Protests and events against President Donald Trump’s controversial policies that include mass deportations and cuts to Medicaid took place at more than 1,600 places across the country on Thursday.
In Greensboro, organizers say hundreds gathered downtown on Market Street before the rain chased most of them away about an hour into the event.
Tami Clayton of Indivisible Guilford County says more than 400 people signed up for the event, but the threat of bad weather kept many at home.
She says one of the key points of the rally was to stress the importance of the upcoming midterm elections. The off-year races often draw a low turnout.
Cyndy Wolfe of Greensboro brought a sign urging people not to whitewash the nation’s history.
"I am heartbroken by the fact that we are not keeping our history," she says. "That we’re trying to deny what Black people and others, denying the fact that we are a nation formed by indigenous people, and we just eradicated them."
The “Good Trouble Lives On” national day of action honors the late Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis.
Lewis was first elected to Congress in 1986. He died in 2020 at the age of 80 following an advanced pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
He was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1965, a 25-year-old Lewis led some 600 protesters in the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Lewis was beaten by police, suffering a skull fracture.
“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America,” Lewis said in 2020 while commemorating the 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.