Marches on D.C.
They don’t always make history.
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 proclaimed it “the birth of a movement.”
In the wings, one of the march’s organizers winced. Donna Dees-Thomases says she knew that one march was not a movement.
Unrealized promise is just one pitfall of marching on Washington, an American tradition that dates back to the depression year of 1894, when an Ohio rabble-rouser named Jacob Coxey led an army of unemployed men. Coxey was arrested and the marchers dispersed.
But the civil rights march in 1963, 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 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 the civil rights march required so much effort, created so many internal divisions and produced so few immediate results that its leaders vowed never to attempt another.
What does a march on Washington do for a political movement?
Jerome Grossman, a 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.
In 2000, Amy Harris, 41, a nurse whose experience in a District of Columbia hospital trauma unit inclined her toward gun control, took her two children in a stroller to join 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 three-day waiting period.
“It was uplifting,” Harris says. “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 chapters.
Harris says she never lost hope. She and many other veterans of that march say they paved the way for Saturday’s rally. “These are our kids,” says DeesThomases of the NeverAgainers. Another Million Mom organizer, Debra Wachspress, agrees: “I feel like, ‘ Here’s the baton — go!’ ”
The marchers of 2000 acknowledge that #NeverAgain’s rise is a reminder that their own march was not the turning point they envisioned.
That year ended in the presidential election of NRA ally Bush.