2025 May Day and No King’s Day

LoreI’ve decided to end this volume (9) with a few updates, designed to both inform, and to give me a chance to think critically about my own efforts in this moment. And I’ll provide links that address ongoing issues with the administration. These updates might go a bit long.  

I’ll begin with the May Day and No Kings’ rallies, events I co-mcd.   

Both come from my loose involvement in post-election organizing attempts. Folks used the rallies to lash local efforts to national ones and to provide proof-of-concept and to present political opportunities for people who weren’t connected on the other. 

The rallies were well attended, and ground breaking. I hadn’t seen that many people at McKeldin Square in a minute, and as it was the site of Occupy Baltimore almost 14 years ago it represented the culmination of over a decade and a half of left organizing. As it was constituted by several other marches, it showed the potential of cross-sector and cross-organizational organizing.

The No Kings event was organized by Indivisible Baltimore, a relatively new organization comprised of people who had less organizing history, and may have been recently politicized/re-politicized. If the May Day rally represented coalition proof-of-concept, No Kings represented proof that there were thousands of people looking to join something bigger than themselves.  

However, both skewed older and white. The May Day rally less so than No Kings, but this is primarily because the organizations behind the May Day rally, many of which had a significant black labor component. 

I see this as reflecting a few different dynamics. 

One dynamic is the simple fact of Baltimore segregation. Baltimore has been and remains segregated, even though it is increasingly multi-cultural and multi-racial. This dynamic was politically produced, but then socially reproduced. I’m connected to white and black left/nationalist/radical tendencies because I spent a big chunk of my first two decades working with them. (I joined Hopkins 20 years ago last week!) My connections to black Baltimore extend from my Morgan State connections (my work on WEAA, my fraternity). There aren’t that many of us connected to both worlds. Which makes political organizing between them difficult.   

Alongside local segregation there’s the political dynamic generated by the Trump administration. Its secret police attacks on Latinx populations—which differ from those generated by the Obama and Biden administrations in quality though not quantity—have politically and socially demobilized them to the point where many find it difficult to conduct normal day-to-day activity much less engage in political activism. The level of courage required for Latinx public participation cannot be overstated. Nor can the viciousness of state attacks against them.  

And then the “let’s sit this one out” rhetoric unique to black Baltimore communities represent yet a third dynamic. This rhetoric is national but is also local. 

One of the less reported stories of this moment is the significant drop in violent crime we’ve seen in major cities across the country. It’s the partial byproduct of a combination of demographic shifts (our nation skews older and older folk are less likely to commit violent crime), shifts in how drug gangs function (if—as a result of smart phones—geography is no longer as important in drug sales, this could reduce the number of real estate oriented conflicts that tend to generate violent crime). But also important are local political interventions. In Baltimore, which has seen the fewest number of homicides ever recorded, Mayor Scott has made a number of changes, including: INSERT CHANGES HERE 

What hasn’t decreased, though, are police killings. 

Within a span of a bit over a week, Baltimore police killed a 70 year old woman (escalating the precipitating mental health emergency in doing so), a young man (who died in police custody), and a local Arabber (the Baltimore term for horse and carriage produce sellers). This latter incident led to a West Baltimore march. Earlier in the year after almost 15 years of protest, state officials recognized that a number of police deaths—most notably Tyrone West—should’ve been categorized as homicides but were not. 

According to Mapping Police Violence, there’ve been 594 police killings so far, which if this holds will put the nation on a 3.2 clip.

How does that apply to the rallies I co-mc’d? 

I’d suggest that for the average No King’s Day attendee in particular, what they’re experiencing now—with cuts to USAID and other federal government bodies—may be the first time they’ve experienced the underside of the American state. It’s the first time they’ve had to worry about making ends meet. The first time they’ve had to think about coming under direct attack.

This isn’t quite the case for Latinx populations although perhaps it hasn’t been as vicious as this. And this isn’t quite the case for black populations in Baltimore, particularly working class ones. One of the more problematic findings of the 2016 Justice Department report about the Baltimore Police was that unconstitutional police stops were normal in most Baltimore neighborhoods. I recall one person who’d been stopped by police at least fifty times, and he wasn’t alone. These stops have their roots in broken windows policing tactics imported from NYC, but these tactics themselves go back much farther. 

We can almost draw a straight line from modern policing which serves to extract revenue and control undesirable populations and the election of Donald Trump and his ICE policies. With the growing role crony capitalism plays in creating folk like Donald Trump smack dab in the middle. 

Neither rallies really spoke to this as effectively as they could have (and as I was one of the MCs, I bear responsibility). Going forward we have to bring together three populations—the white populations bearing government cuts (but not experiencing police violence), the black populations (experiencing local police violence), and the Latino populations (experiencing national police violence). At the very least that means showing up for rallies. But it also means generating popular education programs that can generate understanding about the shared (yet unique) nature of these struggles. And then lashing them up to political projects that combine electoral strategies—putting people in office at the local, state, and national level—with referenda strategies. 

What I’ve tried to do through a combination of social media (FB primarily), zoom conversations with various black communities I’m a part of, and then through coming back to public radio (shout out to Dr. Kaye Whitehead), is inform folk about what’s going on, and then push back against the idea that sitting this one out is the best move for us tactically, strategically, and empirically. If we’re the ones, historically speaking, who have the best handle on the connection between emancipation and democracy, then the last thing we should do is abdicate our responsibility. We don’t talk about abdication enough and we should. 

But that’s the internal work. 

What those of us connected to the efforts that skew white and old have to do is work within those spaces to get people within them to commit to broader action. That broader action has to first involve getting people within these groups to see that the fascist turn didn’t start with Trump and didn’t move from Germany to here.  

In developing this new understanding people have to get that these dynamics affect all of us, no matter where we are. The ally point of view would have us believe that there are certain populations who are affected and certain populations who aren’t. The role of the ally is to recognize how certain populations are affected and then aid them in their struggles. 

This is wrong. It quite simply isn’t the case that there are people who aren’t affected and people who are. It is true that there are populations who are the victims of discriminate indiscriminate police violence and populations who don’t tend to be. But to the extent that modern policing tends to extract democratic capacity in exchange for its power, everyone loses materially and psychically. 

This dynamic has to then translate into action. And working on the idea that it’s just a bit at a time, it isn’t about generating the equivalent of a May Day march among people who haven’t ever marched. It is, though, about getting people to commit to actions designed to change local conditions. Knowing that changing those local conditions end up building the community we need to change national conditions.  

This week in higher education

Haven’t written much about higher education, given everything, but just wanted to point your eye to a couple of troubling developments.

• The University of Florida Law School’s best paper award went to a paper arguing that “we the people” in the Constitution originally meant whites. (The writer is a white supremacist.)

• Indiana University is cutting/merging approximately 400 academic units. 

• Wisconsin is moving most state universities to a 4/4 load.

No room to write these up now but they’re worth watching.