Protest Speech - April 19, 2025

Celebrating a 250-year-old tradition of saying no to tyrants!

Welcome and thank you for coming out. I am Maura Mandyck, one of the organizers of Indivisible Mobile, a teacher and a librarian.

I want to wish all of you and our nation a Happy 250th birthday! Sure, we ordinarily celebrate the birth of America on July 4th in honor of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, but hear me out. And in order to make my case, I’m going to return to my childhood, when my parents took me to New York City on a family vacation. I was seven years old. Among the touristy things we did on that trip like going to museums and Chinatown and to the Statue of Liberty, we also went to two plays on Broadway. One was Fiddler on the Roof, and for years all I remembered about it was that there was an actual fiddler on the roof of the house on stage. I wanted one for our house too.

But the other play was “1776,” which if you don’t know is a musical about the Second Continental Congress. It’s possible that doesn’t sound like much fun to you, or if you’ve seen Hamilton, maybe it does. But I was absolutely entranced by “1776,” and trace my obsession with the American Revolutionary period to that day. The play is set in the months leading up to July 4th, and in the arguments over the wisdom of declaring independence from Great Britain. And those arguments were fierce! It was not at all a done deal that we would become the United States!

One of the recurring bits in the play is the arrival of a courier from the Continental Army, a soldier carrying letters from General Washington to the Congress. This soldier gets a musical number of his own, called “Momma Look Sharp,” in which he describes how his two best friends were killed on the same day and also imagines his mother looking for him if he were to die on the battlefield as well. Most of 1776 is joyful and hilarious, but this moment brings everyone up short. Because in this moment, the bickering Congressmen are forced to recognize that the revolution they are wrangling over is already afoot.

That revolution started on April 19, 1775 with the Battles of Lexington and Concord, 250 years ago today, which is why I think it’s our birthday. You’ll be relieved to hear that I won’t drag you through the entire history–you can Google it–but in short, Lexington and Concord happened because mad King George had declared the colonies in rebellion and instructed the British soldiers to seize their arms and arrest their leaders. And the patriots said, you want to see rebellion? I’ll show you some rebellion, and eventually, we became the United States.

And now, on April 19, 2025, we are gathered here and across the country to tell the President of the United States, our own tyrant wanna-be king, that we have a few deeply-held principles to reassert, the most significant of which is that liberty and justice is for ALL of us, that no man is above the law, that the Constitution of the United States gives We the People the power, if only we will stand up and take it.

I am preaching to the patriot choir, clearly, when I tell all of you we have to do something. You are here, doing something. And please don’t let anyone tell you that protests don’t make any difference. Because look around and see all the people who believe like you do that Republicans in the House and the Senate should not lie down and let this president run right over them, and over us. Who believe that demonizing immigrants is immoral and un-American and dangerous to boot, because once they point to someone and say “Other,” we are all in jeopardy. We are the next other. Who believe that we are stronger together and believe that these protests will grow, and turn into action, and gather in more people, maybe even those who voted for him or who failed to vote but now see what’s happening and how all of us object to it, who will not stand for it, together. I think, honestly, that we are starting to give our elected representatives some courage! We are leading them!

We’ve adopted “Together we are stronger” as the unofficial slogan of Indivisible Mobile. In fact, maybe it’s official. Together we are stronger, and in truth, together we are safer. The more of us there are, the harder it will be for them to harm or intimidate any one of us. A writer I’ve discovered on the internet recently, Oliver Kornetzke said this:

This is a regime testing whether it can get away with state-sanctioned murder. Disappearance is the trial balloon. If no one resists, killing follows. [This is the threshold where authoritarianism becomes atrocity. It is how genocides begin—not with mass graves, but with silence. They are probing for that silence now. If they find it, nothing will stop them. This is not hyperbole. This is how the machinery of horror starts turning.] Any decent, aware human being should be terrified. We are standing at the edge of irreversible darkness. If we do not act, we are complicit in what comes next.

But I don’t want to end there, in such a fearful place. Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, whose constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia is in a concentration camp in El Salvador, sent there by the President and by those who aided him or simply did nothing to stop him, said, “Activism is the antidote to fear. And a rally a day keeps the fascists away.”

So thank you for coming to the rally! Thank you for participating in joyful, defiant, nonviolent activism! Thank you for continuing a 250-year-old tradition of saying no to tyrants!