Blog Post
Pat Young: Note From My Journal on Yesterday’s Rally
They began to muster in the cold darkness of an early Suffolk morning. Before 4 AM, men rolled sleepily out of their beds and began walking down the same streets where they had so often been insulted and scorned. Some stepped down the streets Marcelo Lucero walked on his way to his death.
They called out softly outside the windows of friends apartments, hoping to wake them and urging the sleepy to hurry, the buses would be leaving soon.
Women woke their children. “Get us, mi hijo. We’re going to Washington. Sleep on the bus, but get up now.”
These are the people Newsday once called invisible. The guys who mow your lawn while you’re at work. The women who change your child’s diapers.
You may think they are invisible, but yesterday they were resolved to be seen-and heard.
When I was on the bus, I learned that there were seven buses and more than 350 people going to D.C. from Long Island. A few weeks ago, we thought we’d have trouble filling three buses.
And it was the same story everywhere.
As our bus crossed the bridge into New Jersey and got on the Jersey Turnpike, we saw the streams of buses on their way to the rally transform into a flooding river of scores of buses filled with marchers intent on holding Obama and Congress to account for fixing our immigration system.
In Maryland, we crested a hill and I saw an unbroken line of buses heading for the rally.
At the Mall in D.C. there were already 15,000 marchers three hours before the start of the rally.
Delegations arrived every minute and we cheered them after asking where they had come from: “Ohio”, “North Carolina”, “Los Angeles”, “The Bronx”, “San Jose”, they kept coming on and on.
The Chicago delegation, numbering in the thousands, marched in with a full brass band playing “We Shall Overcome”.
The large Korean unit was led by drummers in traditional dress pounding out a call for reform.
And by the time the rally began at 2 PM, the numbers of those on the Mall were nearly 100,000 and still growing.
And the first thing that was talked about, was the murder in Suffolk of Marcelo Lucero.
Tags : immigration movement, immigration rallies, immigration reform
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