Narration: “Okay, currently walking down the street, towards Dearborn Street, where there is a large protest occurring in front of the Richard J. Daley Center.”
[nat sound: protesters chanting “Hands off! Hands off! Hands off!”]
On April 5th, thousands of people came to the Loop from all across Chicagoland and the country. They gathered in Daley Plaza, holding signs, chanting, screaming and marching, all in protest of the second Trump administration.
I went into the loop that day and talked to some protesters about what brought them downtown. Liz Rathburn, a student at UIC, spoke to me just outside of Daley Plaza at noon.
LIZ RATHBURN: “I think it’s really important that, y’know, we put out a United Front against these, racist, reactionary right-wing attacks that are coming down on every kind of person in this country, y’know? From federal workers, to immigrants, to women, y’know to protesters facing charges now.”
[nat sound: protesters]
Across the U.S., protests erupted as part of a coordinated effort called “Hands Off!” Protesters supported a variety of causes, from abortion access to maintaining Canadian sovereignty. These protests weren’t small either. Democracy Now estimates that about one million people protested across the United States and around the world against the Trump administration.
Sol Vega, a union rep and employee from the South Side of Chicago, talked to me about why she felt compelled to go to the protest.
SOL VEGA: “All of these people here represent all the people that I represent in my industry. So, being here in solidarity with them, letting them know that we’re here to support each other.”
Vega then demonstrated to me one of the chants that had been heard around the plaza.
VEGA: “The people, united, will never be defeated. The people, united, will never be defeated.”
Many protesters, like Amy Healey, focused on the impact that they felt the administration was having on education.
AMY HEALEY: “I’m a librarian, the Institute for Museum and Library Services staff, all of them were just fired, which means no money for grants or education or programs or student internships or any other programs in any library or museum in the country. It’s a direct attack on education, just as the attack on the universities. It’s a direct attack on the First Amendment, and it’s got to stop.”
I spoke with a lot of protesters while standing in Daley Plaza. Here are just a few snippets of some of their thoughts:
“I need to fight capitalism. Not just Trump, not just Joe Biden, but all of them. The bourgeois as a whole.”
“What brings me to the protest today? How about uh, the violation of all my civil rights, not the, no the trampling of our constitution, the destruction of our, of our nation, of our government.”
“My say is that we shouldn’t have a bunch of technocrats running government who weren’t directly elected by the people that have absolutely no, uh, right to be in the position that they are, that are breaking executive authority in pretty much every single capacity.”
“Ever since Trump took over, I mean, it’s just been destroying democracy.”
At one point, the protesters started marching. They made their way through the Loop, all the while screaming and chanting.
[nat sound: protesters chanting “Show them what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like! Show them what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!”]
April 5th was not the first time Chicago had seen protesters. I spoke with Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern, and asked him about the history of protesting within the city.
KEVIN BOYLE: “Chicago has a very, very long, tradition of protests of all sorts. Every, this was a major center of 19th and early 20th century of labor activism, so there were many many labor protests. It was a major, major site of civil rights protests, particularly at the peak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. One of the largest civil rights demonstrations of the entire 1960s was in Chicago, larger than the March on Washington.”
Chicago is certainly no stranger to protests. But with such a storied history of activism, it does make one wonder: Are these protests effective?
BOYLE: “I think protests can have all sorts of degrees of effectiveness. Again, one way in which a protest has an effectiveness is if it has an immediate goal that is achieved. That’s the easiest way to say, yeah, that was an effective protest, but that’s not really probably even typical of protests. It can have a goal as simple as giving people a sense that they are heard, that they have made their voices heard in public, and I think you can look at the most recent protests, the Hands Off protests, in that light.”
While protesters continued to walk up State Street, I made my way into Macy’s, where I found Meg Ghivan, a Logan Square resident, resting at a table. I asked Ghivan a simple question:
Narration: “What do you believe the protesting does?”
I got this response.
MEG GHIVAN: “The marching in it, in and of itself obviously doesn’t do anything directly, except show what people, how disgusted so many people are. The problem is that this administration doesn’t care. This administration seems to want the population to be stupid, ill and impoverished and women to be pregnant and silent.”
After talking to a few more people, I made my way out of the loop, and returned back to Evanston. When I went back to State Street that night, the protests were over.
Another nationwide protest is planned for April 19th. This time, the group 50501 is organizing and calling for protests across every state in the U.S. The group ultimately hopes for 11 million people, or 3.5 percent of the population, to join in.
[Nat Sound: Protesters]
BOYLE: “Y’know it’s always, always going to be really a very small minority of Americans who would go out and actively protest, but I think it’s one of the most noble parts of the American tradition, that you feel that you can make a claim, about how you believe the nation should be, the city should be, your job should be, you’re making a claim to your vision for the future, and I think that’s a really noble thing to do.”
[Nat Sound: Protesters]
For WNUR News, I’m John Kowalski.
