The March for Our Lives Presents a Radical New Model for Youth Protest

• By Emily Witt, www.newyorker.com
  
  
  
  Midway through the rally for gun control that concluded the March for Our Lives, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas junior Jaclyn Corin brought out a special guest, Yolanda Renee King, the nine-year-old granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King. “I have a dream that enough is enough,” Yolanda King said, “and that this should be a gun-free world.”
  And then, wearing a white coat, with an orange ribbon pinned to it in remembrance, the miniature activist stood before the crowd of thousands with a gap-toothed grin and led them in call-and-response:
  

  Spread the word

  (“Spread the word!” The thousands gathered shouted in response.)
  

  All across the nation
  We are
  Going to be
  A great generation.

  It is, at least, a generation that has now defined itself. Regardless of its long-term effects, the March for Our Lives is the first major statement by Americans born after 1999, who have presented a new template for protest. The March for Our Lives was a massive outcry against extreme violence delivered with a mix of pop sentiment, corporate coöperation, and an awareness of the socioeconomic privilege that allows certain voices to be heard louder than others. Youth protest today does not look like it did fifty years ago, although that’s boring to say. Many of the students came to Washington, D.C., with their parents. Stoneman Douglas students were met by politicians on Capitol Hill. The Washington Wizards invited them to basketball practice. Student journalists held a panel at the Newseum. A concert the night before was thrown in their honor, and Shake Shack sponsored a sign-making party.
  
  The student leaders were grateful, thanking their celebrity donors and corporate sponsors on social media, posing in front of the little blue bird at Twitter’s Washington offices. One student even photographed and tweeted the boxes of granola bars and snacks donated by Kind. The media could not love them enough: there were interviews on “60 Minutes,” NPR’s “Morning Edition,” and the late-night news shows. There were major interactive packages in Teen Vogue, and a Time magazine cover. There was, in short, so much consensus about the message of the student movement that it has to be one of the least anti-establishment social movements in American history. What the student leaders seem to be saying is that they don’t want trouble, and, had a person not arrived at their school with a gun, they would have kept their heads down and scored high on their S.A.T.s. They have been as polite and as popular as protesters can hope to be, and yet the establishment has continued to prove reluctant to change.
  
  

  New Yorker writers on the March for Our Lives.

  
  

  The students marched on Saturday, the day after Congress had departed for its spring recess, and the spending bill that Donald Trump signed on Friday had included three meagre actions to address gun violence: fifty million dollars in grants for school-security measures; attempts to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System; and a clarification of the terms of the Dickey Amendment that will now allow for research into the effects of gun violence (although the amendment still bans the use of government funding to promote gun control). As tens of thousands of people descended on the Capitol to demand measures such as universal background checks and a ban on assault rifles that lawmakers would likely continue to ignore, most of those lawmakers left town. Two days before the march, Jaelynn Willey, a sixteen-year-old student at Great Mills High School, in southern Maryland, died, of the injuries she sustained after another student shot her at school. Adults at the march talked about “standing out of the way” and provided snacks.
  
  “It’s about amplifying the voices of current students,” Lysee Webb, who graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2003 and now lives in Brooklyn, said. She and her sister, Emma Webb (Class of 2009), were among the hundreds of M.S.D. alumni who gathered the morning of the march in the ballroom at the J. W. Marriott hotel in downtown Washington for a pre-march breakfast. The alumni breakfast was a culmination of fund-raising and organizing efforts that had begun in the immediate aftermath of February 14th, with impressive results: I spoke with a group of students who had just disembarked from a seventeen-hour bus ride from the University of Central Florida, and who would return to the bus again at 6 P.M.
  Current Stoneman Douglas students arrived to Washington in all manner of convoys, some on buses, others with their families (the march coincided with spring break). One group travelled to Washington on a plane lent by the New England Patriots. At 4:10 A.M. on Saturday, three planes carrying five hundred and sixty-seven students total departed from Fort Lauderdale. The students were whisked directly from the tarmac to the site of the rally, where they were immediately given a special place in front of the stage, where the media started gathering at seven-thirty to watch them file in. Before the rally, the student speakers came out for twenty minutes of intense questioning. The Parkland students were now joined by a coalition of speakers from all over the country, an effort to emphasize that the weak gun laws that result in school shootings also cause the everyday gun violence to which Americans have shown themselves inured. “We’re seeing all these people coming out under one cause; it’s really empowering, it’s really incredible to see,” Delaney Tarr said. “It is a lot, but it’s a good version of a lot.”
  
  The rally began with a song by Andra Day, who sang about “standing up for something,” backed by a children’s choir from Baltimore dressed in red uniforms. It was just after noon, the sun was shining, and the mood was ebullient. The singers were joined by Common, who rhymed “When they go low, we stand in the heights” with “I stand for peace, love, and women’s rights.” After the song, a montage played in which politicians offered thoughts and prayers, followed by another showing the now-familiar narrative of the movement’s beginnings. Clips of right-wing political figures intoning that the immediate aftermath of shootings was “not the time for gun control” gave way to student activists in Tallahassee calling for a new kind of response.
  
  After six weeks of familiarizing itself with the faces of Cameron Kasky, Delaney Tarr, Alex Wind, Emma González, and the other members of the Never Again movement, the public was now introduced to a new set of activists. Edna Lisbeth Chavez, a seventeen-year-old youth leader from South Los Angeles, interspersed her speech with phrases in Spanish. She lost her brother to gun violence, and moved the crowd to chant his name, Ricardo. Zion Kelly, seventeen, of Washington, D.C., spoke of his twin brother, Zaire, who was killed by an armed robber as he walked home from school. Zaire Kelly aspired to be a forensic scientist and wanted to attend Florida A. & M. University. Naomi Wadler, an eleven-year-old from Virginia, said that she was speaking for “the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news.” She quoted Toni Morrison: “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” Christopher Underwood, of Brooklyn, lost his fourteen-year-old brother, who was shot and killed as he walked home from a graduation party. “I took my pain and anger and turned it into action,” he said. Alex King and D’Angelo McCade, both of Chicago, stepped onstage with tape over their mouths and their fists in the air. Matthew Soto, whose sister died in Newtown, said, “America, I am pleading with you to realize this is not O.K., we do not have to live like this.”
  
  There were more video montages. Demi Lovato sang a power ballad about rising from the ground like a skyscraper. Ariana Grande sang that we’re going to be all right. Miley Cyrus sang that it’s not about reaching the other side of the mountain but about the climb. The stories of students who lost their lives in Newtown and Parkland overlapped with the stories of people who lost their lives to police. The performer Vic Mensa dedicated his song “Now We Could Be Free” to Stephon Clark and Decynthia Clements. A video message from Malala Yousafzai offered support.
  
  The final speaker was Emma González. Her last speech, given at a gun-control rally in Fort Lauderdale, only days after the shooting, had made her a household name, and many of the marchers wore buttons and signs that referred to its refrain: “We call B.S.” González was dressed in a green bomber jacket covered with patches and buttons. As she stepped onstage, the crowd went wild. Her speech was short. “In a little over six minutes, seventeen of our friends were taken from us, fifteen were injured, and everyone, absolutely everyone in the Douglas community, was forever altered,” she said. “Six minutes and twenty seconds with an AR-15, and my friend Carmen would never complain to me about piano practice; Aaron Feis would never call Kyra ‘Miss Sunshine’; Alex Schachter would never walk into school with his brother Ryan; Scott Beigel would never joke around with Cameron at camp; Helena Ramsay would never hang out after school with Max; Gina Montalto would never wave to her friend Liam at lunch; Joaquin Oliver would never play basketball with Sam or Dylan; Alaina Petty would never; Cara Loughran would never; Chris Hixon would never; Luke Hoyer would never; Martin Duque Anguiano would never; Peter Wang would never; Alyssa Alhadeff would never; Jaime Guttenberg would never; Meadow Pollack would never.”
  
  Then she stood in silence. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She said nothing. The crowd watched, also silent. A chant of “never again” started, and then faded out. Emma still stood. Finally, the beeping of an electric timer rang out. “Since the time that I came out here it has been six minutes and twenty seconds,” she said. “The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle. He would then stay with the students and walk free for an hour before arrest.” She concluded: “Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.”
  
  She turned to the group of students gathered behind her onstage and hugged her friends. The lectern was removed, a gospel choir came out, and Jennifer Hudson led them all in in a rendition of “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”