Rallies offer a ‘ Million’ cautionary tales
They feel good, but they often don’t bring changes
The #NeverAgain movement’s “March for Our Lives” on Saturday is both inspired and haunted by the legacy of another march on Washington 18 years ago. ❚ The Million Mom March, which brought about 750,000 people to the National Mall on Mother’s Day 2000, was the biggest gun control rally in history. On stage, Rosie O’Donnell spoke for many when she proclaimed it “the birth of a movement.”
In the wings, one of the march’s organizers winced.
Donna Dees- Thomases says she knew even then that one march was not a movement.
She was right. Today, the year 2000 is remembered not for the birth of a gun control movement but for the start of the National Rifle Association’s two- decade domination of gun politics.
Unrealized promise is just one pitfall of marching on Washington, an American tradition that dates to the depression year of 1894, when an Ohio rabble- rouser named Jacob Coxey led an army of unemployed men on the capital.
Coxey was arrested and the marchers dispersed. But the 1963 civil rights march, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, established the power of such an event. And the women’s protest march on Washington last year easily outdrew Donald Trump’s inauguration the day before.
Those were what Vassar College historian Rebecca Edwards calls “world historical events.” But marches on Washington have become so frequent that most attract little attention and have little effect.
They seem to run together: the Million Mom, Million Man, Million Family, Million Worker, Millions More and Million Puppet marches; marches for public broadcasting, colon cancer screening and science; marches against genetically engineered food, Scientology and the African warlord Joseph Kony.
Results have been mixed. Marching on Washington has not liberalized immigration policy or changed abortion policy or gotten Trump to release his tax returns. Marching did not end the Vietnam War for many years, if it ended it at all, and it definitely did not end the war in Iraq. President George W. Bush said being influenced by street protests would have been like making policy by focus group.
Even the1963 civil rights march required so much effort, created so many internal divisions and produced so few immediate results ( the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed only after and because of President Kennedy’s assassination) that its leaders vowed never to attempt another.
So what does a march on Washington do for a political movement? Jerome Grossman, the late Massachusetts businessman who helped organize the huge Vietnam War Moratorium March in 1969, answered the question in one word: “courage.”
He meant the courage of numbers. Pressed together, often for long hours and in bad weather, activists realize they’re not alone. Marchers are energized and unified, even if marches rarely change federal policy and often pass unnoticed. They don’t so much convert the skeptical as confirm the faithful.
That’s how it was in 2000 for Amy Harris, a 41- year- old nurse whose experience in a District of Columbia hospital trauma unit had inclined her toward gun control. With her two small children in a stroller, she joined the Million Mom March.
The marchers called for the licensing of handgun owners, the registration of handguns, child safety locks on guns and background checks for sales at gun shows, including a threeday waiting period.
“It was uplifting,” Harris recalls. “There was a feeling like you were all together as a group working on the same goal to help society.”
In a few months, the Million Mom March established more than 200 local chapters.
Through the lean years, Harris says she never lost hope. And she and many other veterans of that march say they paved the way for Saturday’s. “These are our kids,” Dees-Thomases of #NeverAgain says.
Another Million Mom organizer, Debra Wachspress, agrees: “I feel like, ‘ Here’s the baton, go!’ ”
Now, the Million Moms’ hopes have been revived by #NeverAgain, which emerged following the shooting deaths of 17 people Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Which raises a question: How can kids — innocent, inexperienced — succeed where mothers failed?
“They have a movement,” Wachspress says. “We didn’t have that.”
One difference is social media, which makes organizing easier and faster.
On Saturday, many of the Million Moms will again be marching. That includes Harris and her kids, now in their 20s, and Wachspress, the New Jersey state coordinator in 2000.
This year, she says, it’s clear when and how the march’s legacy will be determined: Election Day.
“It’s all about the ballot box,” she says.
In retrospect, she says, it always was.