The Takoma Park No Kings demonstration was a fifteen-minute walk from our house, so Beth and I went on foot. When we got close, we started seeing people with signs, headed in the same direction we were, some of whom wanted to know which way to go. But eventually they didn’t need to ask because the No Kings logo (the crown with a slash through it) was chalked on the sidewalk with arrows pointing the way to New Hampshire Avenue.
New Hampshire Avenue is a four-lane thoroughfare with a median in the middle. There were people lined up on both sides of the road and some in the median. It was like the Tesla protest we went to in March with people standing on the curb, holding signs, occasionally chanting, and waving to passing drivers who were overwhelmingly supportive. Mostly drivers honked their horns, waved, held up raised fists, or yelled “thank you!” but some had come prepared with their own signs and American flags and a few kept going in circles to pass through the line of protesters multiple times. In the over an hour and a half we were there, there was exactly one carful of counter-protesters. They had a flag that was probably a Trump flag, but it was bunched up and I couldn’t read it. They also had a MAGA hat they were holding up through the car’s sunroof.
There was a woman next to me with a tiny baby strapped to her chest. She told her companion, who had asked, that it wasn’t the baby’s first protest. I said, “I bet there’s no line for that in the baby book,” and she replied that while that was true, she had recorded her baby’s first protest there. These are the times we live in, I guess.
Beth said later that No Kings was a great organizing theme because it was straightforward and the logo was easy to draw, and it allowed people to exercise a lot of creative interpretation while staying on topic. There was a man across the street from us in a colonial costume, which I thought showed an admirable level of committing to the bit.
After we’d stood for about an hour, Beth and I decided to walk up and down the length of the protest on both sides of the street to stretch our legs and get a better look at people’s signs.
King-related signs I liked included:
I Support the U.S. Army. They Got Rid of the Last King We Had
No Faux King Way
No Crown for a Clown
My King is Martin Luther King (There was also a similar one for Billie Jean King)
America: Ousting Kings Since 1776
Only Monarch I Want (with a Monarch butterfly)
No Kings. Yas Queen
Beth’s sign said “Unions Yes. Kings No” with an American flag at the top and the No Kings logo at the bottom. Mine also featured a flag (I’d taped a little one to the sign) and the No Kings logo made out three colors of electrical tape. (I got the idea from a friend on Facebook.) It said “Since 1776. No Kings.” I usually just scrawl something on posterboard with a marker, but I’d put more care into this sign than usual, and I liked how it turned out.
Flags were a common design element, not surprising as it was Flag Day. People were also carrying a lot of American flags, both right side up and upside down.
Of course, there were non-monarchical signs, too:
Don’t Let the Bastards Grind U Down (though I would have liked it better in Latin, like Nicole’s t-shirt)
Beat the Heat with Crushed I.C.E.
Immigrants—We Get the Job Done (which inspired me to listen the Hamilton soundtrack and then the Hamilton Mixtape when we got home)
They’re Eating the Checks! They’re Eating the Balances!
Our Parade Is Bigger (referring of course to that other event taking place in D.C. on the same day)
As we walked, we heard people playing guitar, drums, and bells. I walked through a sprinkler someone had set up to water both a lawn and the sidewalk, possibly for the benefit of the protesters on a warm, muggy day. We ran into all kinds of people we knew—one of the members of my dissertation committee, someone I used to teach with at GWU, quite a few parents of our kids’ preschool classmates, and the leader of my book club. And that was just the people we saw. I found out later there were quite a few more people we knew there, including the director of the musical drama camp North attended for years. I’m not great at estimating crowd size but considering how big it was compared to the Tesla protest (which did get an exact count) I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a thousand people there, in our town of 17,500 people.
We left before it was quite over and went to Walgreen’s to get some cough medicine for North. They’d come home from the beach four days earlier with pinkeye and an upper respiratory infection. (At their first visit to urgent care, on Tuesday, flu and covid were ruled out, and at a second visit to urgent care today, they were diagnosed with a sinus infection.) As you might expect, they’ve been feeling lousy and haven’t been to work all week. From the drugstore we proceeded to Starbucks for iced drinks, including a pink drink to bring home to North. I was hot and sweaty, so my own pink drink was refreshing, even though I did not have a sore throat.
Back at home, I looked at pictures of other No Kings demonstrations. They happened in 2,000 locations all over the country, in big cities and small towns, in blue states and red states. In some big cities, like New York, there were as many as 50,000 people. Near home, four or five thousand people turned out in Rockville, and a friend of mine said there were protesters on every overpass on the Beltway, with hundreds of people on some of them. I’ve seen estimates of 5.5 to 12.1 million people attending nationwide.
The photos and videos of events big and small were inspiring. I loved the picture of people in formation spelling out “No Kings” on the beach in San Francisco. Beth’s favorite, after those taken in her hometown of Wheeling, was the video of seniors coming out the door of their nursing home in walkers and wheelchairs.
Along with a picture of one of the chalked drawings on the sidewalk, Beth posted this message on Facebook: “Thanks to all of the #NoKings organizers for helping us find our way today, as individuals and as a country.”
Did you go to a No Kings demonstration? What was it like?