CHRIS CUOMO: Thousands of Americans at this hour
are descending on Washington, DC,
for what's expected to be a massive women's march.
- And here on Capitol Hill, hundreds of thousands of women
are marching today in cities across the country.
- Over 600 of these marches in all,
more than 2 million people expected to turn out.
- In the spirit of democracy--
- --and honoring the champions of human rights--
- --dignity and justice who have come before us.
- We join in diversity to show our presence
in numbers too great to ignore.
- The Women's March on Washington--
- --will send a bold message to our new government--
- --on their first day in office--
- --and to the world that women's rights
are human rights.
- We stand together, recognizing that defending
the most marginalized amongst us is defending all of us.
- We support the advocacy and resistance
movements that reflect our multiple
and intersecting identities.
- We call on all defenders of human rights to join us.
- This march is the first step towards unifying
our communities--
- --grounded in new relationships--
- --to create change from the grassroots level up.
- We will not rest until women have parity and equity--
- --at all levels of leadership in society.
- We work peacefully, while recognizing there
is no true peace without justice and equality for all.
- Hear our voice.
- It's happening.
We just had a really successful call
with maybe 100 women of color from different walks of life.
As long as we keep on thinking about that-- even the program,
I was like, OK, we need indigenous folks.
It just can't be black and white.
We don't live in a binary world.
Trump went after Mexicans, Muslims, undocumented people.
- What are we doing?
VANESSA WRUBLE: We're going to do a very brief sort of go
around of who's who and what we're all doing since we're
finally in the same place, and most of us
have never met each other before.
- My background is I left a large corporate executive job
to spend the last 570 days working for Hillary
Clinton at Hillary for America.
So I was also a little bummed.
[laughter]
- My background is in international law.
And right now I'm a public defender,
and I also do immigrant defense.
So people who are immigrants and who are getting
deported, we use international law
to prevent their deportation.
JANAYE INGRAM: So obviously, after the election, I was--
I was a lot of things.
I was pissed.
I was angry.
I was like all over the place.
I've organized a lot of marches and rallies,
some as big as we think this one will be,
although I think it could go bigger.
BOB BLAND: My name's Bob Bland, and I
am one of the national co-chairs, along with Carmen
and Tamika and Linda.
And I was also one of the day one
people at the very beginning.
I think one of the most transformative things
about this march and the movement that is rising from it
is that people who are not used to getting out
of their comfort zones are now finally saying,
OK, enough is enough.
I had a Nasty Women T-shirt go viral right
after the third debate.
It was like instant community.
We had over 3,000 people who had bought shirts or totes.
On election night, we were all so completely devastated.
This was time to get out from behind our computers
and actually do something.
That was really how it snowballed all day,
was just women from all over the country
who had never met each other, coming together online.
None of us knew how big it was going to get.
- What Bob did, in terms of organizing
these masses of people who were inspired to come march,
is incredible.
Not to mention that in the middle of this
is she gave birth.
BOB BLAND: No to the movement.
[laughter]
VANESSA WRUBLE: No, not to the movement.
I mean, literally to the movement and--
- To a human baby.
VANESSA WRUBLE: --to a human baby.
BOB BLAND: Tamika was there too.
TAMIKA MALLORY: I was in the hospital with the contractions.
And then we only knew each other for two days.
[laughter]
BOB BLAND: We were having a straight-up business meeting.
[laughter]
TAMIKA MALLORY: So I am Tamika Mallory.
I am a civil rights activist.
I've been working in the space of activism
for almost 20 years of my life.
My parents were two of Reverend Al Sharpton's first members
when he started over 26 years ago.
So I was literally the three-year-old girl
in the protests.
Organizing, for me, in this march, in this moment,
is as much about my survival, my family's survival,
my friends' survival.
My son's father was murdered.
And my son was two years old.
In order to ensure his safety and protection,
I know that I must get up every day concerned about the issues
as it relates to particularly black men in this country.
I come as an angry black woman at all times
of my life, every day.
People who are sort of waking up post-Trump,
it's completely fine because I feel like
everyone has a point of entry--
everyone.
So now that I see it, how can this country look like this?
But the truth is it has always looked like this.
LINDA SARSOUR: My name is Linda Sarsour,
and I came to you today from Brooklyn, New York, which
is where I was born and raised.
I'm a Palestinian Muslim American.
I'm a daughter of Palestinian immigrants
who came here from Palestine in the 1970s
from living under military occupation.
I have been serving in my own community
as a civil rights activist since the ashes of 9/11,
as someone who comes from a very targeted community by
all levels of law enforcement.
And I come to this space, also, like Tamika,
from a community that has basically suffered in silence.
And none of our fellow Americans have stood up for us.
It's a big morale booster for people in my community
to see someone who looks like me be in a leadership position
and to be in a public demonstration
against this administration that says,
actually, this time around, we're
not going to suffer in silence.
There are actually people who know what's going on,
and we're standing here together in these mass numbers
telling you that we're not going to back down,
and we're not going to allow you to target our Muslim sisters
and brothers, our black sisters and brothers,
our Native American, our Latino, our undocumented.
Women have always been leaders in this country.
Just because we don't have the first woman president,
doesn't mean that there is no women
leadership in this country.
Maybe if we allow the women to lead once and for all in this
visible way, maybe we will bring justice to our committees
in a way that we haven't.
CARMEN PEREZ: I'm Carmen Perez.
And so I've been in the world of criminal justice,
movement building, civil rights, human rights
for the past 20 years.
We're really angry at the fact that Trump came out
with this very racist rhetoric.
But that's just really the fabric of America, right?
And so how do we attack the forces of evil and not people
doing evil?
Because this is really beyond Trump.
This is not about Democrats versus Republicans.
This is about building our communities back up.
- We're all in the headquarters.
We're all working 24/7.
Now it's 17 days before the march,
and we're all working tirelessly on logistics.
LINDA SARSOUR: This administration
cannot ignore hundreds of thousands of people.
This is going to be the largest mass mobilization
that any new administration has ever seen on their first day.
TAMIKA MALLORY: We all want big numbers.
But as we get bigger, we need more port-a-potties to make
sure that people are comfortable and that we
have the right accommodations.
And security has clearly been a major concern.
LINDA SARSOUR: Insurance can range anywhere from $30,000
to $40,000 for the amount of people
that we will have at the march.
So I really welcome folks with whatever size donations
you have, whether it be small donations on Crowdrise-- $50,
$100, $500.
We are not yet at our goal.
My experience of organizing this march
has been when we were continuously
asked questions about where the permit was--
permit, permit, permit, permit.
And no one wanted to have a deep conversation about why
we were marching, who are we.
I wondered, did anyone ever ask a group
of men who were organizing a march the same questions
that they were asking us?
TAMIKA MALLORY: Women are carrying the weight
of the community on our backs.
And so we're going to Washington talking
about the entire community, bringing the issues
of the entire family with us, and asking men
and children to join us there.
LINDA SARSOUR: The intentionality
of saying it's the Women's March on Washington
is that this is a woman-led movement.
And you have to be comfortable in your own skin
as a man in this country to say, yes, I will be led by women.
We're also intentional about what kind of women
are leading this Women's March on Washington.
TAMIKA MALLORY: History is going to record this thing,
one way or the other.
- Mm-hm.
That's right.
TAMIKA MALLORY: And it will say in 2017,
there was another white woman march.
There were some black folks sprinkled there,
but the black women still did not feel that they
should be a part of it.
- That it was their place.
TAMIKA MALLORY: And that can't happened to me, right?
Because I might as well go home.
CARMEN PEREZ: We're on the fifth week,
and we're just beginning to bring on indigenous women
from five different reservations.
I feel like the team that we have is dynamic.
And I'm just trying to figure out
what are people doing in case we could fill some of the gaps.
TAMIKA MALLORY: There cannot be a convening in this nation that
seeks to address the issues of women where women of color are
not sitting in the front seat, leading the conversation,
because we come from the most impacted and the most
marginalized communities.
LINDA SARSOUR: What we're doing here
is we are creating another opportunity
to talk about what are the issues that impact women.
Yes, pay equity impacts all women.
But guess what?
Guess who gets paid less than white women?
Women of color.
We can't have a conversation about feminism
that doesn't include race, that doesn't include
socioeconomic status, that doesn't include immigration
status, that doesn't include respecting
people's religious rights and religious freedom
in this country.
And maybe this march is a way for us to put that out there.
I'm just going to throw it out there.
BOB BLAND: I think what stops white women from acknowledging
their privilege too often is fear,
is the fear of acknowledging that we've had a leg up
and that we have to do the work.
The march itself is a platform for conversations
that, at least from my perspective, were not being had
previously.
And my perspective is one of somebody who was not previously
an activist and organizer.
And so thank you so much to Tamika and Linda and Carmen
for joining as leaders.
CARMEN PEREZ: OK, we'll see you here.
OK, all right, bye.
- I can't believe we filled this room today!
[cheering]
LINDA SARSOUR: And women, you may have heard,
I'm one of four national co-chairs for the Women's
March on Washington.
[cheering]
I will not respect an administration
full of Islamophobes that have called
the beautiful religion that I follow a malignant cancer.
[applause]
If we are going to stand up to xenophobia, to racism,
to Islamophobia, to homophobia, if we are going to say,
hands off our health care, hands off our reproductive rights,
hands off our undocumented sisters and brothers,
then we need to say that right here in Bay Ridge.
My approach to movement building has always
been about intersectionality.
When people see a light-skinned Palestinian girl
talking about Black Lives Matter,
they look at me like I'm crazy.
A third of my community's black too.
Do we care just about reproductive rights?
Like if you're a Mexican woman that's about to get deported
to Mexico, how important are your reproductive rights
at this moment?
Being able to not prioritize what women should care about,
but believing that we live intersectional lives.
A politician sits in the ivory office
somewhere on Capitol Hill, when I can sit in the streets.
I can sit in a coffee shop.
I can sit in a community center.
I can sit in a mosque.
I can sit in a church.
I can touch people directly who are impacted by the very issues
that I fight for everyday.
I want to give a special shout out--
I don't know if she's here-- to Megan Abaludo, a mom who heard
about the Women's March on Washington, and she said,
I want to do something.
So she organized, and she's organizing
Bay Ridge to go to the Women's March on Washington.
It didn't require an elected official or someone
in a high-level position.
It took a woman with convictions and a passion and outrage
to say, I'm taking my people, and we're
going down to Washington, DC.
[cheering]
- We have to decide the actual front of the line,
and then we have to decide who those 150 people are,
because those people are going to be transported to the front
of the march by a bus.
LINDA SARSOUR: There's some people
that have to be at the front of the line, right?
So let's just do the have-to.
So there'll be 50 speakers, for sure,
the national team, for sure.
[whistle]
- Thank you, everyone.
We're asking organizers to arrive beginning at 3:00 AM.
- Say it one more time so everyone--
- 3:00 AM.
- Everyone.
- 3:00 AM.
You also have tear-down for the inauguration.
So that's going to be simultaneous--
building up, tearing down.
- How symbolic.
- Oh, yeah, exactly.
So 10:00 to 1:00 is the program.
We'll get into that a little bit.
At 1:15, I have no idea how many people are going to be here.
We, right now-- we've communicated our growing
numbers to the city agencies.
They know about them.
There's not a lot of real estate.
Even we don't march, but we have bodies along that whole route,
that plan has never changed.
And we have gotten that accomplished.
- If we are unable to march because we have so many people,
it's amazing, it's incredible, we'll
make that call in that moment.
But what do we tell people?
- So we should-- well, we'll have to think a little bit more
in these next few hours, because tomorrow
will be here in a few hours.
We'll have to think about that.
- Why can't we just march?
We might not be able to organize it the way
we want to organized it, but how do we
just stop people from marching?
- We don't necessarily stop people from marching.
This is important.
This is not an opportunity for civil disobedience.
That is not what this is.
- Today, if you weren't tracking,
there were riots that have raised
tensions of law enforcement.
So just to kind of keep that in mind.
- This is Noelle.
She is the director of operations for global.
She's our Vanessa.
And she is going to announce what
is happening in this moment.
- You guys, it is already January 21st
in some parts of the world.
And New Zealand is starting to march right now.
[cheering]
LINDA SARSOUR: So what I tell people
all the time is that don't be offended when people are
raising their voices against injustice in the United
States of America.
This is why we live here.
This is why we live in the land of freedom and democracy.
If anything, those who are raising their voices
are engaging in freedom and democracy.
And I tell people all the time, dissent is
the highest form of patriotism.
TAMIKA MALLORY: It's going to roll
better if I do it that way.
We will not remember.
We will-- well, we will remember not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends.
- Tamika.
TAMIKA MALLORY: You like it?
So in this moment, what I see as being something that
is extremely powerful is opportunity,
but it is only opportunity.
Because until January 22nd comes and we
see people continue to do the work, it means nothing.
That feeling, take it back with you
to wherever it is that you came from today.
[cheering]
BOB BLAND: Ultimately, I feel like this is profoundly
benefited me to go through this experience,
and I look forward to sharing it with my children.
I look for it to the beginning of a lifelong learning.
If we can activate and mobilize hundreds of thousands
of people who previously would have just been behind a screen,
then that might make the difference.
[cheering]
- And I'd like to introduce my hero,
feminist icon, Gloria Steinem.
[cheering]
GLORIA STEINEM: You should see yourself.
It's like an ocean.
- Did you see that?
- No, what happened?
- Look!
Look!
- Oh, my god.
- This is history in the making here.
CARMEN PEREZ: My name is Carmen Perez.
I stand here as a Chicana Mexican-American woman.
As a family member of incarcerated and undocumented
people.
We deserve to live in a country that is free--
free from fear, discrimination, free from being told
what we can do with our bodies.
We're fighting for the right to be fully present
and to be our whole selves.