Taking to the Streets in the Name of John Lewis

Will you proclaim that 'Good Trouble Lives On' on Thursday?

The late John Lewis was the embodiment of all the great moral values that Trump is trashing.

He was a sharecropper’s son who risked his life on his way to becoming a civil rights icon. He believed in voting, and racial justice, and the power of government to help people. When he saw unfairness, he fought it.

So it’s wonderfully appropriate that tomorrow, on the fifth anniversary of the congressman’s passing, Americans will take to the streets again, in his name, to protest against Trump.

“My philosophy is very simple,” Lewis said in a commencement address in 2018. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something, do something. Get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Thursday’s event is titled “Good Trouble Lives On.” It’s being organized by the Transformative Justice Coalition, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Black Voters Matter, and many other partners.

"We are facing the most brazen rollback of civil rights in generations,” the organizers say. “Whether you're outraged by attacks on voting rights, the gutting of essential services, disappearance of our neighbors, or the assault on free speech and our right to protest—this movement is for you.”

At last count, there are about 1,700 events – protests, marches, service projects -- scheduled across the country. Find a location near you.

The flagship rally will be in Chicago, with additional “anchor” events in Atlanta, St. Louis, Oakland, and Annapolis.

Organizers are hoping as many as 2 million people show up, which would be an extraordinary achievement for a weekday rally. The massive “No Kings” and “Hands Off” events were both on Saturdays.

There are three basic demands:

1. An end to the Trump administration’s extreme crackdown on our civil rights – from our right to vote to our right to protest and speak freely.

2. An end to politicians and lawmakers targeting, with hateful, dangerous policies, Black and brown Americans, immigrants, trans people and others.

3. An end to the wealthy and well-connected slashing programs that working people rely on – including Medicaid, SNAP and Social Security – to line their own pockets.

You can find a more of the groups’ messaging here.

Los Angeles Steps Up

Los Angeles, invaded by ICE, is resisting. In fact, organizers are calling it “The Summer of Resistance.”

As the Washington Post reports:

Volunteers are stationing themselves outside Home Depots to monitor for ICE activity targeting day laborers, and a citywide strike is planned for next month to protest the raids. Organizers are hosting smaller demonstrations, coordinating know-your-rights workshops and passing out pamphlets to keep community members informed. And some residents who weren’t involved before are getting involved now….

Last week, [Los Angeles City Council member Hugo] Soto-Martínez said, more than 1,000 people gathered at a convention center for a two-hour training on nonviolent direct action. Residents also conduct walks around their neighborhoods to spot ICE agents, sign up for networks that quickly disseminate information about ICE sightings and deliver food to families who are afraid of leaving their homes.

The citywide strike is set for Aug. 12. “We're gonna exercise our power. We're gonna withhold our labor, and we're gonna withhold our purchasing that day,” SEIU organizer Martin Manteca announced during a rally on Friday.

And on Saturday, over a thousand runners took part in a Run Against ICE Relay, a 15-mile protest through neighborhoods recently affected by ICE raids.

Anti-ICE Art

Los Angeles writer Carolina A. Miranda published a terrific appreciation of art’s role in protest in the Washington Post on Tuesday:

As we pass through the sixth month of President Donald Trump’s second term, and protests against his administration’s thuggish deportation methods intensify, artifacts of culture — art, design, music, dance — have surfaced as important elements of the fight. In Los Angeles, on the front lines of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, visual arts groups such as Meztli Projects have produced free, downloadable posters; other artists have created custom bandannas in support of day laborers. Earlier this month, during an anti-ICE protest, graphic artist Pauline Mateos installed in front of Los Angeles City Hall a wall-sized collage of images of deportees.

Music and dance have also played a role:

At an anti-ICE gathering in downtown Los Angeles in June, mariachis and ballet folklórico dancers in bright, ribboned skirts performed on the steps of City Hall. When the “No Kings” rally took over a vast swaths of downtown L.A. last month, the rock act Ozomatli, whose music is infused with cumbia and Mexican norteño, boarded a flatbed truck and put on a rolling show. This month, when hundreds of people staged an anti-ICE protest in Boyle Heights, one of the oldest Mexican neighborhoods in L.A., the march was led by mariachis playing violins.

LAist wrote about visual art inspired by anti-ICE activism, including a painting by cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, which “depicts a paleta (popsicle) cart on the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood. Missing: the vendor.” As LAist explained: “The paletero was detained by agents in Culver City. Alcaraz is selling prints of his painting to help the man’s family.”

Artnet recently looked at some of the artists behind protest signs, including Brooklyn artist Julie Peppito, who led an “art build” ahead of the “No Kings” march last month:

Some 50 volunteers turned out to make about 100 small signs, equipped with papier-mâché backings so they could be held aloft on four-foot dowels. Many read “people power” on one side, with a yellow crown behind the red no symbol on the reverse, complementing a large red sun with yellow rays that Peppito originally created for last month’s anti-Trump May Day march that read “we are the power.”

And this KPBS essay calls attention to protest art coming out of San Diego, including Philip Brun Del Re's street signs, modified from “No Parking” to “No Kings” and Cindy Zimmerman's "Mobile Monument" sculptural installation that “displays and broadcasts 300 words removed from government websites earlier this year.” I also loved artist Paola Villaseñor’s “rage doodle.”

‘Moral Mondays’ Storms the South

Bishop William Barber, the indefatigable champion of the poor, has launched a new phase in his “Moral Mondays” campaign.

The campaign, which originated in North Carolina, and made some notable visits to Washington D.C. in the last several months, stormed into 11 Southern cities this week, including Greenville, S.C., Memphis, Atlanta, Jackson, Miss., and Gastonia, N.C.

“In each location, after we lifted the stories of the people impacted by policy violence, we carried a casket to the local office of a member of Congress who voted for the Big Ugly Bill,” Barber and fellow preacher Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove wrote in a blog post. They were referring to the cataclysmic budget bill that Trump signed into law on July 4.

“We came with caskets because those of us who have to bury the dead refuse to let politicians lie and say they are pro-life while they pass policies that lead to unnecessary death,” they wrote.

Barber explained his strategy in an interview with journalist April Ryan on the Contrarian website. “We’re going south because South is where they try so hard to split people.”

This Week in Lawsuits

The Supreme Court keeps letting Trump do whatever he wants. But at the lower-court level, justice is still being served.

• Most notably, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship after certifying the plaintiff’s lawsuit as a class action – the only way a judge could issue a national injunction after a Supreme Court ruling last month.

• A federal judge ordered federal agents in Southern California to stop using racial profiling to carry out immigration arrests. Judge Maame E. Frimpong effectively agreed with the plaintiffs that roving patrols were terrorizing the city. Amherst political science professor Austin Sarat calls her ruling “required reading.”

• An appeals court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from revoking “temporary protected status” for thousands of people from Afghanistan.

• A federal judge temporarily ordered Los Angeles police to stop shooting journalist with projectiles. The order also prohibits police from blocking journalists from closed areas.

• A federal judge in New York ordered the release from detention in Louisiana of a 20-year-old high school student from Ecuador who had been detained by ICE agents at a Manhattan immigration court “without an individualized assessment that she posed a flight risk or a danger to the community and, therefore, without due process." Joselyn Chipantiza-Sisalema joyfully reunited with her family Wednesday morning.

• A coalition of 22 Democratic attorneys general and two Democratic governors has sued the administration over its unexplained withholding of $6.8 billion in education funding – money that is crucial for summer programs, after-school programs, teacher training, help for children learning English, and adult education.

Odds and Ends

• Monday was a “day of action” against Palantir, the technology and data company that protesters say is guilty of “turbocharging ICE deportations, complicity in the genocide of Palestinians, and expanding surveillance of every U.S. resident.” Rallies were held outside offices in Seattle, Palo Alto, Denver and New York City.

• The Archbishop of Miami scolded Republican officials for “intentionally provocative” rhetoric about the new detention facility in the Everglades. “It is unbecoming of public officials and corrosive of the common good to speak of the deterrence value of ‘alligators and pythons’ at the Collier-Dade facility,” he wrote. “Common decency requires that we remember the individuals being detained are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters of distressed relatives.”

• This is cool: Democracy Forward is launching a “Civil Service Defense and Innovation Fellows” program for “experienced and mission-driven former and departing federal workers and political appointees” to spend a year planning for how to “defend and rebuild the U.S. civil service” post-Trump.

• U.S. Sen. Patty Murray and Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown are among those condemning federal agents for arresting nine people and charging them for “conspiracy” after they blocked a bus and a van from taking away two young asylum seekers on June 11.

• Theology professor Esau McCaulley writes in the New York Times that Trump’s budget bill is uniting Christians by highlighting the “irreconcilable difference between Trumpian politics and Christianity.”

• The Washington Post reports that Maryland officials are trying to help thousands of former federal workers find new careers — “an effort they say could also help address an ongoing teacher shortage.”

• Hundreds of protesters gathered outside Disneyland Resort on Saturday to protest a visit from Vice President JD Vance and his family.

• Watch Trump get booed at the FIFA Club World Cup finals on Sunday.