Birmingham noticed. Each drew 5,000 marchers, and 15,000 to 25,000 turned out in Phoenix. They turned out in large, small, and medium towns all across America. In Denver, tens of thousands showed, nearly 100,000 according to one local news outlet. The Denver organizers were stunned. “On Facebook it was about thirty thousand who said they were coming, and it jumped so fast!” said Jessica Maher, one of the Denver organizers. Jessica was a college senior who had never done anything political in her life. Now she was director of political affairs for Never Again Colorado. The waves of supporters pouring into Civic Center Park and marching past the Colorado capitol dome on March 24 changed everything. This was real, she realized. This was powerful.
MFOL had mobilized on two fronts: inspiring millions of kids, and then recruiting them into a vast grassroots network. It was all about the network now: 762 potential affiliates had come of age that day. National media tacked on the sibling march story as an afterthought. The intersectional message got even less ink or air. The New Yorker, The Nation, and a few others noticed MFOL’s signal that they were fusing with the urban gun safety movement, but it was mostly mentioned in passing. But urban activists heard it loud and clear.
For sibling organizers, the march was already their second local event. Most had been involved with a walkout, and some had organized a die-in or other protest as well. They used each undertaking as a building block to grow their network, to learn from mistakes, and to gather momentum for the next one. The feverish pace had been a blessing and a curse. Now they had time—which could easily translate to boredom and fading interest. Time to map out eight months of initiatives to maintain excitement, register millions of young voters, and turn them out on Election Day.
In Denver, it began with Madison Rose. Madison was a college student who watched the Douglas students erupt on social media day one. That was all it took. Anger had been simmering for years. Why were adults just letting them die? That first night, Madison decided she wanted to organize a Denver march. Then Never Again announced its plan. Perfect, Madison said. She signed Denver up as a sibling.
Logistics were overwhelming—no one to delegate the permitting or grunt work. That forced Madison to reach out aggressively and cobble together a metrowide team. That proved surprisingly easy. New groups were mushrooming across the city and suburbs. She would eventually hook up with Emmy Adams and Kaylee Tyner, who were part of a fledgling network in the Jefferson County School District. Kaylee was a junior at Columbine High, and Emmy was a senior at Golden High. All of Jefferson County (Jeffco) still felt the Columbine scars, and Parkland had hit hard. “I just couldn’t take seeing the community have their hearts broken again,” Emmy said. “So I started by reaching out to people at my school, saying, ‘Hey, does anyone want to help me create some solutions?’ I thought like five people would show up to this meeting, and it ended up being over seventy kids. I was like, ‘OK, if we can get this many at Golden, we can spread this across the district.’” That turned into Jeffco Students Demand Action. It included students from every high school in the county.
Emmy became copresident, and the group organized the first school walkout across the county. They paired that with a rally after school that day, to bring all the young activists together. A big contingent from the group marched in Washington and networked with other cities. Most of the cities in America had a story like that.
When the marches ended, all those groups came together to brainstorm the road ahead. They settled on one big venture to throw their collective weight behind: a rally just outside Columbine, on April 19, the eve of the anniversary, the day before the second national walkout. Columbine kids couldn’t walk out on April 20, because that is a solemn day in the area, and classes have never been conducted on that day since. But there was another reason.
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Grieving Douglas students did not all respond with activism. Most supported gun reform, came out to the occasional walkout or rally, but their priority was healing. The Columbine event helped some Douglas students do both.
It began with an invitation to the MFOL kids. Emmy, Madison, and the other organizers worked with the former Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis to