Signs of the Times – at the Women’s March in Chicago

Ten days have passed since the Women’s March, and the exuberance I felt then—briefly—has been replaced by worry and dread, alternating with fierce determination and only the faintest glimmer of hope. Still, every time I look at my photos from that day in Chicago, I smile a little and feel held and lifted up by that crowd, a crowd so dense we had to move slowly when we moved at all.

The sun came out in Chicago that Saturday. The evening before, as Marilyn and I arrived in the city, heading north on Lake Shore Drive, the fog was so thick, our usual view of the skyline was completely hidden. The day after the march was grey and colder.  But that Saturday morning of the march, the sun shone on us and warmed us; we shed coats, but the pink hats with cat ears stayed on. All the aerial photos of the marches around the country show a rose-tinted crowd.

Though the organizers cancelled the official march in Chicago because the crowd was too big for the route, some of us marched anyway—slowly, cheerfully, stopping right in the middle of Michigan Avenue when needed.  As we moved across Michigan and down Jackson, walking the one block to Wabash, we chanted now and then: “THIS is what democracy looks like,” we responded to “TELL me what democracy looks like.” Or we repeated, “Black Lives Matter.” The chants moved through the crowd like waves.

Every time a train passed on the L tracks further west of us, we would cheer loudly, holding up and waving our signs. The people on the train would wave back at us, some of them holding up signs, too. Marching behind Marilyn and me was a family: grandparents, parents, and a baby girl, who was nine months old that day her mother told me.  Every time the crowd around her cheered for an L train, the baby smiled and clapped her hands, her palms sometimes slipping past each other; clapping was still new to her.  She never seem startled by our cheers; rather, she seemed to understand the rhythm of the marchers and to respond to it. The baby’s grandmother told me her other daughter was marching in D.C., that her family was represented at marches. This baby will probably hear stories of the marches from her family. But I imagine she will have some memories of her own, too, settling somewhere in her body and her mind.

Last week, I read an article about professors and librarians at Northeastern University (where I got my Master’s in 1990) who collected up signs that were discarded after the Boston Women’s March and will catalog them as important cultural and historical artifacts. Many of us who were at Women’s Marches took photos of the signs, our efforts at recording this historic moment and movement. I’m including some of those photos here. May they remind us and inspire us to keep on keeping on.

We are going to be protesting for a while; we’ll need more signs and more inspiration. If you have slogans or stories you would like to share, please leave them in the comments. I’d love to read them.

That's Marilyn holding her sign (which we got from Emily's List) and the flowers a stranger gave her. 

I love this photo of the crowd--even if the crowd meant we could not find the friends we were to meet from our UU church until later, when they left the crowd and when we could send and receive texts again.

As we walked from the rally site to the Trump Hotel, we saw these little girls marching down a closed-off Michigan Avenue with signs they had made.

Near the river, we were astonished to run into friends who live in Chicago and whom we had planned to try to see later in the day.  How we found each other in a quarter million people--entirely by chance--is beyond me!

These teens were hanging out right in the middle of Wacker Drive and were happy to have their photo taken. 

I just had to add this photo.  We were waiting in the crowd, and I could see a gap over people's heads; I asked someone why there was open space that we weren't spreading into, even though we were packed so tight as we waited to start marching. Was it fenced off?  "Oh, no it's not fenced off. That's the grass. We were asked not to go on the grass." "Oh," I replied, and we both laughed and said, "Midwest nice!"  I then held up my camera to get a photo of the grass.