New Friends, Common Foe

How the Women’s March brought progressives together.

- Charlotte Alter

THE IDEA STARTED WITH WOMEN ON Facebook. On the night of Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November, a grandmother in Hawaii named Teresa Shook went online and called for women to storm the capital on Inauguration weekend.

“At the same time, 5,000 miles away, I was doing the same thing,” explains Bob Bland, a female manufacturing entrepreneur in New York City. “Within an hour we’d found each other and merged our events, and we were off to the races.” By the next morning, thousands of people from across the U.S. had signed up to join the event that would become the Women’s March on Washington.

Bland quickly realized that in order to transform the march from an angry Facebook group into a progressive coalition, she’d need help. She enlisted veteran organizers Tamika Mallory, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour as national co-chairs with the aim of wrangling one of the largest Inauguration demonstrations in history—and making it one that brought together activists of all stripes.

“In the past, progressive groups have been working sort of in isolation,” says Mallory, a New York City–based civil rights and anti-gun-violence advocate. “People didn’t really have the time and bandwidth to understand other folks’ issues.”

By the week before the Inauguration, more than 600 marches nationwide and around the world had been planned in solidarity. And while the Women’s March drew support from likely allies such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Global Fund for Women, hundreds of other organizations have also signed on as partners, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the NAACP, the environmental advocacy group 350.org, the health-care-worker union 1199SEIU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, among others.