NO KINGS Rally and March

In one of the largest protests in Seattle’s history, more than 70,000 people turned out on Saturday for No Kings Day in Seattle, one of more than 2000 events held nationwide to protest President Donald Trump’s authoritarian assaults on democracy, immigrants and the rule of law.

West Seattle Indivisible, one of a dozen organizations sponsoring the march, was there. The group chartered three buses to the event, which dropped off 139 Indivisible marchers at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill, then traveled to Seattle Center to await the group at the end of the march. Other West Seattleites made their own way, one couple on a tandem bike, to the event, and a third group of protesters showed up at locations around Southwest Seattle, from the Junction to South Park.

The Capitol Hill group joined tens of thousands of Seattle residents from all over the city, who came via foot, bus and light rail, streaming into Cal Anderson Park and massing for a pre-march rally. It was a huge crowd -  Dave Cuerpo, of the Seattle Emergency Operations Center, told the Seattle Times that  “in excess of 70,000” people were there, slightly below the 100,000 who attended the women’s march in January 2017. At the height of Saturday’s march, protesters filled the march route as they walked shoulder to shoulder, forming a 1.5 mile line from Capitol Hill to Seattle Center, according to the Times. The Seattle Police Department reported that the Seattle event was completely peaceful, tweeting  on its X account “not a single report of property damage” and “thank you to the tens of thousands of peaceful people who came out today.”

At the pre-march rally, legendary Seattle folk singer-songwriter Jim Page warmed up the crowd. Then several speakers took to the stage. The keynote speaker was Seattle’s Democratic Congressional Representative, Pramila Jayapal, who was visibly shaken by the news that hours before, an assassin with a political agenda had murdered a Minnesota Democratic state representative and her husband, gaining access to their home on Saturday morning by impersonating a policeman. Another targeted representative and his wife were injured, but are expected to survive.

Jayapal told the crowd that it must “dig more deeply, and rise higher, to prevent us from going down the violent drain of authoritarianism.” Noting that in the wake of the murders, the Proud Boys extremist group was circulating a meme that said “shoot a couple and the rest will go home.” Jayapal said: “I am here to say – we are not going home. We are here together. We are here to take back our country from any pretender who wants to be king…power does not flow from the top own, it flows from the bottom up.”