Saturday, hundreds of thousands of marchers filled the streets of Washington to protest school gun violence in the March for Our Lives. Each speaker at the march was in elementary, middle or high school. Some Duke students also drove up to the District for the march. Duke Democrats organized a carpool of about 30 college students to attend the Washington event, in addition to Duke students traveling to the Raleigh and Durham march—all part of the more than 800 marches scheduled for across the country that day. The Chronicle's Yuexuan Chen attended the march in Washington with members of Duke Democrats.
Before heading to Washington, one carpool group picked up a couple of students from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“We were in bed and thinking that it might be a Duke joke and that you guys weren’t really coming,” said Cody Allen, a first-year at UNC.
Leah Abrams, president of Duke Democrats and an opinion page managing editor for The Chronicle, was at a gun control rally in the UNC quad last week when she met UNC first-year Molly Cartwright. While a group was getting their picture taken, Cartwright asked if anyone was going to Washington. Abrams gave her contact information to Cartwright, saying that the Duke Democrats were going and that she could come along.
Once in Washington, we followed a stream of people, trusting that it was going towards the march. Though the march was organized by students, we saw babies and grandparents in the crowd.
A grandpa held a sign that said, “I’m with the teens.” A grandma’s sign read, “Grandparents are proud of you. You will make a difference.”
“Tik Tok,” “Black or White,” “Mr. Brightside” and other pop hits blasted from the speakers on stage before the event began. Marchers held up brightly colored, homemade posters bearing sharply worded slogans—ready, aim, reform; a red pen should be my only weapon; arms are for hugging; the people who wrote the second amendment shat in ditches; I am not a target; why must children be braver than politicians?
More than a dozen speakers, all teenagers, shared personal narratives of their experiences with gun violence. There were dropped papers, stutters, pauses to refocus their jitters, fumbling page turns—even a nervous barf—but they spoke passionately and made powerful calls to action.
'It is just the beginning'
Cameron Kasky, the Stoneman Douglas student who asked Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) if he was going to accept any more NRA donations, set the tone as the first speaker.
“Politicians: either represent the people or get out,” Kasky said. “The people demand a law banning the sale of assault weapons. The people demand we prohibit the sale of high capacity magazines. We demand universal background checks. Stand for us, or beware—the voters are coming.”
Reading the names of his gunned down classmates, Kasky saved his classmate Nicholas for last to commemorate him on what would have been his birthday.
“The march is not the climax, it is the beginning,” Kasky said. “It is the springboard off of which my generation and all who stand with us will jump into a safer future.”
Trevon Bosley, a 19-year-old from Chicago, lost his brother in a 2006 shooting. His brother was leaving a church when he was shot and killed. He challenged society to care about all communities equally, and said that "everyday shootings are everyday problems."
Delaney Tarr, a student from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, highlighted the urgency of the movement.
“This is more than just a march, this is more than just one day, one event and them moving on. This not a mere publicity stunt," she said. "This is a movement that relies on the persistence and passion of its people. We cannot move on.”
Sarah Chadwick, a survivor from the MSD shooting, called out Florida Senator Marco Rubio specifically for his stance on gun violence.
“When you take 3,140,167, the number of students enrolled in Florida schools, and divide it by 3,303,355, the amount of money Marco Rubio has received from the NRA, it comes out to $1.05,” she said. “Is that what we’re worth to these politicians? Was $17.85 all it cost you that day, Mr. Rubio?"
Chadwick went on, challenging politicians to question whether their right to own guns come before students' lives. She warned them they would be voted out by students, and future voters, who would not allow "a price to be put on our lives."
“I have lived in South LA my entire life and have lost many loved ones to gun violence,” Edna Chavez, a 17-year-old from South Los Angeles, said. “This is normal to the point that I have learned to duck from bullets before I learned how to read… I lost more than my brother that day, I lost my hero. I lost my mother, my sister and myself to that trauma and anxiety.”
David Hogg, a MSD survivor who has been a prominent activist since the shooting, also spoke at the rally, pointing out that first-time voters show up at 18 percent at midterm elections.
"Not anymore," he said.
Naomi Wadler is an 11-year-old from Washington. She lead the walkout at her local elementary school with her friend Carter, the young activist told the crowd.
“I am here today to represent the African American girls whose stories that don’t make the front page of every national newspaper,” Wadler said. “I represent the African American women who are victims of gun violence who are simply statistics instead of vibrant beautiful girls full of potential.”
Sixteen-year-old Mya Middleton of Chicago said she was going to the grocery store when she saw a man coming towards her.
“He pulls out a silver pistol, points it in my face and says these words that to this day haunt me and give me nightmares,” Mya said. “He said ‘If you say anything, I will find you’ and yet, I am still saying something today.”
Matt Post, a student leader from Sandy Spring, Md., called on his generation to be the new "diverse, inclusive and compassionate face of America" that leads the country on a path towards righteousness.
“If we march today, canvas tomorrow and vote 227 days from now, we will make this a turning point for our country,” Post said.
Yolanda Renee King, the granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., said she dreamed of a gun free world. She lead the crowd of marchers in a chant—"Spread the word! Have you heard? All across the nation! We! Are going to be! A great generation!”
Three students from Newtown, Conn. presented a banner that said "Newtown High School stands with Stoneman Douglas." Other students—including MSD survivors Jaclyn Corin, Ryan Deitsch, Aaliyah Eastmond, Samantha Fuentes and Emma Gonzalez—spoke at the rally.
Celebrities, including Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Lin Manuel-Miranda, Vic Mensa, Jennifer Hudson, Ben Platt and Ariana Grande, performed at the event.
“There might be musicians on this stage, but this is not Coachella. We might have movie stars in the crowd, but this is not the Oscars," said Ryan Deitsch, a MSD survivor. "This is real life."
The entire crowd froze in confusion when Deitsch said, “We need to arm our teachers. We need to arm them.” After a pause, he added, “We need to arm our teachers with pencils, pens, paper and the money they need to support their families!”
One of the other speakers, Samantha Fuentes, vomited from her jitters during her speech. "I just threw up on international television, and it feels great!"
Gonzalez, another of the MSD survivors who has become a prominent activist, spoke and led a moment of silence, choosing to stay on stage for six minutes and 20 seconds, the length of the shooting.
'This is what democracy looks like!'
“That was an experience,” Duke first-year Temi Adekunle said.
Walking back to our car parked two miles away after the march ended, we heard a loud boom. It turned out to be probably just a microphone dropping that sounded on the loudspeakers, but it took a few seconds for our heartbeats to return to normal.
Standing in front of pink and white cherry blossoms swaying with the wind, a row of high school kids chanted, “This is what democracy looks like! Tell me what democracy looks like!”
“I don’t think I could’ve anticipated how moving it would be and how awestruck I would be seeing people as young as 11 up there organizing,” Abrams said. “I really believed in what they said—that this is a revolution and that our generation is going to be the one to lead it. I felt that this issue is so tied to the issue of federal congressman taking money from the NRA.”
“I decided to come to the march because once I heard about the Parkland shooting, I was really inspired to see them speaking,” Adekunle said. “My sister is in school... My high school went on lockdown because of a nearby school shooting."
The other students also remembered how gun violence had affected their time before Duke.
Allen, a first-year from UNC, said she lost a friend to a shooting at a nearby high school.
“It’s something that you watch your friends go through and they never really recover from,” Allen said.
Abrams said that gun violence is an issue that touches every community in the country.
Adekunle said she appreciated how inclusive and intersectional the rally was, and that the Parkland students shared their platform with students from communities that did not get the media attention they did.
“[The march] showed the power of all of us standing together really beautiful,” Cartwright said. “We can all get on board with kids not dying.”
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