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“It means a lot to us,” Schwartz says, “It’s hard, but it definitely helps all of us to come together and march for something that brought us together, for a common cause.”

Students, families and others – many from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School – came together to create signs the night before of the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C.

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Schwartz paused to describe the horrors of that day. When the school announced that it was on a code red, Schwartz and other students ran to the nearest classrooms they could find. The high school’s procedure was for the teachers to turn off the lights and to find a spot that was far away enough from a window, where no one can see in. Schwartz was inside the high school when Nikolas Cruz started shooting. Though he wasn’t in the same building that Cruz was, he still hid for his life in a classroom and texted everyone he knew, letting them know that he was “okay.”

The shooting that happened in Stoneman Douglas high school left 17 students and staff members dead, some of whom Schwartz knew. He grew up with Meadow Pollack and Joaquin Oliver, who both died on what was one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings in its history.

“By doing this, somehow we give them justice,” Schwartz says. “They were well minded kids, they were really intelligent and spoke from the heart.”

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At the event, Schwartz was accompanied by his mother, Robyn Schwartz. They live right behind the high school and, when she heard the sirens, she texted Drew immediately. She made a call to her friend who is a teacher, and the response she got was that there’s an active shooter in the building. Robyn made another call to her neighbor, telling him that he needed to take her to the high school.

“You got to get me up there. I am numb, and I need to get up there,” Robyn recalled that she said.

Robyn Schwartz was one of the first parents waiting outside the high school, along with her neighbor, who lost his daughter in the shooting. She watched as the youth started pouring out of the school; some of the students were injured, and others were covered in blood. She spotted some of her son’s friends; they went up to her and hugged her. They began to tell her that certain students were shot and had died.

“This guy is killing people,” Robyn says she realized.

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Throughout the whole time, she texted back and forth with her son but couldn’t keep it together, and a friend of hers had to text for her. Robyn’s son kept texting her, “Am I safe? It is over? Did they get him? Are any of my friends dead?” She couldn’t say anything back because she kept receiving different responses from people about the shooter. At one point she told her son to play dead.

“It’s the worst nightmare a parent has to live through,” Robyn says. “I am blessed my kid came out.”

Robyn mentioned that the reason why Parkland shooting is different from Newtown, Columbine and Virginia Tech is because there wasn’t social media back then. But this time it’s different because of the age of the teenagers affected.

“They’re teenagers, not 5-year-olds; they’re young adults, they have a voice. That’s why it’s different,” Robyn says of the movement that has ignited.

As the night progresses, people are still coming in and out of the National Education Association building and creating more posters. In a table of only two people, Jessica Millete was creating a poster for the march even though she wouldn’t be able to attend.

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“I figured, if I can’t be at the march, I might as well create stuff that can be represented at the march, to express how I feel about gun violence,” she said.

It makes Millete upset that people and politicians are telling the students to leave it up to the adults to fight for gun violence, especially when the students went through something traumatic. It upsets her even more that people and politicians, instead of protecting the kids and students, are shutting them down and trying to shut them up.

“How are the kids supposed to feel inspired to do these positions, when people who are older than them don’t believe that they are capable of thinking for themselves?” Millete says.

Former reporter for the National Education Association, Anita Merina, was among the crowd at the poster event showing her support for the students of Parkland. About 19 years ago, she marched in Washington D.C for the ‘Million Mom March;’ a march that was also for stricter gun control. Now, she is back with her twin sons, marching for the same issue. She has covered the Columbine, and Sandy Hook shootings; and that came with heartbreak because she saw all of it unfold.

“These students deserve, like my children, to be able to grow-up until they’re college seniors,” Merina says.

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Merina sees that students are motivated to make a change, to take charge and to make a difference. She sees the students not stopping until something has changed and what she sees, she loves.

“I absolutely love it. I see the diversity of the students’ energy and the passion,” Merina says.

After seeing the country become divided, she believes that this march is unifying the country for the better. Gun-control, for her, is a topic that shouldn’t be pushed aside; it’s something that the country has to fix. Merina hopes that people feel the necessity to take action and to do something. For her, the fight doesn’t end with a march, it has to continue.

“People have to rise up and speak out. They have to change the laws for the better, otherwise people continue to die,” Merina says.

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Grant explains that two of her family members were victims of gun violence. She points to the first photo, a black-and-white portrait of her Uncle Leon. Grant never met her uncle; he was shot and killed during a heated argument with a friend before she was born. The second photo features two small children with huge grins on their faces. Her expression grows colder as she recalls finding her cousin Steve lying in the street, covered in blood, when she was only 21 years old.

“It usually takes the death of certain people for others to take notice,” she says. “There are a lot of people who are dying, and there is a lot of blood being soaked in the grounds of America.”

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On February 14, 2018, 13 teenage lives were lost after a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The new face of the American anti-gun movement quickly became a passionate group of students who witnessed the tragedy firsthand. After countless tweets, various television interviews and one Time magazine cover, the adolescent survivors quickly transformed into micro-celebrities who have refused to be ignored by politicians and other adults.

Though they differ in race, age and location, Grant and the Parkland students share one thing in common: they’ve both witnessed the traumatic impact of gun violence. Grant says she’s thankful the Parkland students have been vocal about their anti-gun stance, but she’s quickly noticed a difference in the media narrative surrounding the white high school students and black victims of gun violence.

“The kids from Parkland are very motivated, and their teachers have trained them very well to be public defenders of everyone and give themselves a voice,” she says. “The media likes certain types of victims, and other victims are not given the same due. Victims who are white and white-appearing, who are middle class and upper class and come from certain neighborhoods, are typically the ones who are given the voice.”

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Grant isn’t the only person who is frustrated with the media’s portrayal of white activists. Over the last few years, some feel the Black Lives Matter movement has often been demonized by the American media. Many black Americans perceive drastically varying narratives surrounding victims of gun violence, creating feelings of disappointment and disenchantment within black communities.

The evening before the march, longtime anti-gun activist Jamira Burley spoke on a panel about gun control legislation at the National Press Club. A lifelong social justice advocate, Burley is the senior advisor at the Community Justice Reform Coalition. She spoke to attendees about the importance of creating an intersection between Black Lives Matter activists and their white peers.

“We finally have victims who have, because of their privilege, received a national platform because they’re white,” she says. “We need to see all human death as a problem, regardless if this person is a drug dealer or student.”

Like many other activists, Burley praised the Parkland students for their continued effort to include members of other, less privileged communities in their discussions of gun violence. She stressed the importance of intersectionality in widespread social movements and noted how the youngest generation is more socially conscious than their predecessors.

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“They’ve done what their parents haven’t done, which is be inclusive,” she says.

The Parkland students have acknowledged their own privilege, and they’ve been vocal about their desire for communication among various anti-gun violence movements. Seventeen-year-old Eryn Banton is a high school activist who wishes all victims of gun violence could be treated with the same respect.

“I’m extremely thankful that these students are using their platform to make a difference, but I wish that people would see the flaws in the process,” she says. “[The media] is talking about schools and just paying attention to those students, but they called Black Lives Matter activists terrorists. We’re all fighting for the same thing. We just want to stay alive.”

The morning of the March for Our Lives, hundreds of Black Lives Matter activists gathered in D.C.’s Folger Park. Young black activists gave compelling speeches and performed powerful spoken word pieces about gun violence within their own communities. Onlookers of every race cheered and showered the adolescents with praise and support. National Collegiate Preparatory High School teacher Gianni Clarkson, 38, discussed the unexpected death of one of his students. A young father on his way to college, Zoruan Otto Harris was another young, black victim of gun violence.

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“In certain communities, [gun violence] is expected and nobody feels bad about it, but when it happens in other communities, it’s a tragedy,” says Clarkson. “I don’t want to trivialize what’s happening, but when children are shot and killed in D.C., no one walks out for them. What does that tell my students?”

Richard Wright Public Charter School student Imani Romney, 16, read a powerful poem in front of the enthusiastic crowd. Romney wondered if her “school of color” would receive as much media attention as Stoneman Douglas High School if a school shooting occurred.

“I had a friend ask me, if this same shooting happened at our school, would we get the same amount of press?” she asked. “I told her I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean we should stop fighting, and that doesn’t mean we should sit back and watch and let more of these things happen.”

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Her father, 71, believes that people shouldn’t be able to own weapons or anything that he held when serving in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

“My father gets ill when hearing the mention of guns,” Del Valle says.

Veterans and family members of veterans were among the many thousands who attended the march in Washington, D.C. to voice their feelings about assault rifles and gun violence.

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Del Valle agrees with her father.

“People shouldn’t be holding war time weapons,” she says.

As the crowd of people starts to grow, it becomes harder to move. Under the shade of trees, James Clark, a Vietnam veteran who flew a helicopter over Cambodia, was standing with his poster, wearing an Army bomber jacket and aviator glasses.

“If something that fires as fast as your finger, you might as well call it a machine gun,” Clark says.

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When Clark was serving, he was in an area that was about four miles away from the biggest base; on occasion, he said, they needed weapons to defend themselves against attacks. But, for the most part, the guns and weapons were locked up when not needed.

“Some fool would shoot some other fool on the foot, if you let them keep their weapons,” Clark says.

James believes that civilians shouldn’t have anything to with weapons of war. The only way that the gun issue can be solved, he says, is by regulating guns: stricter laws and requirements for people to get a gun. He says he’s encouraged by the students’ movement.

“Now that we have search engines, we can become knowledgeable really fast in many areas,” Clark says.

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Marchers slowly start to make their way out of the sea of people, and all you can see were posters hovering over their heads. There was a sign that read, “Willing to give up my AK-47,” held by Army veteran and teacher Shelena McCoy.

“I own an AK-47. But hey! This is getting crazy,” McCoy says. “We might have to saw those things in half.”

McCoy grew up in West Virginia where her father taught her how to shoot at the age of 5. She said that her father was safety conscious, and he made sure to teach her about gun safety and hunting as a way to provide food for the family. She joined the Army to help pay her way through college.

“As a teacher, I feel ashamed to go to school every day and act as if everything is okay,” McCoy says. “It’s not okay.”

She said that as a teacher, she is being used as bait to attract children to come in so that they might be slaughtered. McCoy has the overwhelming feeling that she needs to do something to make sure that the students and children stop coming into “slaughter houses.”

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“I know it’s not an everyday thing,” McCoy says “But, it’s crazy, out of hand; and it’s not even safe anymore for a kid to walk in a school building.”

McCoy said that people in Florida gunman Nikolas Cruz’s life did not take safety measures into consideration. It was too easy for Cruz to get access to the weapons, she said. McCoy said Cruz should not have been able to access an assault weapon when he was going through an emotional crisis.

“As Americans we have to do something to protect our kids,” McCoy says.

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More than a dozen spoken word artists performed pieces inspired by gun violence at local restaurant Busboys and Poets in Washington D.C. the night before the March for Our Lives.

Busboys and Poets, established in 2005, is a community gathering place named after the American poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in the 1920s before gaining recognition as a poet.

According to their tribal statement: “Busboys and Poets is a community where racial and cultural connections are consciously uplifted… a place to take deliberate pause and feed your mind, body and soul… a space for art, culture and politics to intentionally collide… we believe that by creating such a space we can inspire social change and begin to transform our community and the world.”

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Busboys and Poets on 14^thand V street, The D.C. Youth Poetry Slam, Sixdegrees.org, Once Common Unity and Split this Rock cosponsored an event called Louder Than A Gun – Open Mic for Our Lives. More than a dozen young activists performed spoken word pieces inspired by gun violence, school shootings, racism, sexism and more.

“When I say something like ‘make some noise’ or I introduce someone to this stage, we need to make noise like we’re saving lives tomorrow,” Split This Rock Director of Youth Programs and event host Joseph Green said. “We need to make noise like we’re sending a message to the people who have been making decisions that have cost us our lives for years.”

Similar to Busboys and Poets, Split This Rock is named after a line in “Big Buddy,” a poem by Langston Hughes. The organization encourages poets to accept a greater role in public life by teaching and celebrating work that calls out injustice and invokes social change. Joseph Green, dressed in a t-shirt printed with the face of Martin Luther King Jr. wearing a gold crown, brought his organization’s energy and encouragement to the event when performing a piece about his son and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I am overwhelmed by the irrational rankings of a society too busy arguing about whether or not black lives are important enough to fight for, to actually fight for black lives,” Green said.

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One Common Unity, another co-sponsor of the event, is an organization that works to break cycles of violence by building healthy communities through music, arts, and peace education.

Rodney Johnson, a volunteer with Split This Rock and One Common Unity, is a lanky young poet and rapper, who is known on SoundCloud as “one great bastard.” As the crowd roared for the first performer, he took the stage with a huge smile on his face. Audience members showed support and appreciation by snapping their fingers and clapping their hands or shouting things like “word” and “shezus.”

“We don’t even talk to our youth about weapons ya’ll, turn the TV on and Call of Duty gives the lesson,” Johnson said.

Actor, musician and philanthropist Kevin Bacon sat quietly in the audience next to his wife, Kyra Sedgwick. Bacon attended the event in support of his charity SixDegrees.org, which allows ordinary people to become “celebrities for their own causes” by donating or raising money for local charities across the nation.

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Dani Miller, a high school student from Winston Churchill High School in Maryland, spoke about oppression and standing up for the lives of others:

“And I’m tired of writing poems about oppression, probably just as tired as you are of hearing them,” Miller said. “But we both aren’t as tired as the women who are forced to let politicians make decisions about their bodies, as 10 year-old girls who take skinny as a compliment, and as children who have to hide under desks and text their mom’s they think they are going to die, as people who can’t afford health insurance, as anyone who has had to fight for their lives and their own humanity as a means of survival. I’m tired of writing poems about oppression, and that is why I keep writing them.”

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Washington D.C. native Tony Keith is in his last year of a PhD education program focused on student engagement with spoken word poetry. In 1999 his friend, Gary Hopkins, was killed by police. He wrote his poem after the shooting of Michael Brown.

“There’s a correlation between the way we treat money and the way we treat people,” Keith said. “Cash, coin, bills and bodies all commodities meant to be traded in exchange for products, goods and services. The denomination depends on our purpose, but a lot of us don’t know what our purpose is, so all we do is consume. Rarely do we create, and the result is that our wealth has become low with a really high interest rate, and somehow, we’ve defaulted. We’ve been told that some of our payments arrived a little bit too late, and granted we have our checks and balances, but let’s be honest, none of my checkbooks are really balanced. We need to check our balance. Check to determine the status of what our account is because the last time I checked we were deeply in the red, and we used to be in the black. Now, blood covered brown men, hands up, holes in their backs, racism is making withdrawals ya’ll.”

Several students from Parkland, Florida spoke at the event. Diego Pfeiffer, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said that poetry and music hold the power to heal.

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“I came to talk, to push and tug at heartstrings for change, but voices caught against the wind can never really be the same. My voice is caught in lives I never thought I’d touch, and those whose touch I will never feel again. My eyes can’t focus on a future because they are so focused on the dark and horrid past. A darkness that protrudes each and pore, that fills my head with sorrow and guilt, guilt that right now I’m standing where others have fallen before me.”

The venue vibrated with cheers after the eloquent performances of each artist and women could be seen wiping tears away from their eyes. The young activists spoke with passion and conviction, inspiring each and every member of the audience for much longer than the duration of the event.

“Have a wonderful evening,” Green said. “Please go out and support in whatever way you are able to support tomorrow and in the future.”

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