6000 People on the Battle Green Was Second Largest No Kings! Rally after Boston

ByToby Sackton

Our No Kings! Rally on Saturday Oct 18th with an estimated 6000 people was the second largest rally in Massachusetts, according to counts turned in to Indivisible.

Most of the speakers had deep ties to Lexington. (See Speakers’ Videos here.) Kunal Botla is Lexington’s youngest town meeting member. Amahl Bishara, a Palestinian American, lives in Lexington and is a Professor at Tufts. Valerie Overton and Jessie Steigerwald are both well known activists with long histories in town. Regie O’hare Gibson, Commonwealth of Massachusetts Poet Laureate, is a Lexington resident, as is our ACLU speaker, Charu Verma. And of course Bill McKibben grew up in Lexington as well, and even gave tours of the Battle Green in high school.

We also had Senator Ed Markey speak, and Laurie and Jared Berezin, founders of the weekly Bearing Witness at ICE demonstration that many of us attend.

The video clips and text of those speeches will be posted on our website as we get them from Lex Media.
The event was so unifying because we had one message: American patriots do not bow down to kings. We don’t accept the violations of our founding values by a President who assaults the constitutional order; who authorizes terror raids in our communities, and who attempts to deploy the US military in American cities for no other reason than they have democratic elected leaders.

This is full blown authoritarianism, and we and the rest of America won’t stand for it. Over 7 million people turned out nationally in 2600 No Kings Protests.

In addition to the speakers and patriotic atmosphere, the rally featured a series of information tables for people to get more involved in organizations that are leading the fight against the harm of the Trump administration, from Indivisible to MIRA, LUCE and the ACLU.

As Bill McKibben said in his closing speech, quoting Sam Adams, “It was a glorious day for America.”

Photo credit: Lauren Feeney, Lexington Observer.

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