn’t consider herself an activist. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network-many of the women participating are not.
#Womens arch dc organizer professional#
While three of the four national co-chairs of the Women’s March are professional activists and organizers-Sarsour is the executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York, Perez is the head of The Gathering for Justice, and Mallory is an experienced gun-control advocate and civil rights activist who previously helmed the Rev. Trump’s victory also revealed deep fissures in the American social and political landscape that prompted many people who had no previous experience in activism to seek an outlet for their fear and anger. (Shook, who declined to take a central role in leading the march, will meet Bland for the first time in person this weekend in Washington, D.C.) Sarsour, who had previously worked with them, soon followed. Within a day, they had joined forces on the advice of Vanessa Wruble, editor of OkayAfrica and head of campaign operations for the Women’s March, that it not be organized by white women alone, Bland connected with Perez and Mallory.
She invited around 40 friends, went to bed, and awoke the next morning to a viral success: More than 10,000 users had clicked “attending.” At the same time, on the opposite side of the country, fashion entrepreneur Bob Bland posted her own event, mobilizing the following she had cultivated after her own viral success: The “Nasty Woman” and “Bad Hombre” t-shirts she produced raised $20,000 in support of Planned Parenthood in three days. shortly after the election was called in favor of Trump.
Teresa Shook, a retired grandmother living in Hawaii, created a Facebook event for a march in Washington, D.C. Just two months after Donald Trump edged out Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election, the march’s inception now has the patina of myth. On Saturday, January 21, 2017, activist Carmen Perez will turn 40 Donald Trump will wake up for the first time as president of the United States and hundreds of thousands of women-led by Perez, Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, and Bob Bland-will participate in the Women’s March on Washington, which is poised to be one of the largest and farthest-reaching demonstrations in support of a wide swath of social justice interests and organizations in the history of the nation’s capital.
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