More than 400 community members rallied for labor, immigrant and welfare rights at Fountain Square on Thursday afternoon as part of the national May Day Strong campaign to reclaim power from ”corporate elites.”
North Shore residents, led by Indivisible Evanston, seized the moment to rally against President Donald Trump’s recent federal policies on immigration, social benefits and the economy, as well as his alliance with billionaire interests.
Local officials, including Mayor Daniel Biss and Cook County Commissioner Josina Morita, addressed the crowd along with Indivisible Evanston leader Susan Sidell and a slate of other speakers.
“Today we’re fighting back,” Sidell said. “We’re demanding a country that puts our families and our neighbors first over the fortunes of the one percent.”
May Day, a long-standing Chicago-born tradition, was first sparked from the Haymarket Affair of 1886, a violent confrontation in Chicago’s Near West Side between police and union workers protesting for an eight-hour workday. Since then, May 1 has been an occasion for Chicago area residents to take to the streets for labor and political rights.
The Evanston rally was one of 1,300 events organized in more than 1,000 United States cities, according to May Day Strong steering committee member Saqib Bhatti.
As veteran activists sat attentively in chairs and benches around Fountain Square, younger generations carried on the 139-year custom of advocating for labor rights on May 1.
From the rally’s main stage, Indivisible Evanston led protest chants.
Among the guest speakers was third-year Northwestern mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate Rohan Kota, who said his peers have received stop-work orders and his department is facing funding cuts.
Kota emphasized the importance of academic research to U.S. economic and political interests and the complications of halting medical research.
“You can’t just turn the light switch off, wait for a new president and then turn it back on,” Kota said. “(The research) is decades in the making.”
Besides Kota, Sidell said all the guest speakers, who were directly impacted by Trump administration policies, “spoke from the heart” and brought the Trump administration’s federal policies to the forefront of the local community.
“These are not just numbers. These are real people,” Sidell said.
Earlier Thursday, about 50 of Kota’s peers belonging to the Northwestern University Graduate Workers union participated in one of the largest May Day protests in the country, a march through the West Loop from Union Park to Grant Park in Chicago. The march drew tens of thousands of participants.
Third-year molecular sciences Ph.D. candidate and NUGW chief steward Gracie Siffer said the union joined the march to advocate for international graduate workers’ rights, funding protections, transgender rights and preserving diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Graduate international workers are “terrified” to align with the union’s messages out of fear of retaliation, Siffer said. She added that the union has met that moment of fear with compassion and helped motivate people to act.
“We are really at the forefront of our struggle, concerned with protecting our international workers here on campus so that they can finish their degrees and continue to do the amazing work that they do,” Siffer said.
Back in Evanston, community members protested against the influence of billionaires like Elon Musk on federal policies.
Community members, including Rogers Park resident Ray Magiera, spoke out against Musk’s cost-cutting agenda in the face of potential cuts to Social Security and Medicare — crucial benefits he and others have paid into for decades. Other protesters echoed the anti-oligarchic sentiment.
“It’s the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many,” Wilmette resident Tony Cash said. “Using the president’s office to sell things — it’s like Kmart.”
Demonstrator Roxann Salgado said she attended the rally for the future of her two children, who came with her. She said the U.S has “reached a point of no return” and rallied to defeat the “complete hopelessness” she felt in the face of discriminatory and fast-changing executive orders.
As Indivisible Evanston gears up for further political rallies in the coming months, Sidell said she hopes protesters will call their congresspeople and maintain a united front against the Trump administration.
“I’m hoping everybody will leave here and do the work, because we can do it,” Sidell said. “There are more of us.”
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
X: @sidvaraman
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