“I can’t just sit back and let Trump say what he wants. “I felt like I had to come to DC,” Abdelrahim, who is a student at University of Illinois Chicago, told me. Abdelrahim had come with 55 women from Illinois, including her mother and sisters. “Ceci N’est Pas un Hijab,” (“This is not a hijab”) it read, a play on the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte’s famous painting.
Behind me, a 22-year-old woman named Nadine Abdelrahim with the Muslim Women’s Alliance held up a large poster she had created.
So we all just sort of stood there, inching if we moved at all, a wall of excited protesters stuck blocks away from the real action. The main event was set to begin at Third Street and Independence Avenue, Northwest, in front of the Museum of the American Indian. Across the street, a group of women plumbers in orange hard hats joined the march three women lined up behind me holding handmade signs reading “Nasty Woman,” “Keep your laws OFF MY body,” and “Liberty and Justice for ALL.” Just in front of us was a massive Jews March for Justice banner. I joined a group of teachers streaming down toward the main entrance to the day’s events, moving down Constitution Avenue past the National Gallery of Art. Hand-lettered and professional, heartfelt and snarky, signs with literary quotes from the likes of Albert Camus and Maya Angelou and signs featuring popular internet memes whose meanings were often lost on the less social media–savvy.
#AS I AM ALICIA KEYS TORRENT TORRENT#
They poured down Louisiana Avenue from Union Station in a torrent of knit pink “pussy” hats and signs - so, so many signs. Everyone relished the fact that it was the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration that the real crowds had arrived.
Marchers were already swapping war stories of hour-long waits for metro trains. By 9:45 am, the Women’s March on Washington was a veritable flood of humanity, clogging public transport and streets. The official start time of the march was 10 am. Every so often a cheer would roll like a sonic boom over the National Mall, but by the time it reached the crowds wedged shoulder to shoulder on the periphery, far beyond the reach of the jumbotrons and loudspeakers, no one was entirely sure what they were cheering for. They just couldn’t hear a single word of the official program happening way off in the distance at the main stage. The other was a messy, glorious, wildly unstructured free-for-all of families and singletons, millennials and octogenarians, all there to take a stand for women’s rights, in whatever form that took. One was headlined by Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem the Indigo Girls and Toshi Reagon Alicia Keys and Ashley Judd. There were two protests that took place in Washington, DC, on Saturday, both under the banner of the Women’s March on Washington.
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