1 of 6 | Attendees of the 2024 Girls’s March chant as they march down Structure Avenue towards the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. Members marched from Freedom Plaza to The Ellipse, the place Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris gave her last main handle on Tuesday. Picture by Bonnie Money/UPI | License Picture
Nov. 2 (UPI) — Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Washington D.C., on Saturday as a part of the Girls’s March 2024, calling for abortion rights and voicing help for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris three days earlier than the election.
The march was designed to evoke the spirit of the unique mass rally when out greater than 1 million demonstrators turned out the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration 2017 to denounce his presidency.
Saturday’s occasion was rather more modest with round 10,000 individuals marching from Freedom Park to the White Home, Girls’s March govt director Rachel O’Leary Carmona advised The Washington Submit.
However individuals mentioned they nonetheless obtained their message out, chanting slogans resembling “We cannot return” and carrying indicators studying, “A girl’s place is within the White Home.”
The preliminary occasion on Jan. 21, 2017, was staged as a rebuke to Trump’s swearing-in ceremony and resulted in a single the largest mass occasions within the District of Columbia’s historical past, whereas simultaneous marches drew giant crowds throughout the county and around the globe, together with 150,000 in Chicago and 125,000 in Los Angeles.
Members then equally demanded that abortion rights be protected whereas criticizing the Republican victor for his disparagement of girls, minorities and immigrants.
This time, organizers mentioned they needed to march earlier than a presidential election involving Trump in hopes of swaying voters in favor of Harris.
“On November 2nd, hundreds of feminists will mobilize throughout the nation to point out our collective energy,” the group mentioned on its web site forward the scheduled 4 p.m. EDT rally and march from Freedom Plaza to the White Home.
“Had sufficient individuals been prepared for the battle for our households, our freedoms, and our futures in 2016, Donald Trump would have by no means been elected. We can not repeat the errors of the previous.”
Carmona mentioned the stakes are far increased now than seven years in the past.
“We’re on the the cusp of a brand new period in American politics,” she advised advised ABC Information on Saturday forward of the march. “We’ve got a lot on the road. Regardless of the place you are voting, we’re in a alternative between freedom and fascism.”
Among the many scheduled audio system had been girls’s rights legal professional Gloria Allred, nonprofit media entrepreneur Aisha Becker-Burrowes, bestselling creator and astrologer Chani; Parkland, Fla., college capturing survivor Aalayah Eastmond; and racial justice organizer Tiffany Flowers.
Hundreds of protester march on the Nationwide Mall to rally for girls’s rights and to protest the election of President Donald Trump close to the Capitol for the Girls’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017. Crowd estimated within the tons of of hundreds rally in D.C. as a part of a worldwide protest in opposition to Trump. Picture by Kevin Dietsch/UPI | License Picture