January 21 marks the one-year anniversary of the Women’s March, the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. All this week, Glamour will be spotlighting the stories, people, and issues that framed the March, as well as where we go from here.
In the days before the march, the organizers worked from the infamous Watergate Hotel. The national team traveled to Washington to join Janaye Ingram and her team of organizers and volunteers, overseeing logistics and operations in the District of Columbia. As the activists dove into their last days of planning, they shared tense elevator rides with enthusiastic Trump inauguration attendees, dealt with online harassment, and faced critiques within their coalition.
JENNA ARNOLD [Women’s March Strategic Adviser and National Organizer]: I remember showing up at the Watergate Hotel the week before the march. I mean, the irony of us being based at the Watergate Hotel while planning the largest human rights protest in history has to be mentioned.
NANTASHA WILLIAMS [Deputy of Operations and National Organizer]: To my knowledge the Women’s March decided to stay at the Watergate because, simply put, they had the most available rooms to accommodate us and were willing to work with us on numerous things. The Women’s March was a very last-minute, rushed thing, so we were scrambling and had been in talks with many hotels to work out the best deal given all the complexities. Trump supporters were all over D.C. that weekend, so it would have been really hard to avoid them altogether.
TAMIKA MALLORY [Cochair and National Organizer]: That was a very, very intense week. We had received death threats. Linda, specifically, was under attack. So much hate coming at us from so many different directions. Being in the hotel with Trump supporters wasn’t easy.
JENNA: We didn’t want anyone knowing that we were at the Watergate. We didn’t know what the reaction would be. So yeah, so it was definitely confidential. But it was really hard because it was swarming with people with red hats.
ALYSSA KLEIN [Director of Social Media Strategy and National Organizer]: We got death threats on Twitter. They said they were happy for their Second Amendment rights because they were going to be able to use them on us and the people onstage.
CASSADY FENDLAY [Director of Communications and National Organizer]: Hate crimes had increased following the election. The visibility of the march brought a new level of intensity to the online harassment and death threats. A certain element felt emboldened now. We were days away from a new administration that had promised to unleash hell on so many communities, so there was a menacing element, like: Soon we’ll be able to get you.
LINDA SARSOUR [Cochair and National Organizer]: In 2003, I was with my son, who was four years old at the time, in line at a bank in Brooklyn. It was winter, and I was wearing a long black coat and a black hijab. A middle-aged white man in the bank started yelling, “How can you serve people like this? They killed Americans. They are animals.” He was looking directly at me, but I ignored him. He continued to scream and walk toward me, and my son was like, “Mommy, why is that man screaming at you? What did you do?” This is a four-year-old child. The man came directly next to me saying, “We will get rid of you all.” One of the bank tellers asked him what he needed so she could get him the hell out. Eventually he left, but I felt so unsafe. My office was across the street, but I didn’t go there. I jumped on a bus
so he wouldn’t follow us into the building.
Times are the same and maybe even worse than they were then. I don’t want to see the threats. The vitriol is just draining. It’s not that I’m afraid of it, but it’s draining. I wear hijab. And I’m from Brooklyn. There was a moment when I realized that I am this administration’s worst nightmare. And not only that, but I also was resonating with people far and wide across this country.
MICHAEL SKOLNIK [Board Chair of The Gathering for Justice]: One of my duties was security. I’ll never do that again. It’s an awful feeling knowing that there might be some car out there with a bomb. No insurance company would give us insurance. Thirteen companies denied us. I ended up calling my aunt, who’s in the production side of the music business, to ask who insures Coachella, and I called that broker. The Friday before the rally, at five o’clock, he said, “You’ve got a deal—but this is the most expensive policy I’ve ever sold.” This guy insures Coachella! It ended up being $108,000. For one day.
TAMIKA: It was so intense. You know, just in terms of all of the stress. It was almost like we were in a bubble. There were moments when we were in that hotel, in the basement where it felt like being underwater at the bottom of the ocean.
MARIAM EHRARI [Deputy of Operations and National Organize]: I kept running into Trump supporters and many Russians in the hotel and thought, Is this real?
“No insurance company would give us
insurance. I ended up calling my aunt,
who’s in the production side of
the music business, to ask who insures
Coachella, and I called that broker.
The Friday before the rally, at five o’clock,
he said, ‘You’ve got a deal—but this is the
most expensive policy I’ve ever sold.'”
—Michael Skolnik
NANTASHA: It’s so funny, thinking back, on the things that weren’t negotiated until the last minute. Like, Oh, we need to have a
little office space, right? We need to have some type of war room, or peace room, or something. And then negotiating with the hotel to give us that space for free.
TOSHI REAGON [Music Director]: Janaye was doing all of these negotiations with the city through all of it. She is a badass, and in big meetings she would take out a map and say, “This is happening, and it’s happening here.”
JANAYE INGRAM [Director of Logistics and National Organize]: There was a whole range of emotions, staying at the Watergate. There was the very stark, contrasting reality of seeing people who were probably opposed to our very existence, who were also staying in the hotel and going to balls. And we had the hotel staff saying to us, you know, “Please don’t tell anyone you are here.” They didn’t want anyone to know that we were staying in the hotel, because they had all of these inaugural guests who were also there, and they felt it would hurt business.
MICHAEL: We were worried about security. We wanted to make sure that we were doing everything we possibly could to protect people. So we spent much of the week trying to get more security. But every firm in Washington was booked for the inauguration, and they didn’t want their guys or their women to work 48 hours. So we ended up hiring officers out of Philadelphia. We bused them in, about 57 security officers—mostly former police officers, civil service, FBI, and current officers off duty—so we had 175 in total, but that still wasn’t enough.
MYSONNE LINEN [Head of Security]: The thing is, everyone needed to be safe. Not just those on the stage and the speakers, but the whole march. We had an entire plan for how security would be inserted into the crowd, how they would march in the crowd, the exit strategy for an emergency.
PHOTO: Noam Galai/Getty Images
The crowd in Washington, D.C., at the Women’s March on January 21, 2017.
PAOLA MENDOZA [Artistic Director and National Organizer]: One of the hardest moments for me was accepting the fact that my son Mateo wouldn’t be able to go to the march. I knew the day of the march would be the busiest day for me. I also knew that Michael was going to be consumed filling in holes, so we had to make the decision to not bring our son on this historic day. I wish he could have seen in the flesh what his mama and papa did for him and his country. Mateo Ali wasn’t able to be there with us on January 21, but it was his spirit, his joy, and his love that carried us through that historic day.
TONY CHOI [Deputy of Partnerships]: Another thing I did was make sure people drank enough water. Movement people are terrible at taking care of themselves!
BREANNE BUTLER [Global Director and National Organizer]: It was insane. A few days before, the London lead called me to say, “Oh my God, they’re telling us now that our march is too big. Our permit doesn’t hold as many people as we’re anticipating and now they’re saying we can’t march there.” And this was, like, 48 hours before the march. And we decided, “Alrighty, let’s go as high up as we can [laughs] and try to see how we can turn this around.” We ended up getting approved through a petition in Parliament.
SARAH SOPHIE FLICKER [Women’s March Strategic Adviser and National Organizer]: Three days before the march, someone told us we had to talk to this woman who knows all about Internet safety. She told us, “On the day of the march, your Internet is going to go down. What is your waterfall plan? Where is your auxiliary Internet? It has to be off-site, in a secured place. How are you dealing with emergencies?” We were terrified.
ALYSSA: So we brought in the Digi Geeks, a superhero squad of kick-ass women of color working in social media and tech led by the extraordinary Stefanie Cruz. With less than 48 hours’ notice, they came on as our trusty reinforcements to essentially run all social media while we were in the dark at the march.
TAMIKA: There were a lot of different issues coming up. I think during that week, we dealt with the antichoice issue.
TONY: There were organizations that signed up through our website to be partners, and we were responding to them one by one. It wasn’t working. I sent out a mass email, bcc’ing everyone and saying, “If you want to be a partner, please reply and confirm and we will add you to the list.” Well, that may have been a mistake because some antichoice groups made it onto the list because their names were intentionally deceptive. The list should have been vetted better, but we were doing so much. From that point on, we did more extreme vetting of partners.
TAMIKA: We also dealt that week with Clinton supporters wanting her name to be included in the list of historical women that we were uplifting. There was a lot happening all at once.
LINDA: We chose not to invite Hillary or Bernie to speak. Nobody’s “invited” to march. Bernie showed up on his own in Vermont. But De’Ara was in contact with Hillary—which is what people assumed wasn’t happening. And not only were we in contact with her that morning, but she asked us, “How can I be helpful? Can I tweet in support of the Women’s March?” We said, “Absolutely.” So that day, she actually tweeted in support of us.
TAMIKA: I’ve been in the movement for a long time. I’ve had the FBI knocking on my door at five in the morning. I’ve witnessed some very intense moments. Whether it be organizing the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, or the Million Man March twentieth anniversary. I’ve been in intense spaces where the work was constant and the stress level of everyone involved was up. But I have never, ever dealt with the intensity that we were in, in those last few days leading up to the march. And then the backdrop of that hotel, and what it represents in American history, was constantly looming.
I mean, I really found myself looking around my room for bugs. [Laughs.] I was looking behind the TV, in the light posts, looking for potential—you know, wiretapping. All of that was happening that week.
“I’ve been in the movement for a long time, whether it be organizing
the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, or the Million
Man March twentieth anniversary. But I have never, ever
dealt with the intensity that we were in, in those last few days
leading up to the march.” —Tamika Mallory
CARMEN PEREZ [Cochair and National Organizer]: The night before the march we gathered in a room and I asked everyone to hold hands. We said the Assata chant together and I felt a vibration of togetherness. We had all given our souls for this moment.
JENNA: So at like six or seven the night before the march, I had a moment where I was like, You know what, we’ve done everything we can. All right, everyone, just put down your pencils, close your computers. That’s it. We were literally turning it over to the universe. There was just this moment of calm. I had been prepared to work through the night. I said, “I need to get a proper meal and go to sleep.” Which is not me—typically I’m hustling until the last minute. We all went up from the basement to go find food, and the lobby was packed with people dressed in black tie on the way to the inaugural ball. And that fucking sucked to see.
This article is adapted from Together We Rise, a new book by the Women’s March Organizers and Condé Nast, publisher of Glamour, which is available for purchase now.
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