As Marisa Hebble passed by the Capitol Building, moving slowly through throngs of men, women and children, something on the building’s steps caught her eye.
Hebble noticed about 20 young Girl Scouts, joined by their mothers and brothers, standing on the steps. The girls were all holding signs, much like Hebble, whose sign featured the John Lewis quote “We will stand up for what is right, for what is fair and what is just.”
“It was a pretty powerful moment watching these girls watch these enormous crowds,” said Hebble, of Northfield.
Powerful. The word was used over and over by Franklin County residents who converged on Washington D.C. — with more than half a million other Americans — to describe Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington.
“To me, it really communicated a sense of women’s power, women coming together to change what we want to change,” said Becca King of Greenfield. “The sense of solidarity of women all over the world was very palpable … We’re still vibrating from it.”
Through the Women’s March on Washington and more than 600 “sister marches” worldwide, marchers hoped to send a message to President Donald Trump on his first full day in office: They won’t let his agenda go unchallenged. Crowd estimates from police and organizers around the globe added up to more than a million, with marches everywhere from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles to Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, London, Prague and Sydney.
“It was just more people than I had ever seen in one place,” said Lea Appel of Greenfield, who attended the Washington, D.C., march with her 9-year-old daughter Bryn.
Various Franklin County marchers said they’d never seen anything like the crowd that gathered in the nation’s capital, even those who had participated in rallies and marches there before.
“They were talking about 200,000 (people). This was way more,” said Carlos Uriona of Ashfield, referring to the original projections of how many people might attend Washington, D.C.’s march. “Every avenue was packed.”
King described the crowd as being “body-to-body,” with “no room to move.”
“The march almost couldn’t take place because it was 2-miles-deep,” she said of the crowd.
As of 5:30 p.m., several hours after the march began, Uriona said some people were “still sort of marching,” long after others had dispersed.
“There are people in the streets everywhere with signs,” Uriona relayed by phone. “There were a lot of people who went spontaneously in front of the White House.”
Many marchers wore pink “pussyhats,” a response to President Donald Trump’s caught-on-tape remarks about grabbing women by their genitalia. King said she witnessed “a sea of pink heads, men and women and babies.”
Even on the trip down from Massachusetts, Appel said, she kept seeing people wearing pink hats at rest areas and in their vehicles.
The Franklin County marchers also observed an array of witty signs, people climbing into trees so they could witness the speakers such as filmmaker Michael Moore and feminist icon Gloria Steinem, and saw fists thrust into the air to express their solidarity.
“The biggest message I came away with is there is a lot of power and strength in the number of people out there who feel that women’s rights and immigrants’ rights and gay rights are all important values for our country,” Appel said.
Through gathering, the marchers hoped to stand up for the rights of LGBT citizens, immigrants, women, minorities and any other group whom they feel are “vulnerable under a Trump presidency,” Hebble said.
They saw no negativity in the crowd, but excitement and warmth.
“It was a life-changing experience seeing the amount of love there and the people bringing that love,” said 15-year-old Gray Davidson Carroll, who traveled to Washington with his 17-year-old friend Bella Lattanzi and her parents Mark Lattanzi and Cindy Tirrell, all of Montague. “It was mind-blowing to me.”
Tirrell and Mark Lattanzi noted how moving it was to join together with different ethnicities, genders and ages. They said there were elderly women in wheelchairs and with walkers, but also high school girls.
The big question now, Mark Lattanzi said, is what’s next?
“I think it’s key that there becomes an organizing structure for people to take that energy and keep moving it forward,” he said.
“Even though we live in a fairly progressive state, we shouldn’t take anything for granted,” Tirrell said. “We, just like everybody else, should be taking this chance to fight for justice and equality. Start now.”