back, but realized it was hopeless, turned her back, and let it rip. There were gasps, brief confusion, then a big round of supportive cheers that quickly died down. CNN cut away to crowd shots—distressed moms, shaking their heads, unsure whether to clap or cheer. It took nearly a minute for Sam to recover. Kids started chanting “Enough is enough!” Sam returned to the podium with a hearty laugh, and shouted, “I just threw up on international television, and it feels great!” Tyra Hemans rubbed her back tenderly at first, and then pumped her fist at the end of that line. Sam continued full bore: “We’re not asking for a ban, we’re asking for compromise. Forget your size and colors, let’s save one another.”
Some of the older Sandy Hook survivors, now in high school, recounted their horror in 2012. At the worst of it, they’d drawn tremendous solace from a simple act of solidarity, when Columbine survivors sent a banner encouraging them. Then they unfurled their own banner with their school logo, reading “Newtown High School stands with Stoneman Douglas” over a huge red ribbon. Messages had been handwritten in a rainbow of colors.
Eleven-year-old Naomi Wadler had beaten back a month of obstacles to reach that stage. In February, she began organizing the walkout at George Mason Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia, where she was in fifth grade. Her principal’s staff were opposing it, out of safety concerns on the school lawn. Were they safe inside? Naomi asked. She fought for her proposal at a town hall organized by her congressman. “How will we be safe in our own classrooms in the world we live in now when it’s OK for someone to walk into a store with an expired ID and buy an assault rifle?” she asked. She won that day, and sixty students participated. Naomi also insisted they honor the Parkland kids, and urban kids dying as well. Seventeen minutes was extended to eighteen, to recognize an African American girl gunned down in Alabama that week.
Naomi brought the same passion and confidence to the MFOL stage. She electrified the crowd. She also distilled a theme repeated throughout the rally. “I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper. I represent the African American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential.”
Shortly before three, Emma González took the stage and stole the show. She had put on the self-embroidered bomber jacket, and had shed the slouchy beanie to bare her signature scalp. She gave a short, fiery speech, recited the seventeen names, and then went silent. She looked straight ahead, began to grimace, fought back tears, lost that battle, and let them stream. She didn’t even wipe them off this time. The camera zoomed in and projected her face on the Jumbotrons—fifteen feet high, so the hundreds of thousands there, and millions tuned to laptops, phones, and TVs, could watch every quiver. It was spellbinding. She continued to hold it, and the crowd stood silent, awed. But as the minutes passed, people grew nervous: Was this intentional? Was she fighting to speak? Having a breakdown? Some kids in the crowd decided to “help,” and started a chant: “Never again! Never again!” The bulk of the crowd knew better, and it died down. A sea of moms—so many moms that day—stood transfixed. Emma suspended that crowd for four and a half minutes that way, then leaned back into the microphone to explain: “Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and twenty seconds. Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.”
4
Two questions had murmured through the crowd, and the media tent, all morning: Would a massive crowd materialize, and could Emma possibly live up to her own hype? That “We Call BS” speech seemed sui generis. How could she compete with that? Had she found an even better line, could she wow the crowd without one? Or would she prove a one-hit wonder—the perfect alchemy of the moment, never to be repeated in her lifetime? (Yes, of course reporters are that catty. But civilians were wondering aloud too.)
She had not just matched We Call BS, she had blown it out of the water. I watched the speech with my colleague and mentor Joan Walsh, now a CNN analyst and a writer for The Nation, whose story that night ran