By Olivia Arnold, editor-in-chief
More than 175,000 people of all ages and genders flocked to the Boston Common Saturday morning for the Boston Women’s March for America. The event—which advocated support for women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQA+ individuals and people with disabilities—was part of a global movement the day after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.
Boston rally-goers filled the Common around 11 a.m. donning pink knitted “pussy hats” and holding homemade signs with messages such as “My body my choice” and “A woman’s place is in the resistance,” as well as criticisms of the new Republican president such as “Dump Trump” and “Make America think again.”
“We’re out here to show support for women’s rights, but also for groups who are affected now that the president has started,” said Erica Coray, a 31-year-old lawyer at Boston legal firm Mintz Levin, as she held a painted sign of a female symbol imposed on a rainbow.
Before participants began the one-mile march to Commonwealth Avenue, a stage set up in the Common hosted a diverse lineup of speakers, including members of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the Boston NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and 32BJ Service Employees International Union. Mayor Martin J. Walsh, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey also delivered speeches urging equality and solidarity with vulnerable populations.
“This march was never meant to be anti-Trump,” said Zachary Steigerwald Schnall, 19, the co-chair of the campus and student outreach committee for the march. “This march is a natural reaction and an important reaction to the wave of elections, not just the presidential election that occurred on Nov. 8. We want to make sure that people in our democracy know that their constituents believe in ending discrimination and continuing our trend toward complete equality.”
Olivia Triplett, a freshman biology major at Northeastern University, recalled the moment she stepped out of the Chinatown T Station on her way to the march with friends and found swarms of people headed to the Common.
“Coming around the corner and seeing that giant crowd of people—the pink hats, the signs—I did get kind of emotional,” Triplett said. “You just feel the feelings of all that energy and passion and love at the same time and just knowing you might not be alone in how you’re feeling.”
Upon arriving at the Common, Peyton Galloway, a freshman English major at Northeastern, said she felt a sense of camaraderie with the other marchers.
“I was really impressed, first off, just by the amount of people who came out and just the spirit and passion they showed,” Galloway said. “You could really feel that there was a lot of positive energy. Everyone was talking to everyone. There was a lot of friendliness.”
Mayor Walsh channeled that energy as he told attendees about a sickness he felt in the days following Trump’s election and inauguration because he was fearful of the direction the country was headed. The sickness, Walsh said, disappeared when he walked into the Common and saw the crowd of people calling for love and unity.
“It’s not what we do today that’s important. It’s what we do tomorrow,” Walsh said. “We have to organize our neighborhoods. We have to organize women in the workplace to let them know that we’re not going backwards. We’re going forward.”
Sen. Warren, wearing a pink Planned Parenthood scarf, said she too had a negative reaction to the presidential inauguration, which she attended in Washington on Friday.
“Yesterday, Donald Trump was sworn in as president,” Warren said. “That sight is now burned into my eyes forever.”
Warren spoke about the disadvantages already faced by American populations such as the middle class and people of color, which she feared would worsen under policies by newly-elected officials.
“The fact is that the playing field has been tilted badly in favor of those at the top for a generation now. And now President Trump and the Republican Congress are ready to ram through laws that will tilt it even harder,” Warren said. “Now we can whimper, we can whine or we can fight back. Me, I’m here to fight back.”
Sen. Markey said the gathering was emblematic of “who we are,” reminding the audience that Boston was the birthplace of the American Revolution and the abolitionist movement, while Massachusetts took leading roles in health care reform and same-sex marriage legalization.
“Martin Luther King and all of those preceding generation of revolutionaries who stood on this ground would want one thing: They would want us to fight,” Markey said.
Healey, the first openly gay attorney general in the country, delivered the final speech, saying she would stand up to bullies and protect vulnerable communities. She promised to go after Trump’s administration if it cancels health care for millions of Americans, indebts the federal government to big oil companies or defunds Planned Parenthood.
“I have a message for President Trump,” Healey said. “The message from the people of Massachusetts: We’ll see you in court.”
Laurie Douglas, a 61-year-old Lexington resident, said she was inspired by all the speakers and hoped what they said would motivate people to work on long-term change.
“[I want] people to commit their time for more than one day,” Douglas said. “However many years it takes.”
The Common was so crowded that it took some participants nearly two hours after the speeches finished to exit the park and begin the march. As marchers shuffled through the gates, people in nearby Beacon Street apartments stood outside on their balconies and stretched out of their windows to wave rainbow LGBTQA+ pride flags and hold signs reading “Stronger together: Girl power” and “We are a country first not a corporation.”
Marchers chanted “Love trumps hate” and “This is what democracy looks like” as they walked down Beacon Street toward Commonwealth Avenue. Boston police officers, firefighters and other city workers blocked off streets and intersections to stop traffic for the procession.
Galloway said after feeling uneasy in the months following Trump’s election, the Boston Women’s March helped motivate her.
“After November, I was feeling kind of unsure of where to go from there, and today was a really good starting point,” she said. “We literally moved forward. And doing that, I think, just shows commitment and showed me how much I need to get involved over the next four years.”
Photo by Dylan Shen
