Greene County Democrat

Tag: protest

  • No Kings 3 breaks the record for the largest single-day nonviolent protest in America.

    No Kings 3 breaks the record for the largest single-day nonviolent protest in America.

    by Maya Quinn, managing editor

    Organizers reported eight million protesters gathered in roughly 3,300 cities across the U.S. to challenge the policies of the Trump administration. The third installment of the No Kings in America protest is now recognised as the largest single-day nonviolent protest in modern American history. 

    The policies of the Trump administration seen thus far have targeted funding in government welfare, employed masked federal agents, and increased the cost of everyday life for Americans. The sentiment that the U.S. government truly operates in the best interest of every citizen has been called into question. In Birmingham, protester Hannah Blackwell told The Democrat, “There’s no sign big enough to list all the reasons why I’m here…We thought it was so important to use our voices to speak up for our immigrant neighbors as well as any black and brown people who are targeted.”

    Recently, the power of voting has been called into question due to the nature of American politicians. In a politically divided nation, many politicians are seen promoting platforms to appeal to voters, but seemingly forgetting their promises once elected into office. “In the past 40 years, the government has become less and less about the average citizen,” said a Tuscaloosa citizen.

    Protest sign photo taken by Hannah Blackwell

    Indivisible West Alabama, a progressive grassroots organization and organizer for Tuscaloosa’s No Kings 3 event, participated in a mini interview with The Democrat regarding the purpose and intended impact of the protest. The questions and responses are detailed below:

    1.  What is the overall goal of the ‘No Kings’ rallies, and is this part of a long-term strategy beyond the 2026 election?

    “The overall goal of the No Kings rallies is to draw attention to the growing authoritarian behaviors being exhibited by the current administration. Indivisible, both our local chapter and national, will continue to oppose this administration’s tactics via demonstrations and other forms of resistance for as long as the administration maintains these behaviors.”

    2.  Are there specific strategies in place to transition first-time protesters into long-term advocates?

    “Absolutely! Attending protests is just one form of advocacy, but it’s a great way to get started. Our hope is that first-time protesters sign up to be involved with other local organizations to find other ways to be involved. Connecting with others in local communities is the best way to develop long-term advocacy goals and behaviors. Calling representatives, volunteering for campaigns, and spreading awareness are all long-term strategies that occur between protests.”

    3.  How does Indivisible plan to support local grassroots organizations and first-time organizers to maintain momentum through the 2026 midterms? 

    “Indivisible IS a local grassroots organization! We work with other grassroots organizations to draw attention to their goals, promote their events, and encourage our members to volunteer as needed. We encourage engagement within and beyond Indivisible’s activities and will continue to do so to improve our community.”

    The ‘No King’ rallies are one of many steps to dismantle controlling policies and encourage civic engagement. The practice of rallying and organizing nonviolent protests reminds citizens that they have the power to hold government officials accountable and change the seats of those in office. This national day of action continues to sustain the momentum of a community rooted in defying powers that serve themselves instead of democracy.

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  • Newswire: ‘No Kings’ protests set to become largest in US History

    Newswire: ‘No Kings’ protests set to become largest in US History

    A new wave of nationwide demonstrations is set to take place this weekend, as organizers behind the “No Kings” movement prepare what they say could become the largest protest in American history. 

    In Alabama, there are over a dozen “No-Kings protests” for this Saturday, March 28, 2026. There is one set for Selma, at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge for 10:00 AM to Noon. There is one in Tuscaloosa at the Government Plaza from 4:00 to 6:00PM. Check the No Kings website for a map and other scheduled rallies.

    With thousands of events already planned across the country, No Kings’ mobilization reflects growing public concern over the current political climate and the direction of U.S. democracy. On Saturday, March 28, the organizers are set to host what might be the largest protest in this country’s history. 

    According to Fast Company, the upcoming protests include more than 3,000 community-led events spanning all 50 states and every congressional district. That number already surpasses previous “No Kings” demonstrations, including the October 2025 event, which drew an estimated 7 million participants nationwide. 

    Organizers say the rapid expansion signals a broad and diverse coalition of Americans who are unified around a central message. The official No Kings platform emphasizes that the demonstrations are rooted in the belief that power belongs to the people, not to any singular authority. As stated on their website, “In America, we have no kings,” a phrase that has become the rallying cry for participants across political and geographic lines.

    A wide network of advocacy groups, including Indivisible, the ACLU, and the American Federation of Teachers, is coordinating the protests. Leaders within the movement point to a range of concerns driving turnout, including economic instability, immigration enforcement practices, and ongoing military conflicts abroad.

    Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, told Fast Company that the scale of the upcoming March 28 demonstrations reflects a shared urgency among Americans.  “We will be in every single congressional district,” Levin said, emphasizing that participation is expected from both traditionally liberal and conservative regions.

    The movement’s momentum has been building throughout the past year. Earlier protests in June and October 2025 drew millions, signaling what many organizers describe as a sustained and expanding push for civic engagement. This latest action is positioned as a continuation of that energy, with even more events being added daily.

    Organizers also stress that the demonstrations are nonviolent and centered on democratic principles. The goal is to create space for collective expression while reinforcing the idea that civic participation remains a powerful tool for change.

    With another major action — including a planned May Day general strike already on the horizon — the March 28 protests mark a pivotal moment for the movement. As turnout expectations continue to grow, the question now is not just how many people will show up, but how their voices may shape the national conversation moving forward.

  • Newswire: Legendary Civil Rights Icon C.T. Vivian dies at 95

    By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior Correspondent
    @StacyBrownMedia


    Rev. C. T. Vivian receiving medal from President Barack Obama


    The Rev. C.T. Vivian, the legendary civil rights activist who marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has died. Rev. Vivian was 95.
    Vivian reportedly suffered a stroke earlier this year, but his family said he died of natural causes.
    “He has always been one of the people who had the most insight, wisdom, integrity, and dedication,” said former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, a contemporary of Vivian who also worked alongside King.
    “The Reverend Dr. C.T. Vivian was one of my strongest mentors in the Civil Rights Movement,” National Newspaper Publishers Association President Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., stated.
    “Rev. Vivian, like Martin Luther King, Jr, and Joseph Lowery was a visionary theologian, genius, and a leading force in the tactical and strategic planning of effective nonviolent civil disobedience demonstrations. C.T. has passed the eternal baton to a new generation of civil rights agitators and organizers. ”
    In a statement emailed to BlackPressUSA, the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks expressed their condolences. “The Atlanta Hawks organization is deeply saddened by the passing of Civil Rights Movement leader, minister, and author, Dr. Cordy Tindell “C.T.” Vivian. The City of Atlanta and the entire world has lost a distinguished icon whose leadership pushed the United States to greater justice and racial equality for African Americans,” team officials wrote in the email.
    “To inspire the next generation, Vivian founded the C.T. Vivian Leadership Institute in Atlanta, with the intent to create a model of leadership culture in the city that would be dedicated to the development and sustainability of our communities.”
    They continued: “Vivian also started Basic Diversity, one of the nation’s first diversity consulting firms, now led by his son, Al, who has been a great partner to our organization. We are grateful for Dr. Vivian’s many years of devotion to Atlanta and thankful that we had the opportunity to honor and share his legacy with our fans. The entire Hawks organization extends its most sincere condolences to the grieving family.”
    Rev. Vivan was active in sit-in protests in Peoria, Illinois, in the 1940s, and met King during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott — a demonstration spurred by Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat to a white rider. The 13-month mass protest drew international attention.
    Rev. Vivian went on to become an active early member of the group that eventually became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, according to his biography. Like King, Vivian was committed to the belief that nonviolent protests could carry the day.
    “Some thoughts on the Reverend C.T. Vivian, a pioneer who pulled America closer to our founding ideals and a friend I will miss greatly,” Former President Barack Obama wrote in a statement. “We’ve lost a founder of modern America, a pioneer who shrunk the gap between reality and our constitutional ideals of equality and freedom.”
    Rev. Vivian was born in Boonville, Missouri, on July 30, 1924. He and his late wife, Octavia Geans Vivian, had six children.
    With the help of his church, he enrolled in American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville in 1955. That same year he and other ministers founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, an affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, according to the National Visionary Leadership Project. The group helped organize the city’s first sit-ins and civil rights march.
    By 1965 Rev. Vivian had become the director of national affiliates for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when he led a group of people to register to vote in Selma, Alabama.
    CNN memorialized Rev. Vivian, noting that, as the county Sheriff Jim Clark blocked the group, Vivian said in a fiery tone, “We will register to vote because as citizens of the United States we have the right to do it.”
    Clark responded by beating Vivian until blood dripped off his chin in front of rolling cameras. The images helped galvanize more comprehensive support for change.
    Vivian also created a college readiness program to help “take care of the kids that were kicked out of school simply because they protested racism.”
    “I admired him from and before I became a senator and got to know him as a source of wisdom, advice, and strength on my first presidential campaign,” Obama stated.
    “I’m only here to thank C.T. Vivian and all the heroes of the Civil Rights generation. Because of them, the idea of just, fair, inclusive, and generous America came closer into focus. The trails they blazed gave today’s generation of activists and marchers a road map to tag in and finish the journey.”

  • Black Lives Matter is not a hate group

    July By B19, 20BJ. Richard Cohen is president
    of the Southern Poverty Law Center

    IF
    HUNTS POINT, BRONX, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – 2016/07/17: On the second anniversary of the death of Eric Garner by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo, the Black Lives Matter community organized the Stop The Violence Rally, March and Healing Circle in the South Bronx to remember Eric Garner and other victims of police brutality with a peaceful demonstration around the neighborhood culminating the march at the 41th Precinct where participants held a moment of silence followed by chanting “I CAN’T BREATHE” 11 times as Eric Garner did before his tragic death by an illegal choke-hold. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

     

    Each year, the Southern Poverty Law Center, of which I am the president, compiles and publishes a census of domestic hate groups. Our list, which is cited extensively by journalists, academics and government officials alike, provides an important barometer—not the only one, of course—to help us understand the state of hate and extremism in America.

    In recent weeks, we’ve received a number of requests to name Black Lives Matter a hate group, particularly in the wake of the murders of eight police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Numerous conservative commentators have joined the chorus. There is even a Change.org petition calling for the hate group label.
    In our view, these critics fundamentally misunderstand the nature of hate groups and the BLM movement.
    Generally speaking, hate groups are, by our definition, those that vilify entire groups of people based on immutable characteristics such as race or ethnicity. Federal law takes a similar approach.
    While it’s no surprise, given our country’s history, that most domestic hate groups hold white supremacist views, there are a number of black organizations on our hate group list as well.
    A prime example is the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), whose leaders are known for anti-Semitic and anti-white tirades. Its late chairman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, famously remarked: “There are no good crackers, and if you find one, kill him before he changes.” Bobby Seale, a founding member of the original Black Panther Party, has called the NBPP a “black racist hate group.”
    We have heard nothing remotely comparable to the NBPP’s bigotry from the founders and most prominent leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement and nothing at all to suggest that the bulk of the demonstrators hold supremacist or black separatist views. Thousands of white people across America—indeed, people of all races—have marched in solidarity with African Americans during BLM marches, as is clear from the group’s website. The movement’s leaders also have condemned violence.
    There’s no doubt that some protesters who claim the mantle of Black Lives Matter have said offensive things, like the chant “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” that was heard at one rally. But before we condemn the entire movement for the words of a few, we should ask ourselves whether we would also condemn the entire Republican Party for the racist words of its presumptive nominee—or for the racist rhetoric of many other politicians in the party over the course of years.
    Many of its harshest critics claim that Black Lives Matter’s very name is anti-white, hence the oft-repeated rejoinder “all lives matter.” This notion misses the point entirely. Black lives matter because they have been marginalized throughout our country’s history and because white lives have always mattered more in our society. As BLM puts it, the movement stands for “the simple proposition that ‘black lives also matter.’”
    The backlash to BLM, in some ways, reflects a broad sense of unease among white people who worry about the cultural changes in the country and feel they are falling behind in a country that is rapidly growing more diverse in a globalizing world. We consistently see this phenomenon in surveys showing that large numbers of white people believe racial discrimination against them is as pervasive, or more so, than it is against African Americans.
    It’s the same dynamic that researchers at Harvard Business School described in a recent study: White people tend to see racism as a zero-sum game, meaning that gains for African Americans come at their expense. Black people see it differently. From their point of view, the rights pie can get bigger for everyone.
    Black Lives Matter is not a hate group. But the perception that it is racist illustrates the problem. Our society as a whole still does not accept that racial injustice remains pervasive. And, unfortunately, the fact that white people tend to see race as a zero-sum game may actually impede progress

  • Nixon’s ‘War on Drugs’ was government sanctioned terror on Black people

    war-on-drugs

    People protesting the War on Drugs

    Last week, a quote from Richard Nixon’s former Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman surfaced, confirming a disgusting truth that’s been well known by Black folks for several decades: the war on drugs had nothing to do eradicating a drug epidemic. Instead, it was a ploy to hide for the intentional targeting and decimating of the Black community. Ehrlichman states: The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
    I’ve always believed the “War on Drugs” was a hoax from the very beginning, thus I felt a wide range of emotions reading this quote. I’ve seen my own community ripped apart by enforcement of draconian drug laws. I know people who are currently serving sentences related to the same drug that, now increasingly legal, is being used to make white folks and the government wealthier.
    And still, America’s embarrassing incarceration rates and disparities, painstakingly outlined in Michelle Alexander’s now legendary book The New Jim Crow are merely a fragment of the aftermath of Nixon’s vicious war on black folks. When the highest levels of government, in the now incontrovertible spirit of genocide, decide to decimate a community, the ripple effects will be unending.
    Consider first: all wars need soldiers. The soldiers in Nixon’s phony war have been police officers, chiefs, prosecutors and judges- all law enforcement officials tasked with carrying out inherently racist order. Much of the now well-documented problem with how law enforcement officials interact with communities of color can be traced to the war on drugs. Despite the fact that drug use in our country has always spanned broadly across lines of race and class, our entire system and everyone in it were necessarily taught to view urban communities as being rife with criminals and addicts needing to be cleansed.
    None of this was  possible without Nixon perverting another broken system for his destruction campaign: mainstream news media. Plastering implicitly anti-black propaganda on major networks with regularity is how America was taught to view urban centers – and the black people living there – as deserving of war.  The war’s soldiers, therefore, are to be supported with a similar blind deference as we are taught to give our military. (A comparison which, of course, helps us justify equipping the police like they’re in combat).
    The kind of racist reporting Nixon expressly requested from mainstream media outlets didn’t end with Nixon’s shameful exit from the White House; four decades later, it remains a staple of what American’s consume daily. Just Google news anchor Wendy Bell and see what people who control the messages on your TV screens think of black people.  Hell, media bias is the reason this news of Nixon’s war against black communities (read: treason) wasn’t a front page headline.
    This is bigger than detestable police and biased media, however. Like with any unjust war, there are economic implications – in this case, in excess of a trillion dollars spent destroying the very community that ironically is one of very few domestic racial groups terrorized by the government that hasn’t received any sort of reparations. There are social implications, namely that what follows from unjustly incarcerating black people at alarming rates, a majority of them men, is a decapitation of the black family unit that spans generations.
    And there are lasting community implications, the most startling of which is that the blighted neighborhoods that are most impacted by the terror of the war on drugs – pillaged by Nixon’s soldiers and stripped of many of their bread winners – are part of the communities across the nation being actively identified “development.”  Gentrification is a brand of renovation that forces the removal of black families for economic reasons– and it didn’t appear out of thin air.
    So remember that the next “conspiracy” you hear being repeated by hundreds of thousands of marginalized people probably isn’t a conspiracy at all. The next time you hear that a useful social initiative is just too expensive, be reminded that we wasted more than $1 trillion over 40 years taking out Nixon’s perceived enemies.  And the next time people try to convince you that drug abuse in black communities is a criminal issue, tell them to extend the same courtesy given to white communities and call it what it is- a healthcare issue.
    Nixon wasn’t the first criminal to commit crimes against his own citizens; our government has perpetrated criminal atrocities against communities of color before, from the Tuskegee Experiment to Japanese Internment Camps.
    Lies and deceit are nothing new.  But this time, when you go to the polls, remember Nixon’s “War on Drugs.”  Then act accordingly.  The stakes are too high to let another lie go unchecked.