In 2000, Donna Dees-Thomases celebrated Mother’s Day by going for a walk.
About 1 million people joined her.
It was the Million Mom March, a giant grassroots mobilization of moms against gun violence that Dees-Thomases had organized over the course of just 10 months. A mother of two girls living in suburban New Jersey, she had watched the Columbine massacre open up a summer of violence that ended with an attack on a day camp at a Jewish Community Center outside of L.A. in August of 1999 that left one dead and five injured. The sight of terrified children fleeing a gunman shocked her into action.
At this point in the story, which Dees-Thomases is telling me from the backyard of her home in Louisiana, she interrupts herself to pet a dog that has wandered into her yard. I hear panting in the background, as she begins to talk again about governmental inaction in the face of gun violence. Then she adds, ecstatically, ”Two goldendoodles! Beautiful.”
It’s this kind of extreme, almost comic friendliness that helped her organize a historic event and launch a national movement—and the reason Glamour honored her in 2000 as a Woman of the Year.
Dees-Thomases spent 10 feverish months working part-time as a publicist for Late Show With David Letterman, parenting, and organizing the Million Moms March. In the days before social media, before smartphones, before virality, Dees-Thomases used every connection she had ever made and worked every hour she could stay awake. As her plan, which had started as bullet points on scratch paper, grew into a national news event, she promoted it by debating the head of the National Rifle Organization on Meet the Press and securing a spot on Oprah. She wore denim overalls most of the time. On the day of the march, she was so tired she nearly put on mismatched sneakers. The day was a smash success, and honors, including Glamour’s Woman of the Year award, followed.
And then? You know what happened, even if you don’t know Dees-Thomases’s story. The Million Moms March was a massive success. But the mass shootings of the Columbine era continued. Innocent people died. Children died, all the time. There was no runaway movement that defeated the gun lobby and changed federal regulations and took over state houses. In 2019 there were more mass shootings than days in the year.
“Grassroots, progressive causes are not easy,” says Dees-Thomases, who is remarkably open about her own shortcomings. “We struggled so much to create an organization out of it. We attempted two mergers after the march, we struggled as an organization, we had branding issues. I think we overused our database for fund-raising.” She shares these lessons with the leaders of the other organizations she supports (and thinks you should support too): Moms Demand Action, Brady Chapter, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Giffords, and March for Our Lives.
“Twenty years later I’m beating myself up a little less, because I’ve watched groups like the Women’s March struggle,” she says. “It’s difficult when you go from a Facebook page to activists across the country.” And gun-violence work, in particular, is hard (“No one wants to have a movement created by trauma and death”). She believes—she knows—that grassroots organizing to change law and life is possible and necessary. “Million Moms March was a grassroots group of women, many of whom had never organized so much as a carpool before,” she says. “But they found inner strength, used their talents and their ability to stand up to the gun lobby, and say, ‘This is what we’re doing.’”
