Dispatch from Atlanta

Unlike Diane & Beth, I am a “marcher.” I marched to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and countless times for marriage equality and LGBT rights. Heck, I even organized a “food not bombs” campaign in college and spent hours stuffing envelopes with carefully-measured scoops of rice that students could send to President Bush in the White House.

Then I became a lawyer. I haven’t marched much lately because, like them, I’ve felt I could better serve in a different capacity. But today, the marcher in me was reawakened. Though I wasn’t in D.C., walking the streets of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown felt like a great close second. The parade route was so incredibly American: we gathered at the Center for Civil and Human Rights, then marched along, past the Coca-Cola and CNN headquarters (where the crowd went wild chanting “not fake news”), and ended at the State Capitol in front of a miniature replica of the Statue of Liberty. At 63,000 strong, it was the largest march in Atlanta’s history.

Today was the first day since the election that I’ve felt truly empowered. It must have been the great company. Besides a tremendous number of energetic Atlantans, I had the pleasure of marching with my colleague and friend, Emma Hetherington, newly-minted Clinical Assistant Professor at Georgia Law (you go Grrl!), and my professor, mentor, colleague, and friend, Diane Marie Amann (see photo below: she’s hard at work documenting for the blog).