Washington’s Birthday Protest was held today in Elizabethtown, NY. The rally was attended by over 100 people who braved the cold winds to protect and defend our Constitution, our democracy and one another.
Video of the event
JBL! helped organize the event, and executive director Martha Swan spoke.
Martha’s remarks
Washington’s Birthday Protest
Elizabethtown, NY, February 17, 2025
Today, we are united with people across the country who have chosen to take action, to speak up and speak out to protect and defend what they love and cherish and simply know to be right and good and necessary for our very continuance as a decent people and on Planet Earth.
Our tent is big, as it must be, because the onslaught by the Trump regime and its enablers in Congress, the courts and state government, the media, corporate America and elsewhere is unprecedented in its scale and in its cruelty. We are in this together. And must be.
I received a text message from Gloria Browne-Marshall, Constitutional scholar, Black woman poet and playwright, who was on a bus to DC for a “We Will Not Be Blamed or Erased” demonstration she helped organize with a New Jersey chapter of the NAACP. She asked for our prayers for their safety.
I also want to lift up the middle schoolers in a US Army Base school in Stuttgart, Germany who walked out in protest of the visit of Mr. and Mrs. Hegseth and banishment of Black history and erasure of LGBTQ people from school holidays, book shelves, student art and their self-expression and learning.
Today, it is fitting enough to be gathered outside a courthouse to demand respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and equal protection under the law. It is especially fitting to be here where abolitionist John Brown lie in state on the last leg of his journey home for burial in North Elba.
Brown was a man of action who consecrated his life to end the abomination of slavery. Events in his early his life sensitized him to the brutal inhumanity of the slave system and the inherent dignity of the enslaved. As the 1800s unfolded, acts of brutality, violence and official federal policy further radicalized him. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was one such federal policy, one that required law enforcement to arrest people suspected of escaping their enslavers on as little as a claimant’s sworn testimony and rewarded monetary compensation to collaborators and threatened imprisonment and fines to those who refused to cooperate with the slave catcher’s law. So egregious the law, Brown responded, “It now seems that the Fugitive Slave Law was to be the means of making more Abolitionists than all the lectures we have had for years.”
May that be so for us today, that we become their rightful heirs, as the Trump regime is bearing down our neighbors, co-workers, family and friends, terrorizing tens of millions of people across the country, to tear them from their families, detain and deport them en masse, and even banish them to Guantanamo, for God’s sake.
Like the “slave catchers” before the Civil War, Trump’s “people catchers” are bribing law enforcement, cities and states, and recently threatened the Saranac Lake village board with the potential loss of millions of federal dollars, if they fail to allow local police to enforce federal immigration law or arrest someone based solely on their (supposed) immigration status.
We laud the two village trustees who voted NO on a resolution which would have kept local police from being used to assist Trump’s “people catchers” in executing his ghastly mass deportation campaign promise.
Also historically relevant today is Article I of Brown’s Provisional Constitution which provided, in effect, birthright citizenship to all adults, and their children, who would abide by the provisions and ordinances of his 1858 Constitution.
The 14th Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified ten years later guaranteeing citizenship to all babies born on this soil. It created American citizens out of millions of formerly enslaved women, men and children and charted our course to become a citizenry of many peoples. Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship puts millions of people in his crosshairs, threatens a pillar of our democracy and tears at the very fabric of who we are as a people.
We are not only fighting for our democracy and our country today. We are here today to fight for decency, truth, and our collective lives and our continuance on Earth. As Brown said, “What is needed is action – action!”
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