“827 going.”
That was the number on the Women’s March on Jackson Facebook event page when I checked it for the fifth time Saturday morning. It was after 9:30 a.m. and Dispatch photographer Luisa Porter and I were trundling down Highway 25 South on our way to take in the event.
“It was 700 something when I looked earlier this morning,” I told Luisa.
But I was skeptical, switching between the event page and Twitter for news on other marches around the country — could a march for women’s rights in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, really draw more than 500 people?
At first it seemed the answer was no. As we arrived at the Capitol steps, I only saw a couple hundred. I met up with Rachael Damms, a Columbus resident who drove down with her younger brother Colin. They met their friend Philip Stoner, a Mississippi University for Women grad now living in Hattiesburg. They were munching on bagels and bananas and toting a homemade sign that said “FEMALES ARE STRONG AS HELL.”
As the crowd began to march, I fell into step beside Colin. This wasn’t his first protest, he told me as he marched — he had been part of an LGBT rights protest on MUW’s campus following the passing of Mississippi House Bill 1523. He also attended rallies in Washington, D.C., where he interned last summer and heard Bernie Sanders speak. Something must have resonated with Colin because he was wearing a bright blue “Feel the Bern” shirt on Saturday.
The crowd was getting bigger — it had probably swollen to around 500 by the time it arrived at the Governor’s Mansion — and that was just what I could see of it. The mood was excited. People were chanting, kids were yelling as their parents held up signs and friends greeted each other in the crowd.
I lost track of Colin after I stopped to chat with Jamie Mixon, a Starkville graphic designer who I’d talked to for a previous story on the march.
Jaime was toting a sign she’d made herself that showed the Statue of Liberty and read, “GRAB ME BY THE WHAT?” — referencing a video of Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women by the genitals.
“I did expect a rather large crowd, but this just makes me very happy to see all these people out here and raising their voices,” Mixon said. “You see a very diverse crowd here, all for different reasons but all united.”
She was certainly right about diverse — I saw black, white, men, women, white-haired ladies sporting pink buttons, and a little boy sitting on his father’s shoulders holding a sign declaring “Women’s Health Affects Us All.” People from around the state, some of them meeting for the first time, talked about issues like immigration reform and climate change — or just how much they didn’t like President Trump, shaking their heads over his signing an order to repeal the Affordable Care Act just that morning.
I said goodbye to Mixon and found Stoner in the still growing crowd.
“It’s actually really reassuring because we are a really conservative part of the country, so it’s just cool to see that people do care about serious civil rights issues, which right now in our current political climate are under serious threat,” he said. “And it’s not just women. It’s every minority.”
By the time we looped back to the Capitol, the crowd was at what I estimated conservatively at 700 or 800. They cheered and talked among themselves as speakers from churches around the state, the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi, Planned Parenthood and other organizations graced the top of the Capitol steps. I found a contingent from Columbus and Starkville, who got involved in the march through progressive-themed Facebook groups.
Three Columbus women — Cindy Sanders, her mother Dorothy Fortman and her niece Shelley Dornan — were all part of it. None of them had ever attended any kind of march or protest before.
Sanders had been following the women’s movement since just after the election. It started first as a women’s rights movement, she explained.
“And kind of as the movement got bigger, it seemed to take on more of a life of … equal rights for everyone,” she said.
The hundreds at the Capitol joined millions of people around the country and the world. The Washington Post reported 470,000 people clogged the Metro in Washington D.C., and the march portion of the Chicago rally was canceled after 150,000 protesters flooded downtown.
Millions of people all over the world, The Post said. And the hundreds of people here in Jackson were part of it.
As the crowd began to drift away — as people said goodbye to others from around the state, loaded their signs back into their cars — I pulled up The Women’s Mach on Jackson Facebook page again. The number had changed.
875 Went.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 36 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.